Wibbling

As I'm suffering another bloody migraine today¹ and so not getting any useful work done I thought I'd wibble here as I'd not done so for a while. Apologies in advance for any typos. I'll re-read this later and fix.

First a little story about chuggers. We had one at our door on Saturday, which is unusual in itself, they don't normally bother us out here in the sticks. I was lying on the sofa with a migraine. The doorbell rang so as I was only a couple of yards from the door I got up and staggered to the door. The conversation went something like this:

Her: "hello, how are you?"

Me: "not at all well as it happens."

Her: "oh, well I see you support the RNLI (pointing to stickers in my study window) so I wondered if you might be interested in supporting the Red Cross?"

You have to wonder what part of my reply she had failed to understand. I think in the circumstances I was quite polite in the way I told her I wasn't interested.

Anyway on a happier note I've got a new toy to play with. It's a Samsung i8910 HD phone. It's got a 3.7" 640x360 AMOLED touch screen display, 8GB of storage as standard plus a micro SD card socket, and all the usual gizmos like MP3 player, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and an accelerometer (oh, and a digital compass).

Its stand out feature is the camera. It's an 8Mpixel still camera, which is pretty good for a phone, with some nice features. Just a shame the flash is only LED not xenon but sadly outside of Sony Ericsson that seems to be rare.

But it also does 24fps HD video recording, hence the "HD" in the name. Apparently it is (or was at the time) the first phone to offer this.

I've put a short sample below taken at the Village Fayre last Saturday. I think it's pretty good². Not as good as my proper cameras, fixed focus for a start, but not bad.

I'm still not 100% sure about the phone to be honest. I had a real struggle getting it unlocked (it was essentially brand new, ex-Orange, via eBay) and re-flashed to the generic UK firmware. That's done now: unlocking via the man on the market for £20 (he had to take it away for a couple of days) and re-flashing by yours truly.

I'm slowly getting it set up how I want it. So for example I've got an icon of Clive, our post bear, on the home page which takes me straight to our extranet, and the phone is polling my business email address every fifteen minutes for new email and beeps if there is any.

But I'm not getting on with the touch screen. I keep touching the wrong thing. And the virtual keyboard is as poor as I feared. My Nokia 6760 with its real keyboard had its downsides but data entry wasn't one of them. I tried installing the widely recommended DayHand, which is widely recommended, but getting unsigned apps onto S60 v5 seemed pretty much impossible now without jumping through ludicrous hoops.

There's also some oddities like it charges via USB, but if you plug it into this laptop it loses the phone signal which it's charging!

So it's a bit of a curate's egg and I'm not sure if I'll keep it or go back the 6760.

1. I'm going though a rather prolonged cluster at the moment, I've lost track but it must be three weeks or more now writing off one of every two or three days. Shrug. Same old, same old.
2. I've discovered since I first posted this that I hadn't set the phone to record HD, so that video sample was recorded at only 640x480! I shall try again in real HD and post another sample later.