Russell Beattie

Heh. How about everything I can get my hands on legally? I just bought a 128MB Multimedia Card (MMC) and I am astounded by how much space that actually is. I know it's "storage" and not "memory", but still, my laptop only has 256MB of RAM... so 128MB on my phone is incredible to me. Like I said before, compared to the 4MB on my Nokia 7650, it's downright decadent. The saddest thing is that I bought a PCMCIA adapter for it as well and it cost almost as much as the card itself. Why do PCMCIA cards cost so much? I've had to buy a hub for all the freakin' USB stuff I have on my machine now (infrared mouse, ADSL modem, webcam, Bluetooth card) and the prices for other peripherals for USB are cheap as hell. My Bluetooth adapter cost around 70� a few months ago, but a Bluetooth PCMCIA card cost almost triple that price. Why? I've got 2 slots sitting there unused right now, and when I do use them, they're only for Network connectivity (regular ethernet or WiFi). Well, no biggie. I probably won't use the MMC adapter much, but when I do want to transfer large files (or lots of files) it'll be nice to have an option that's much faster than Blue tooth - which definitely is a bit slow when you start transferring files in the multi-megabytes.

Anyways, now that I have all this space, I threw everything and the kitchen sink on the phone. I even had to buy copies of a few pieces of software again... and I'm going to email others so I can get a new code for the new phone (good luck). For example, I bought MSG Karting, but it's way too big to keep on my 7650, so it's not installed. However, it needs a code which is tied to the IMEI number on your phone, so I can't just copy it to my 3650 and have it work. I'm going to email the company and see what they can do. Opera, however, is incredibly useful on both phones, so I ponied up another $19.00 for it (before they raise the price). Same thing for Yellow FTP (which has a new version... nice.).

It's too bad that the 3650 doesn't have stereo sound like the P800, so I'm not going to put any MP3s on the phone or anything (not that I'd be able to fit a lot of music on 128MB anyways. And battery life... I'm sure playing MP3s on the phone would chew up the battery pretty damn quickly.

By the way, I forgot to mention this the other day. If you have a Bluetooth adapter for Windows, make sure you get the latest drivers. They're constantly updating them and improving their usability and reliability. Bluetooth works great, but the drivers sorta suck on Windows... I had random problems with my adapter from MSI until I downloaded their latest drivers on Saturday (because I COULD NOT connect to my 3650) and now it works like a charm - better than ever. I'm AMAZED at how well it works, actually. Almost like a Mac. I don't have to mess with connecting to my phone from my computer any more. As soon as I turn on Bluetooth on my phone, the computer and the phone are ready to connect and I can start using it immediately. That's pretty great.

Anyways, here's a tip: My phone is working REALLY quickly now that I've moved everything I could onto the memory card. The default messages, images and video apps allow you to change the settings so that it uses the memory card instead of the phone's memory. I'm not exactly sure why, but reducing the amount of info stored on my phone noticeably affected performance. I only have 888k on my phone now - and I'm not even sure why it's that high because it doesn't list that much data... probably system stuff.

Opera is GREAT but it has weird problems with memory. It needs everything it can get its hands on, so if you're running any sort of background app or some other app is still holding on to memory for some reason OR you're actively downloading something via Blue tooth, Opera won't start with a "not enough memory" error - which makes you nuts if you just bought a 128MB MMC. I know it's talking about RAM not storage, but still... It's frustrating. The guys at Opera are smart, I'm sure they'll get the size of the app down a bit and improve the footprint as well soon.

Okay, so here's the list of crap I have on my phone right now, and this plus a few images is only using 11MB of my memory card... Yowza.

• Nokia Video Recorder w/sound
• Opera
• NetFront
• FExplorer
• SyncML
• SlovoEd Spanish<->English
• AvantGo
• Yellow FTP
• AppMan
• ReadM (+ All Hitchhiker's Guide books)
• Nokia CardDeck Game
• Interstellar Flames
• MSG Karting
• GoBoy
  • Tetris DX
  • Mario Land 2
  • Space Invaders DX
• ChessGenius (demo)
• MeltDown (demo)
• J2ME
  • Splinter Cell
  • Tiger Woods
  • Fifa 2003
  • Siberian Strike
  • TipicME
  • Solytare

Any suggestions for other applications would be great if you've found something that's interesting or indespensible. Note that I own a few other apps - but they're tied to Ana's phone instead like IM+ and MSG Karting and I only thought that Opera and YellowFTP were worth buying twice. Since I've easily spent $1000 on Symbian hardware and software this year alone, I'm now starting to slow down a bit on software purchases. (If you think about it, Symbian actually only received $10 of that $1000... oof.) The sad thing I recently learned is that not all Gameboy Color ROMs work on the GoBoy emulator - especially the bigger 2MB ones. Damn! I found a zip full of 30 games on Kazaa but only 3 or 4 actually work on the phone. Damn damn damn! (Well, it serves me right for being a P2P pirate of these games, but still! Damn!)

By the way, I have to say that every day I like this phone more. I love not having to flip anything open like on the 7650. I really like having the memory card and I like the styling. The keypad's driving me nuts still... but I'm getting used to it. The fact that it's always available is great. Being "mobile" for the past couple of days has kept the phone in constant use: chatting, checking email, taking snaps and videos, games, browsing the web online and reading AvantGo and ReadM offline on the metro, using it as a modem from my PC and more. It's just an AMAZING piece of kit.

:-)

-Russ