When I first swapped the N97 over with Tim Salmon (for my E72), I thought it would be a quick play, and then dump it on eBay, the iPhone triumphant again.

Well, first couple of days, I could have done exactly that, there being only bad comparisons between the different screen technologies and the different OS. Now, whenever you read about iPhone vs xxxx it gets personal between the Apple Fanboys, and the xxxx fanboys, the main difference being that the xxx fanboys don't actually believe they are actually such.

What I hope to do on here is try to discuss these things without too much of that creeping in, although I will not deny I am personally a fanboy.....I am just not sure what of!

I think my experience with iPhone almost exclusively for the past year at least has changed my expectations in a device, and the thing is, well the thing is, whenever I read all the comments about iPhone being for the masses, and not geeks like me, well, I sort of understand that.

What I am trying (badly) to say is that no one is more surprised than me how completely the iPhone has satisfied my gadget needs. I mean, I am the guy who would buy two or three phones a week at times, one day I had four major phones delivered the same day, over a £1000 worth, although I admit my plan was only ever to keep one of them and sell or return the others.

The last phone that did captivate me as much as as this iPhone was the N95 and later the 8GB version, and lets think back to that time, not that long ago.

The iPhone was in its early form, and it was pretty terrible, although anyone remember the Motorola iPhone :-))

The N95, especially the 8GB version was a simply stunning phone, and we were all happy without fancy touchscreens weren't we? I had the first iPhone, and sold it on almost right away, transferring the SIM into various other phones, and making a large profit on the iPhone. When the 3G iPhone came along, with OS 2.0, it was better not still not great like the N95 8GB.

But when the 3GS was released, with the faster hardware, and the much improved OS 3.0, there was very little missing for me, although for me, the lack of certain features that the iPhone gets slated for never bothered me that much, as I always jailbroke my devices, and still do to this day.

So, back to the N97 mini. When the original N97 came out, I had two of them in quick succession, the second one I got as I felt I had not given the first one a fair chance, but back then, on V11 or 12 software (first one was the horrible V10), it was not a great device.

But the mini is a bit different, the build is equally as good as the Classic (from here on we will refer to the original N97 as Classic) but the size makes it much more pocketable. The software (I am told) is equivalent to the V20 on Classic, and it feels much much better than the old versions, but it has still reset on its own 4 times now in the past 3/4 days sadly.

Say what you like about 3GS, it has never rebooted on its own in the time I have had it, but in the grand scheme of things, does it matter?

Well today, I was using the N97 mini and the 3GS to take photos for my work, and the N97 mini and it reset for no reason other than I changed the photo size from 5mp to 2mp.

Now, this was a pain, but look at it this way, I can not even change that on the stock iPhone camera can I , and once the N97 rebooted, the resultant pictures were much better for uploading to our website. The other really nice thing was being able to take the photos, and simply connect the N97 to the PC via USB and just upload the pictures right off the phone, using mass storage mode, no need to mess about transferring them first.

Well I am at a crossroads, I like lots of things about the N97 mini, but still really like the 3GS.

One of the reasons for writing this blog is to clarify my thoughts about this whole ditch the iPhone thing, and so far it ain't really helping :-)

Maybe I need an N900?

Kev

So, all these Nokia handsets I have been buying, I guess they must be hard to use and look bad :-)

To setup the iPhone for email is basically a matter of filling in a few fields in the Settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars tab, select an Exchange Mail account, and pop in your details. That is it, you will now get completely synced Email, Calendars (more than the one you are allowed on the N97 BTW) and Contacts if you use google.

On the N97 its a little harder. I can not tell you the exact steps to take, since it all seems to be a but hit and miss. If you just go with the flow with "setup email" from your homepage widget, you may get one of any number of setup situations, as it automatically sets up something. For me, it did get all the gMail setup, but I could not access the email, or only very slowly, and I was only able to read headers, no way to get the whole email.

So I deleted that account, and following bits of several different blogs on t'interweb, managed to get Exchange for Mail working.....

So what I roughly did was.....

Setup email from front homepage gadget thingy, put junk@junk.com in, and a jjjjjunnnnk password, and then it gave me the option........^^^^^whoa, wait a moment, that was on the E72, where Exchange for Mail is in the ROM. Ah, I remember now, on an Nseries we don't really need easy email as we are only interested in meeja consumption :-)

So, go online and find the right copy of MFE (Mail for Exchange) and install it. Oh, there is no copy for N97 Mini ATM, so lie and tell it you have a N97, that will be OK.......you really shoudl know this you know :-)

Ok, where were we? put the junk in and it fools it into giving you the choice of account types, select Exchange for Mail (hurrah!) and you are away......sort of.

Now, everything you read about setting up MFE on S60 will tell you that you must turn off email sync as that does not work, and, on the E72 that turned out to be true, well, it DID sync email once, then gave errors everytime after that.

On the N97 though, you can sync email, calendars (well, only your main google calendar sadly) and contacts with the same account.

As of that lot is not confusing enough, you need to keep in mind you have to put googlemail.com and not gmail.com, and you might have to select contacts sync and cal sync a couple of times before it works.....

Nokia, are you listening to me (I very much doubt it :-)

This is simply disgraceful in December 2009, FFS it would have been disgraceful in 2005!

But hey, once its setup, it is much better than iPhone for email, right?

You decide, take a gander at this short video, let me know your thoughts. Video

Sigh, trust me when I say it pains me to write this, and I know lots of you will write me off as an ifanboi, but this is from the heart!

As you know if you read the E72 posts here, I am trying to replace my iPhone, and really want to do it with an S60 phone. So, I swapped my E72 for a N97 mini, had heard and read good things, it is much better than the old N97 large, and it was even number 1 on Steve's Phone Show podcast, a chap who's opinion I value greatly.

Well, I have only had it for 24 hours, but I was up till 3am playing with it, so have spent possibly as long as other people have spent on the iPhone before ripping it apart...so here goes. I will split this into different posts, all labelled N97 so you can read them all easily, if you dare!

Kev

Giving it a good old battery charge right now, but have put a (pretty poor!) first look video up on Youtube, here if you fancy wasting a few mins :-)

More later, and can it unseat the iPhone where the E72 failed?

UPDATE: It ain't looking good :-(

Kev

It has clarified things a little bit for me, and I at least now now that any mobile that is to unseat the iPhone here needs to have the following....

1. Minimum screen size of 3"

2. Be either of one piece construction or have a VERY solid build and hinge/slide.

3. Not at all bothered about hardware keyboard provided the software one is as good as iPhone.

4. It will probably run either iPhone OS, Andoid, or S60 5th Edition.

With that in mind, the E72 is outgoing, and I will have an N97 Mini by this Tuesday, and the whole iPhone replacing thing will start up again, so stay tuned.

Kev

Its been interesting, trying to switch back to a non touch S60 phone from the iPhone, and at the moment I alternate between thinking I could, and could not do it.

A lot of the time, its completely unfair on the E72, cos the iPhone has a screen the size of the whole Nokia and I will slate the E72 screen for being poor. And then I hit up the Home button on the E72 and see I have 10 S60 apps running, and just now on the iPhone I wondered why a tap on the Home button (the ONLY button!) did not bring up a list of running apps :-)

Its really weird, I have never been so undecided in my life over tech. I can not keep both, I want to invest in only one platform at a time.

At the moment however, I would not be able to ditch the iPhone, as there appears to be no Audioboo app for the iPhone, and I use this to record my slots for the Phone Show Chat each week, I guess there must be some way to do this on S60 though, tried the recorder app, but sound quality is not great.

One slight disappointment with E72, I expected really great battery life, but it seems to go down rather quicker than I thought. It has only charged a few times of course, so it may improve, and to be fair, maybe the meter drops quickly to halfway and then lasts ages?

I now realise that although the iPhone gets slated for battery life, at least there always seems to be a way to give it a quick boost. Mind you, the E72 does have a standard Nokia small round charge hole as well as charge over USB, so plenty of options for a top up.

More to come...

Kev

This is not really part of the intended series of specific articles as such, more of a round up of likes and dislikes since opening the box this morning.

It is great to have a phone again that you can just connect to via bluetooth from the Macbook and just copy files to and from, and also nice to have a hardware keypad again, I am not sure I will be any quicker on it to be honest, I will do a separate test and post on that.

Battery life looks like it will be very strong, as I have hammered it all day and it has barely dented the battery meter. The screen is nice and bright, and clear, but the text is quite small, and this was previously a deal stopper for me, but lately, it has become clear I need to wear my reading glasses EVERY time I use a phone, I was used to just pinching and expanding stuff on the iPhone to get around that, so if I do have to wear them, then the smaller screen may not be such a huge issue. Maybe.

The E72 camera looks like it will be better than the iPhone, but I find the iPhone pretty decent on the 3GS, and although I have yet to try video, I doubt it will better the iPhone.

Stuff like changing the tone for messages and email is so simple on S60, something I still have to Jailbreak the iPhone for, in fact pretty much the only thing I JB for these days.

Disappointingly the signal capability of the E72 is no better and might even be a little worse than the 3GS, which is very surprising. At home, I struggle to get a usable voice connection on my O2 sim, without going upstairs, which is annoying, but with Skype and a home phone, its not a major issue. I was hoping and expecting the E72 t0 be far better here than it is.

After about 12 hours of pretty much non stop use of the E72, I would say that it is a brilliant S60 non touch smartphone, but will it allow me to sell the iPhone and use it 100%.......watch this space :-)

Kev

Same email as seen on the iPhone and the E72

OK, one of the first things I need to setup is email, and boy, do Nokia make this confusing on the E72.

This is part 1 in a multipart (not sure how many) series on the E72 and if it can stand up to and even beat the iPhone 3GS, these will appear with the tag of E72 in the sidebar, I will only put these articles in this heading so you can follow easier. Please give me some feedback on these, I would appreciate it.

Some of you will know this already, if you have heard my mutterings on the Phones Show Chat audio podcasts that Steve Litchfield and Tim Salmon do every week, that for about two years now, I have been firmly stuck to an iPhone, first a 3G, and since launch, a 3GS, and nothing I have tried since has beaten it on various levels.

So, to start the series off, I present a little piece I wrote a few months ago, but has never been published, this should act as background for the rest of the series.