Posts Tagged ‘Nokia’
Getting isync back on lion
January 10, 2012 | 
Author For some reason apple has removed isync from lion. For those of us without an iphone this is rather annoying. I have used isync for years. It sort of generally works ok. I tried syncmate but that was useless as it only works with s40 nokia phones and my N8 is an S60. I tried it but it just hung when trying to sync. I uninstalled it and then later it popped up to remind me I hadn’t sync’ed! Not impressed with an application that leaves bits of itself lurking.
I had a quick google and I found this article on nokia support forums which had a solution.
I downloaded the sync from there. It is the last version that was made. I then went onto nokia’s site and got their add in for the N8.
After pairing my phone via bluetooth I loaded up isync and copied it into the applications folder. I then loaded the nokia package. After that I added the N8 as a device back into isync. It worked perfectly! All the calendar items I had have popped into the new calendar. Contacts have appeared in address book (never use it). I have no idea why apple have dropped it.
Nokia N86 – how more infuriating can this phone become??
For most of this evening I have been trying the very simple task of uploading a photo straight from my phone and sharing it on twitter simultaneously. So far after several hours and the air turning blue I still haven’t actually managed it. Partly this is due to several services that should do what I want simply but don’t and the continued dismal performance of this Nokia phone.
Firstly I tried twitpic. I can send a pic. It appears on twitpic but it does not automatically tweet it onto twitter. Why not? Why would I upload to a photo sharing service designed to tweet onto twitter and not want it to do just that?!
Then I tried Flick to Twitt or some such named effort which suggested you could upload to flickr and tweet that photo out on twitter at the same time. Hurrah, I thought. But it is via a web interface only! I want to send it via my phone in one go. Not send it to flickr then begger about with some other service. Humph.
Then I noticed that Flikr has a share on a blog kind of setting which is rather an obtuse way of twitter sharing as that is one of the options. After wrestling with the email on the phone and a bounce due to my own spelling mistake I thought it would work without another hitch. I was wrong. This was where all the trouble started. My F$*&((&@(£(££*£* phone decided this was the time it was going to crash, hang, freeze and generally behave worse than spyware infested windows machine. I set up email using the wizard. You can’t do it any other way and it didn’t work with correct settings. I didn’t know they were incorrect until I tried to send the photo – the outgoing icon remains on screen forever! I switched the phone off and on. The icon was still there. Then it decided it wouldn’t switch off so it was battery off time. Back on – icon still there. It doesn’t appear in the messaging outbox so you can’t cancel it. There is literally no way of cancelling a stuck email it seems….
Soooo. I deleted the mailbox it was using. The icon went away. Hurrah. Then the phone had another eppy fit so I had to reset it again. I tried to add the mailbox again and it was mental by this time. So I did a hard reset, which I hate doing as it takes ages to go through all the settings and change them all back to how I like them.
So I tried to add the mailbox again. Wizardy thing just sits there with the ‘contacting server’ for ages. Great. Go back, try again. Nope. I must have tried this wretched thing half a dozen times. I give up. I then get a random error about a website wanting to offer a certificate…. the stupid little bleeder has switched on ‘security’ in the connection settings when I specifically set it to OFF. It has also lost the username and password settings for incoming and outgoing mail so NO BLOODY WONDER IT DOESN’T BLOODY WORK! This is a freshly reset phone on factory settings and it doesn’t even do something basic like setup an email mailbox with the settings you give it. No, it picks some others because it feels like it.
After piddling about further and adding settings it still sits there for ages. I add the server name as an ip address and this time it just about manages to sort itself out. I get to see my inbox and I think hurrah, this has worked. So I merrily set about making another email with the corrected settings completed and….. the ruddy thing is stuck in an outbox! The icon is still there, sending this stupid email. So I’m going to have to delete the bleeding mailbox again to stop it in its tracks.
All I want to do is to send a pic to twitter from my phone. How hard should this be????! I have sent pics to Facebook without any bother. They upload straight away. But somehow this phone has decided it doesn’t do email to any other destination!
Even with using Yahoo mail which you’d think would be Nokia numpty programmer proof it still doesn’t manage to create sensible settings that enable to log in with the correct email password. Hopeless! (But I have later found out that you have to have yahoo plus to access yahoo email from anything other than the web interface so it’s not the Nokia numpty programmers for certain that stop yahoo mail from working) I can only think the last firmware update screwed up email so badly that once you change or try and add a mailbox it will never work again. New update has been available since April but still no sign that O2 are going to pull their fingers out and make it available OTA.
The question still remains as to what phone I’d replace it with…
Posted in Computing & Technology, Gadgets | 
Tags: email settings, N86, Nokia, rubbish phones, twitter | 
1 Comment »
Why is the Nokia N86 so appalling?
I spent ages looking for a new phone. I had a faithful nokia e70 which did the job of being a phone and email device quite well. Battery life was decent and it would surf t’internet too. But it was a brick and a the camera was rubbish. So I decided I would change it for a new one.
I was torn between the N86 and the iphone. The iphone also had a rubbish camera so there would be little to gain. I also tried an LG phone with a touchscreen and found it such an annoying experience I wished to hurl it at the wall. Therefore I chose the N86…
First day of use didn’t go that well as the migration tool only works if you migrate from similar nokias so it seemed you couldn’t migrate data from an E series to an N series even though they both run symbian. Great. Luckily I just synced the old phone with isync then synced the new one with it too so all calendar and contacts were imported without problem. I spent a happy afternoon playing with all the settings on the phone. It was ok for the first few days then it crashed randomly requiring the battery to be removed to reset the phone. I’ve updated firmware,restored to factory , restarted it regularly and still this phone is the most unreliable phone I have ever used!
The bugs found so far: random freezing, new message indicator light stops working then you need to reset the phone entirely, randomly picture messages don’t send and hang about in the outbox and usually hang the phone, photos aren’t saved into the gallery but are there when you check the filesytem. You can’t use card memory as it makes the phone throw a wobbly. You can’t plug it in to a laptop to charge it as it switches new messages to phone memory from mass memory. Battery life is mad. One minute it has nearly full bars the next it is half power. Switching on and off loses several bars even though the battery usage must be minimal. Email program is abysmal. It hangs and locks and generally is barely fit to use.
Worst problem of all is the atrocious build quality. The charger connector is wobbly and the slider makes noises now and is loose. The slide out keypad also has the number keys slightly too high
It beats me how a company as large as Nokia can release a phone with beta quality software. I found all the problems within a few days of normal use. Why don’t their in house testers manage this??? I’m sure many nokia users would be happy to be lent a phone for a few weeks to iron out these issues if Nokia are unable or unwilling to pay people to actually test the phone. It must surely be more cost effective than releasing the product and receiving such negative publicity.
Networks are not innocent in this either. They will insist in beggaring about with the software and changing options. This practice should be stopped. The only difference between a sim free and networked phone should be the start up logo and connectivity settings. Leave the rest alone!
Yet another firmware release is imminent. Will it be third time lucky?
