About a month ago I changed my phone to the Nokia 6280. It's got a bigger screen than my old phone. Last night I was on the train home and the bloke sitting next to me was watching a tv programme on a video ipod. The screen was a similar size to my phone's so I wondered if I could use it to watch things on.
The software CD which came with the phone had the latest version of the Nokia PC Suite. The media viewer part of the suite allows you to view mpg or avi files and save them in a format suitable for the phone. I tried it and it seems to work ok. The playback on the phone didn't let me fast forward or rewind within a video file but the video quality on screen was good. If I restrict myself to 20-25 minute shows or split larger programmes into shorter segments then I should be able to watch videos on my way to and from work.
I received a phantom text message this morning. It claimed to be from Emma but the message was completely blank. I replied, asking Emma about it. She said that she hadn't texted me and that the phone was in her pocket at the time!
On the subject of mobile phones, I also got a call about renewing my subscription to the Orange network. The thing is, I haven't been with Orange for a few years but I keep getting these calls.
Yesterday morning, whenever I received a text message it would silently sneak into the inbox without my phone (nokia 6630) playing the 'text message arriving' alert. This afternoon it wouldn't even receive any. I checked the phone settings but they looked ok. I hadn't changed any recently so I couldn't see what the problem was. I could still send messages and send and receive phone calls.
This morning I put the sim card in my old phone and 8 new text messages arrived. A lot of them were 'test' messages I sent myself yesterday but some were actual messages which I should have had.
Tonight I put the sim back the phone with the intention of backing up my data and resetting the phone. The battery had been out of the phone all day and when I switched it back on it asked me for the time, date and my timezone. I sent myself another 'test' text message and to my surprise it arrived ok. Having the battery out of the phone seemed to be all the 'resetting' it needed.
Our phones were reporting hardly any free memory despite the amount of used memory being a fraction of the 10Mb on the main phone itself. Deleting text messages didn't help - deleting a couple of messages actually made the free memory go down, leaving Emma's phone having no free memory at all. Copying the messages over to the memory card failed - possibly due to the lack of memory.
We used the Nokia Communicator software to back up the phone data, then reset the phone completely. This freed up all the memory but restoring the backup just got things back to where they were before. There was actually a tiny amount of free memory which allowed us to move the messages over to the memory card, deleting them from the phone memory. This did the trick, giving around 8Mb of free memory, despite the File Manager only claiming the messages took up less than 2Mb.
The free memory decreasing when we deleted texts is still a mystery but at least we now know why the phone was full. Each text message must take up more memory than is reported. The phone treats it's internal memory as a disk drive and if each message is stored as a seperate file then this will explain it. Files always take up a minimum size, often around 2-4Kb, so a message which is only a few characters long will still take up a few K.
One of the problems with my new Nokia 6630 is that it came without any games pre-installed. I was looking for games to download when I realised that the phone was probably powerful enough to run a ZX Spectrum emulator. I knew that one had been written in Java so I looked to see if anyone had adapted it to run on a phone. Instead, I found ZX Boy, which is designed for phones which use the Symbian operating system.
The emulator runs surprisingly well - slightly faster than a real spectrum (which makes playing arcade games a bit more of a challenge). The main problem of course is the lack of a proper keyboard. For games with only a few controls, it is possible to redefine the phones keypad, but a text adventure or anything which requires a lot of typing would be too awkward. There is an on-screen keyboard for typing in small amounts of text, but it would be nice to be able to type by using the phone's keypad in a similar manner to texting.
I intend to browse through some of the spectrum archives on the internet to find some more games to download. At the moment, I am playing Football Manager a lot, especially on the train while travelling to and from work.
