The other day at an event I went to, I had the opportunity to have a go on a Nokia N900, Nokia’s flagship Linux-powered mobile phone.

Check out the video and photos below to see the N900 in action.

I’m afraid there’s no getting away from it – the N900 is somewhat of a disappointment.

First off, the hardware – generally clunky and difficult. The phone is huge and heavy compared to everything else out there; the slider for the keyboard is clunky and the slider for the camera is flimsy; the touchscreen is a joke.

I admit I was expecting the touchscreen to suck a bit, as it is capacitive; however it is a continually poor experience that I found simply difficult to use. Sliding anything is a struggle, and selecting some of the minuscule icons I’m sure is a physical impossibility.

The software is an equal let-down. The entire operating system is completely unintuitive; the screen is constantly locked in the horizontal view, so the phone is nigh-on impossible to operate with one hand; and as I said, some of the controls are simply too small to operate in conjunction with the poor screen.

I suppose the advantage of the OS is that it is based on Linux and can do the closest resemblance to multitasking of any mobile platform, but the fact is it is simply too difficult to operate (yes, even for me) to put up with.

Nokia must do better if they want to survive in the face of iPhone and Android. The last really decent phone they brought out was the E71, but they cannot survive on business sales alone (thanks to BlackBerry).

Unfortunately earlier this weekend my trusty E61i died a horrible death. What’s annoying is that it shows some signs of life (the notification light comes on when you press power) but it doesn’t start booting. Think it’ll be long hours for me to figure out what’s going on, and even longer to get it sorted.

My outgoing E61i

So in the mean time, I needed (literally) a new phone – I didn’t fancy doing 300 miles in a weekend in a car that has failed its MOT (the other one hasn’t expired yet – don’t worry it’s still legal!) without a working phone to call the AA if it all went wrong.

So here’s what I got, and what I think of it.

Thanks to a plugin and a bit of tinkering, you can now check out this blog from your mobile phone or iPhone/iPod and you’ll get something that should make it substantially easier to get content on the go. Check out the screenshots below, or simply visit http://www.chris-alexander.co.uk on your mobile device to check it out.

The mobile site on the iPhone

Viewing a post

On an S60 Nokia

Recently I’ve been making more and more use of Fring, a multi-protocol S60 (symbian) instant messaging client.

It’s much more than just that though – all your contacts appear in one easy to use list, and chats are tabbed so it’s really easy to navigate between them and keep loads running at the same time. Protocols include all the popular ones like MSN, AIM, Yahoo and Google Talk, as well as Skype, ICQ, and also enabling you to post to and read your Twitter. It can even make VoIP calls using Skype and the Fring servers, and although it can vary greatly due to your connection (it works best on devices using WiFi as opposed to using the mobile data connections.

I would highly recommend it for someone on the go, but you really need to have WiFi or an unlimited data plan to make full use of it, otherwise it will get very expensive very quickly!

Carbide UI is a Nokia application (actually based on the open-source application Eclipse) for developing themes for use on Series 60 and Series 40 Symbian-powered Nokia devices. It’s a fully featured suite and is very good, although I ran into this mysterious error the other day running Windows Vista:

The following error occurred in the packaging process: The command S60_32_mifconv.exe execution failed

MifConv version 1.11 build (48, SVG stand-alone).
Reading source list file: themepackage_MIFList.txt
Checking: .\qsn_bg_screen.bmp
[...]
Checking: .\qsn_fr_set_opt_foc.svg
Choosing...
Convert files...
The current directory is invalid.
[...]
The current directory is invalid.
................................
Loading mif icons...
Loading file: \epoc32\BUILD\s60\icons\temp\s2uo.tmp\._s60_2_6_qsn_fr_list.svgb

ERROR: Unable to open file for reading! \epoc32\BUILD\s60\icons\temp\s2uo.tmp\._s60_2_6_qsn_fr_list.svgb

Multi Icon File converter tool. Version 1.11 (Build 48, SVG stand-alone)
Copyright (c) 2001-2007 Nokia Corporation. All rights reserved.

Usage:

MIFCONV miffile.MIF
[/Hheaderfile.MBG]
[/E]
[/Ppalettefile]
[/Bbmconvpath]
[/Ssvgencodepath]
[/Vsvgtversion]
[/Fparametername.txt]
[/A] [/OPT] iconsource1.EXT [ ... [/A] [/OPT] iconsourceN.EXT]

/Hheaderfile.MBG specifies output header file name

/E               specifies that source icons are only loaded with given file
extensions. By default, MifConv prefers source icons with
extension .SVG over .BMP, regardless of which is given as
a parameter.
/Ppalettefile    palette parameter, which is forwarded to BMCONV for
bitmap icons. See more details in BMCONV help.

/Bbmconvpath     specifies the location path of BMCONV.exe.

/Ssvgencodepath  specifies the location path of SVGTBINENCODE.exe.

/Vsvgversion     specifies the format version of the generated SVGB binary
code by SVGTBINENCODE.exe.
svgversion may be one of the following values:
1 - original encoding for 3.0 and 3.1 (BGR/float)
2 - encoding (BGR/fixed point)
3 - optimized encoding for 3.1 only (RGB/fixed pt)
4 - encoding (RGB/float)

/A                specifies animated flag for icon

/OPT              specifies icon framebuffer depth and mask depth and
the syntax is DEPTH[ ,MASK]
DEPTH             may be one of /1,/2,/4,/8,/c4,/c8,/c12,/c16,/c24,/c32
MASK              may be one of 1,8

EXT               may be one of SVG, BMP

Parameter file defined with option /F may contain
any of the parameters listed above, separated by spaces or newlines.

This error was solved like so: Firstly, export your project to a new folder. This has to be somewhere your user has access to, as this problem is caused by Vista’s file permissions and security, so your user’s documents folder is a good place. Then, switch to this workspace, using File -> switch workspace. Now you should be able to export correctly without any errors