Nokia 7610 Blog

GSM Position Locator

2005-02-16T00:59:00.000-08:00

There are several of these programs about and what I found interesting about this particular one is it is stable and works quite well. What it does is as you move from an area it detects new cells and enter it as a waypoint and so you can navigate back to your starting point or anywhere in between. As you return it will erase the waypoints you re-pass and you end up with the current waypoint on top of the list, very nifty as you do not end up with a whole long list of waypoints you have to scroll through. The format is Network:Area Id:Cell Id and the only problem is in the urban there are many cells for each area; as can be seen even standing still I am getting 3 cells for the same area. Still if you just look at the Area Id you should be alright and of course in the country area you will get less cells for each area.

Snes games on the 7610

2005-02-04T23:17:00.000-08:00

Well vampent of http://vampent.com/vsun.htm has tempted me to put back these timeless RPG games on my phone :) and why not, they play like a book anyway and a few minutes here and there is very acceptable and most important of lasting interest.
Below are some screenshots of FF5, FF6, Chrono Trigger, Breath Of Fire2:

Philips Camcoder Pro

2004-10-25T04:21:00.000-07:00

Philips Camcoder Pro is a vast improvement over the built in application. It has unlimited recording to the memory card, 2X Zoom, Auto or Manual Adjustment for Brightness and Contrast.

Spectacle For My Phone? Are You Nuts?

2004-10-18T19:51:00.000-07:00

NO
You see the 7610 like most cameraphones has a fixed lens.
This means it is focused at only one point in space(usually close) and all other distances are essentially out of focus. In the 7610 the fixed aperture is f2.8 which is fairly large (good low light performance) but this also leads to very narrow depth of field so the distance shots are blurry, in other words the camera is short sighted. So where to get the spectacle for your camera. You can buy these correcting eye-pieces for short-sighted persons using manual focusing cameras. How you attach it to your camera is up to your ingenuity.
Here a Nikon -3.0 Eyepiece Correction Attachment.

Some sample shots showing the improved results.
http://forum.mypdacafe.com/viewtopic.php?t=214

Shooting lights with the 7610

2004-10-08T02:59:00.000-07:00

The 7610 has no manual control over its exposure at all, this is not too bad in good light, but in low light the camera will give an over exposed and grainy picture. Here is a way to take advantage of the slow response of the exposure by shooting Before the camera has finished its adjustment. First put the camera into night mode, compose your picture and take the shot by pressing the joypad once, do not save that picture yet, now give your joypad a quick double tap. You will notice the second picture is a lot darker than the first without the grainy effect of most night shots. Nokia could have saved us going through this convolution by a simple exposure lock, instead this is all we have.

Hard reset the 7610

2004-10-05T18:44:00.000-07:00

OK it has to happen, installed so many apps that my phone is acting up a bit. First thing first is to see which I can do without. So out came some wonderful but hardly used progs and games and then a hard reset, surprisingly easy to recover: set the date and time, load theme stored in mmc, choose and set the profile, remake the applications folders and move the icons to each, set the AP and email, and finally sync back the data from outlook, done, lean and mean again!

So surviving applications are:
Quick Office, cant do without this
sCrypto, see review
mCal, see review below
FExplorer, yes another cant do without
AppMan , useful
AlarmManager, repeating alarm at last!
http://home.tula.net/symbian/am/index.html
OggPlay, nice sweet mp3 playback
UltraMP3, undecided on this, OggPlay sounds better to my ears.
RealPlayer, this is built in, crappy mp3 play, but good for video
AgileMessenger
WirelessIRC
Netfront, use Opera mostly but got this free during recent promo
Opera, yes king of browsers
Built in Browser, use this mainly for wap sites
MSDict Viewer with Oxford Dictionary, use predictive input to enter word text.
WorldMate, useful
ReadM, love this ebook reader for its unique non-jerky auto word scroll
http://zavorine.net/symbian/readm_s60.htm
and MakeDoc, make your own ebook from any text file
http://www.pierce.de/makedocw.html

Games:
ChessGenius
Bounce
ExplodeArena
Frozen Bubble
Hearts
Spades
Solitaire
Triz
Vexed
Mosquitos
So gone are all the Sierra, Gameboy and Nes emulations, Ngauge ...good and impressive but the nature of the device makes it hard to play and time to play are in short busts, so the remaining games are more suitable.

Here is a short comment on two wonderful progs:

sCrypto is an encruption prog that can password protect Any file on your device. The files can be word or excel or even graphic files. I can see this is very useful for the business person and the files can be stored in the mmc card. The only thing I wish for is the ability to encrupt whole folders this would be great if you have a lot of files.

mCal is the best cal progs I can find at the moment for the S60 short of a full sci calculator(which I dont need). This RPN cal makes it very easy to do a long string calculation and it has some useful built in functions. The unique way of using the joystick to enter the 4 operators makes for easy one handed use.

7610 as a photo copier and fax

2004-10-05T18:07:00.000-07:00

How good is the 7610's camera as a quick and dirty document copier?
Not too bad even though the below test was done handheld and under dim light.
I would suggest using the high resolution mode, but even the low resolution mode below will capture a readable A4 size.

Excel on the 7610

2004-10-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

I have been waiting for a spreadsheet to fully downsize from my HP4150 PPC. The spreadsheet is an essential program for me as I use it as a database and a calculating tool, so no device can be regarded a PDA without the ability to read and edit a spreadsheet.
Some of you might be wondering just how usable Quicksheet is on the 7610.
As a test I made a spreadsheet as below:

This sheet has 9 Columns(A to I) and 790 Rows(1 to 790).
Now enter some nonsense but simple formulas like this :-
Column C has =$B$2/I2 copied down the whole column.
Column E has =C2/H2 ,, ,,
Column F has =C2-E2 ,, ,,
So if I change B2C2, 3x789=2367 cells will be recalculated.
This is a big spreadsheet(9x790=7110 cells), that will chock
many older pda's to death occupy 200KB in the desktop Excel.
When transfered to the 7610 it takes 95sec to open this file
the first time, because quicksheet do file conversion on the fly.
On saving the file the size is increased to 645KB but subsenquent
file opening is a lot quicker at 20sec.
So is the 7610 capable of handling this large file?
The answer is Yes! Recalculation of the 2367 cells takes but an instant
and I feel it can do much more complex sheets with greater number
of formulas. Scrolling around this sheet is fast
and you can even use multiple sheets in a file.
I cant imagine anyone wanting to carry around larger spreadsheets
in their pocket but Quicksheet is fully capable of it.

Read RSS feeds with your phone

2004-09-10T19:51:00.000-07:00

Use Opera browser in your phone to read your RSS like here.
The advantage of the mobilerss service is that you read the headlines
and only click on the links of interest. This cuts down a lot on the gprs download.
Here is what to do:
1.On your desktop PC,
Go here to create your account and password:
http://www.mobilerss.net/
2.Login to add feeds
Look for this sign
and copy the short cut, and configure display for phone.
3.Click on My Feeds to read RSS
Bookmark the link and have fun reading rss on your phone!

Some RSS feeds:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm?
http://www.dpreview.com/news/dpr.rdf
http://www.zdnet.com/html/z/xml.html

My Mobile Opera Bookmarks

2004-09-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

You have Internet in your pocket, so make use of it by bookmarking interesting and useful sites.

If you like you can try my bookmarks of 100+ small sites for Opera by
downloading the file here:

http://img127.exs.cx/img127/7158/bookmarks3qd.jpg

Download, rename to bookmarks, transfer to phone and use FExplorer to copy to E:\System\Data\Opera

To open the bookmarks faster:
Click the folder then click down on the joystick.

Most of the sites are configured for pda as the phone handles these well and they are much more interesting than wap sites.

Digi Malaysia GPRS and MMS settings

1.Setting Up GPRS
Connection name: DigiGPRS
Data bearer: GPRS
Access point name: diginet
User name: digi
Prompt password: No
Password: digi
Authentication: Normal
Homepage: None

Advanced Settings
Phone IP address: Automatic
Primary name server: 0.0.0.0
Secondary name server: 0.0.0.0
Proxy serv. Address: None
Proxy port number: 0

Settings>Connection>GPRS
GPRS connection: When needed
Access point: diginet

2.Setting Up MMS
Settings>Connection>Access point>New access point
Connection name: DiGiMMS
Data bearer: GPRS
Access point name: digimms
User name: mms
Prompt password: No
Password: mms
Authentication: Normal
Homepage: http://mms.digi.com.my/servlets/mms

Advanced Settings
Phone IP address: Automatic
Primary name server: 0.0.0.0
Secondary name server: 0.0.0.0
Proxy serv. Address: 203.92.128.160
Proxy port number: 80

Messaging>Options>Settings>Multimedia message
Access point in use: DiGiMMS
Reception: Always on
On receiving: Retr.immediately
Allow anon: yes
Receive advert: Yes
Receive report: Yes
Deny report sending: No
Message validity: Max
Image size: small

Whats on my Nokia7610

2004-07-12T01:06:00.000-07:00

I have just upgraded to the Nokia 7610 which is a Symbian series 60 phone. Here are screenshots of some of the programs available.

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