After two years of using the I-mate Jamin smartphone, I finally decided that it was time to upgrade to something with better feature set and a more open connectivity options. This time around, data was becoming more of a priority, since I don’t seem to use voice calls terribly much. I needed a phone that I could get on a contract that has a cheaper monthly payment than what I was paying before. While I was with Vodafone with the Jamin, the best I could get was $50 plan and $20 repayment for the handset. It offered GPRS EDGE connectivity with no included monthly data allowance which was charged at a rate that would give anyone a heartburn . With the least addictional cost, the best Vodafone could offer was an extra $10 on top of the already quite expensive plan to give me a mere 5MB of data per month. It definitely hurt.

Soon after i Acquired the I-mate Jamin, to make the experience even worse, I ended up buying a MacBook. The first thing I wanted to do was install Thunderbird (my favorite email client on all platform) on it and to my disappointment, I discovered that I could not do a sync between Mac and Windows Mobile without either using Parallels and Windows (and then only with that beast called Outlook) or buying some third party software. It seems that neither Apple or Microsoft wanted to know about people in my situation who did not want to subscribe to either one of the platforms (aka platform agnostic) for everything. The only thing that came close to being a solution was to use a Funambol Server installed on one of my servers, which was not only clumsy to use, but also difficult to manage. In the end I settled with using Schedule World so I could do sync between my Windows XP, Linux and OS X notebooks and my Windows Mobile 5.0 phone. This approach, while it works, is not really ideal since I have to rely on an external server to manage the synchronisation and the data.

The I-mate Jamin was a reasonably good phone, but its shortcomings were mainly caused by the Windows Mobile platform it was built on. While it works almost seamlessly in a Windows world, when you start venturing outside that walled garden the problems become unbearable. The minute you don’t want to use Outlook anymore (did I mention that an early version of Microsoft anti-virus product ate my entire Outlook database because of a single infected email?) you start seeing the ugly brick walls and quickly hitting your head against it. This gets a lot worse when you decide to try working on another platform such as Mac OS X. While there is Microsoft Office for Mac, there is no activesync for Mac. Entourage which was supposed to resemble Outlook on the Mac does not have support for syncing with Windows Mobile.

The only way you could access the files on your Windows Mobile was to use the Acitvesync software which was not a good thing when Activesync decides to play up. In the end I basically had had enough of the “closed” way in which Windows Mobile was working, so this time around I decided to look around for a phone built on a platform which supports open standards.

My first choice would have been the iphone from Apple. It is a beautifully-designed piece of technology with a very nice and intuitive interface, based on a platform which originated from a Unix world. I was quite sure about getting the iphone, until I discovered that despite its appeal, it does not really support open standards that well and I just could not understand why they would limit the bluetooth profile to headset-only. So the iphone is out.

The next on my list was the Nokia E71. Ever since my partner acquired the E65 phone from Nokia I was always a little partial to the Symbian platform, so when the Nokia E71 was released I was itching to get my hands on one to try it out. However, when I read more about the specs it soon looked like a very good candidate for my next phone. It supports 3G HSDPA, most of the common bluetooth profiles, SyncML synchronisation standard, Wifi, Assisted GPS, Flash Lite 3.0, push email  and the list goes on. It even has IRDA support.

The day I went to a Three shop in Sydney, I just wanted to check it out and hold it in my hands. The phone feels very nice to hold. Its thin and wide frame sits well in my hand and having a qwerty keyboard definitely makes things a lot easier when it comes to hammering an email or a text message. The screen looks nice and smooth and the phone is suprisingly large. It definitely amazes me what Nokia engineers manage to fit into such a thin and small device.

I liked the device so much that I decided to sign up for a plan right away. What I ended up getting was the E71 on a $29 cap plus $10 handset repayment a month on a 24-month contract. This was cheaper than getting the E71 on a $69 cap plan with no repayment. To quench my thirst for mobile data, I added $20 X-series (1GB/month) to the plan which brought the total to $59 per month including 1GB of data. This is definitely in my ball park and having 1GB of mobile data to play with means I will not hesitate to use the phone as a modem with either my Nokia N800 tablet or a notebook when needed.

3 · Australia · data · E71 · HSDPA · mobile · mobile data · Nokia · phone · Three

I started the day with a quick dash to the bank to deposit a cheque that I have been waiting for in the last four weeks. Sometimes some jobs don’t pay immediately and that is just the reality today. Everybody wants everything to be finished yesterday, but when it comes to paying for it they can take weeks to get their hands to lift up a pen and write that cheque or print it out as is more the case these days. After the bank coffee was mandatory to get me started for the day and clear up the remaining morning cobwebs. (more…)

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Recently I have watched a few movies that contain non-simulated sex scenes. One was Romance . I also watched a few others including Ken Park and 9 Songs. I am by no means a movie buff, but I recently felt compelled to watch these movies as they seem to represent a new trend in movies that are appearing in film festivals around the world and are not likely to be released in Australia (except for Romance) which I have seen available on DVD.

For quite a while I was pondering the reason why these directors decided to make these movies and what was so significant about having a sex scene that is not simulated. I thought it could be a sign of a new interesting radical trend in film-making, but after watching them I am not so sure if that is the case.

What was interesting about these movies is that there seems to be a really strong emphasis on the sex scenes. The directors seem to be obsessed with making the sex scenes as “real” as possible but they are happy to leave other parts of the movie in the traditional realm of “simulation for the screen”. The question, then, is why? Why are these sex scenes so important to these directors? Is it to gain notoriety or is it an attempt to create something that cannot be emulated by the Holywood studios (an attempt at differentiation)? Well, in the case of the latter they have certainly emulated the San Fernando Valley crowd.

Another question that must be asked is why they tried to create real sex scenes when the medium of cinema itself is just a simulation of reality. Does this mean that we are not allowed to use our imagination anymore or are we supposed to believe that a real sex scene is more erotic than a simulated one?

In the case of 9 Songs, the sex scenes in the movie certainly appears to be gratuitous and superficial. There seems to be no passion in the actors even though they are having real sex and if Michael Winterbottom asked why real sex could not be in a movie then I guess we are very lucky that Larry Clark still believes in simulating the murder scene in Ken Park.

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On the second day of April I realised that yesterday was April Fool’s Day, but I just forgot to post anything as a joke. However, there is a joke going on with the television programming here these days. I wonder if there is something sinister behind all this, but anyone who has been watching TV a lot (I never watched much TV until recently) will notice how many different cop shows there are on TV every night. Is this supposed to prepare us for more police presence and intervention in our daily lives?

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It has been a while since my last post. I believe it is nearly three months ago that I last posted to this site. Well, the story is quite long, but as usual, it is to do with changing priorities. Since the change of the year things have been going quite hectic and there is hardly any time to do anything other than work. Sound familiar to you? Well, that is what I call dynamic priority reassignment or DPR for short (just kidding).

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