Birkett's Blog

I like reviewing things. I find I can talk for hours about how that circular thing rotates along a 270 degree plane, only to return to it’s initial position with a satisfying spring loaded action. Not too much spring, just enough to give a satisfying fell of quality. It’s a stainless steel circular thing by the way.

It may sound strange to be reviewing a 4 year old phone, but for reasons that will become apparent, this is the most appropriate way. I don’t understand how “reviewers” can give an honest opinion of a product having only used it for a few days prior to the review. I find that the outcome usually goes along the lines of “I didn’t get the chance to use this to its full potential, but generally i didn’t like it” or “I love it, buy one”.

I have used this phone every day for 3 and a half years, 1,213 days to be precise. I believe that is long enough to give an honest opinion, of all features.

Before the N95, I was a proud owner of a Samsung E900. Not the fanciest of phones looking back, but still served me well. An unfortunate smelting charging accident left it somewhat limited in use. That left me phone shopping for a day or two. 

I had been looking at these new fangled “smartphones” that seemed to be gaining a reputation at the time. Touch screens had not yet made a big break into the phone world and built in WiFi was something still limited to only the most up-market phones and PDA’s.

When phone buying, I look for something that will last. I don’t mind putting in a comparably large investment if it will last. I don’t tend to follow the crowd (I have a habit of hating most of the popular gadgets), I look for quality and features. So along comes the N95 and the N95 8GB, modestly taking its place at the top of the smartphone market. It certainly didn’t come in cheap, but it packed almost all of the cutting edge features at the time into a form factor that became a landmark icon for Nokia. To this day, I no other phone comes to mind that has a two way slide.

I remember unboxing the N95, which Nokia seems to make an enjoyable experience. I got my N95 from 3 UK, so It came with the usual carrier locks and branded firmware. However, 3 kept all the packaging vanilla. The phone came packaged with a USB cable, mains charger, TV output cable, Driver CD, earphones and documentation. I’m not a believer in reading the Quick Start guides, so I jammed a SIM card in and went for it.

The first boot took an age. It wasn’t even a user friendly age, a white screen, no icons, no back light, nothing. I now know that this is normal on first boot, or after a reset – but still – an animated boot splash couldn’t have gone a miss.

Initial set up was quick and easy, the usual time / date and language choices. Network APN’s and message gateways where automagically set up for me, so I could start using the phone immediately.

It took me a few days to get used to things, notably the different space key placement, one of the finer details of moving from Samsung to Nokia.

For it’s time, the battery life wasn’t great. I was pressed to get 3 days moderate use out of it before having the phone refuse to turn back on. The old E900 was quite frugal on power, regularly turning back on when all the indicators said 0%.

Zoom forward over 1000 days, the old faithful is still going strong. Not once have I been disappointed by lack of features compared to modern phones. The camera keeps up with the newer Sony Ericsson CyberShot (I’ve compared with the K850i, C902 and W995). To be fair, there is a difference. For a quick photo to remember something (which is what phone cameras are for?) the N95 will still hold its own, even against dedicated digital cameras. Start talking about full-hd recording and bi-directional mics, then I’m on the second place side.

WiFi has always been reliable for me, Bluetooth has never put a foot wrong. GPS on the other hand has been a nightmare. I have never been able to get it to reliably connect, making the N95 as a navigation device quite useless.

Call and audio quality has been fantastic, loud speakers still pack enough power for most scenarios.

I use the N95 for SMS (texting), alot. The only issue I have ever had, is with the inbox. Once you have more that 1500 messages stored in there, things become noticeably sluggish. Simple fix though, move the messages to “My Folders”, or simply delete them. (On this note, I have found ABC Amber NBU Converter an invaluable tool for extracting and archiving messages from a Nokia backup file)

My biggest observation about this phone after a few years though, the build quality. Yes, it’s a bit battered and bruised on the back – but the slide is still tight, the buttons and keypad still feel sharp and nothing has fallen off or chipped. About 6 months ago, it even got wet, to the point where it decided to switch itself off. 2 hours later, having removed the battery and let it roast on a radiator, it fires back into life no problem. I am disappointed though, it asked me for the time and date!

Symbian has continued to be sub-par next to its rivals, Nokia Ovi has been an attempt to change this – but has sadly gained a rather bad reputation.

4 years after release, this phone is showing it’s age. It is for that reason, and that reason alone – I sadly cannot recommend this phone to people any more. It’s a fantastic phone, it has served me well for a very long time, but it’s time to be retired.

Well done Nokia, you created a phone that has become a deserving icon for your company.

Sometimes things happen that seem like a massive kick in the balls, but it’s those things that change perspectives and help clear the mind. It’s the harsh change of direction that makes one realise mistakes and more importantly, what they really want.

I don’t like change, but accept its merits. I wouldn’t say I fear change, but certainly don’t welcome it. The security that comes with stability is a nice feeling.

I struggle to comprehend how individuals can call themselves part of a greater collective for the purpose of disruption. It’s those people who destroy the great things, the things others live for. Forgive me for out of mind thinking here, but why can’t society actually build and become something far greater, living up to it’s own potential? We have the technology, drive and purpose – I does seem like the human race has reached equilibrium, where we cannot advance without loosing something important.

I guess what I’m getting at here, it is up to each individual to take what they are given and make the most of it – learn to not rely on stable surroundings. If I had to pick one quality I am not proud of, it’s this one. I need stability and a sense of monotony. That sounds incredibly boring – I just admitted I can have a monotonous life.

That kick in the balls I typed about in the first sentence, I had one of those recently. It’s like hitting the big red button you know you’re not supposed to press. You touch it and everything becomes screwed up beyond belief, things fall apart that seemed so stable, other things come into place that didn’t seem to have presence before. The whole process hurts, but the realisation after a few days is quite astonishing. Any idiosyncrasies are put to one side and a long process of rebuilding can start. It’s at this point that people divide into very distinct groups – those who can reflect and recognise consequences, and those who fail to understand how brutal some decisions can be.

Quoting some famous scientists theory of revolution: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. For each and every decision that is made, moving towards a goal – an equal decision is made elsewhere that counter acts. Now i’m no psychologist, but that seems to render most endeavour completly void. There in lies the problem, failure to advance beyond such constraint, or at least to a point of conscious thought about consequence.

Now that’s enough incoherent babble for one week – read between the lines and hopefully it will make sense. Or not, maybe it will just become letters arranged in such a way that they happen to make recognisable words, following some  structure to create phrases.  That’s what Stephen Fry does, right?

In October, I, with 3 friends, will be running in the Great Yorkshire Run. A 10k run in Sheffield city centre, organised by BUPA. We have entered to run for the Stroke Association.

We are complete novices to serious running, and have a fair bit of work to do before we could class ourselves as competitive. We are targeting a time of 1 hour 20 mins to complete the run, that’s an average of 4.6 miles an hour. Or 1k every 8 minutes.  I’m a numbers man, I like calculating ETA’s and averages. Running in the red bit of a tank of petrol, with 50 miles to get home is my kind of fun. Can I make it? What does my average need to be?

I had a tough weekend last week, where I really pushed myself. I did far too many miles on the bike and wasn’t able to run consistently. I feel I held the group up, going far too slowly. Perhaps that was a consequence of deciding to bike the same day though. All I know is, I was knackered after 7k.

I see myself as a pretty resilient biker, 20 miles doesn’t phase me, and I used to be a fair medium distance runner. Things happened a few years ago though, taking away more from me than I realised. This run for me will be quite satisfying, a numbers game, the opportunity to prove to myself I can do it, for a good cause.  Of course, there’s no way I could manage it by myself.

We will do this, do it well.

What follows is a rant, aimed at UK  car insurers – expressing my disgust, anger and thought process that concludes with the words “Scamming bastards”.

I’m still a relatively young driver, own a car popularised by hooligans, and generally tick the boxes that rake in the money for insurers. But when you get a renewal quote through, that is more expensive than your first years policy on a provisional licence, as a student – eyebrows raise.

It gets better when you start getting quotes from other companies. One wanted to charge me just over the total value of the car, another wanted less than half my renewal quote. It’s like these people just pull arbitrary numbers out of their money shitting arseholes.

I have my no claims bonus, drive sensibly, look after the car and have a regular income. Why then, is it such a problem to offer me a decent premium based on me – not the drivers causing accidents and fraudulently claiming. Look at it this way insurers: chances are, my policy will never need to pay out. It’s pure profit for you.

Needless to say, I went with the most sensible quote, got windscreen cover, legal protection and Business Class 1 included for next to nothing.  I’m quite happy with the Nationwide right now. I can’t say that for the likes of Quinn Direct and others who are charging extortionate prices.

Scamming bastards.

Previous versions of Windows never seemed to last more than 6 months with me. I could just about bare 9 months before nuking and re-installing XP. I guess I just like having clean installations, no hidden crap left behind by uninstallers run weeks ago. To my credit though, I can’t say I’ve ever broken a Windows installation due to carelessness or general use.

When I installed Windows 7 Service Pack 1, it left the old 7600.0 version files in WinSxS. Great for program compatibility, but god awful for disk space. I lived with it for a few weeks (I was an early adopter), then decided it was time to get rid of the RTM files. Running dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded from the command line soon got rid of them, but left me with a 5gb %Systemroot%\Installer folder.

Now I never touch the Installer folder. Too many horror stories, very little benefit. Never.

So what do I go and do? Shift Delete it by accident.

iTunes can’t update to 10.4, I can’t uninstall it, I can’t even install Windows Updates. Even the one update that does install, can’t decide what It’s doing because it installs itself again on every shutdown.

Well done idiot. Well done. Now will someone finally get rid of or find a way to disable that damn Shift Delete shortcut to stop me using it?

So here we are. Almost 3 years after the last attempt, I got me a blog. Why? I guess I have some inner desire to write about pointless life events, entertaining idiosyncrasies and random thoughts.

Twitter seems to have calmed this desire for a while, but 140 characters sometimes isn’t enough to describe how stupid, laughable or saddening something can be. Sometimes, there is a need to write paragraphs, describing in great detail how that perfect joke played out, but ultimately back fired, leaving you with one testicle and a scorched eyebrow.

From previous blogging experiences, I can guarantee, 100%, categorically, without a doubt, promise that most of what I write is meaningless to most people. In hindsight,  that was the reason those previous attempts failed.

Truth be told: I’m just too boring.

There’s not many ways I can elaborate on that, “normal” is the best word that comes to mind. I live a normal life, working a normal job, doing normal things. I cant help but think, “How hard can it be to come up with one thing a week that isn’t normal?” If I can stick a smile on someone’s face, once a week, with something a little wacky - this blog will have served its purpose.

Right now, (this post has been drafted over a few days), I’m at work. It’s staff meeting day, and the phone just rang. Very normal.

Now you see my dilemma, I can’t make that sound any more interesting.

I’m constantly told (and I mean CONSTANTLY) by my girlfriend that I’m a very cold and matter of fact person. I say things as they are. Spades are spades, and wankers are wankers. Very clear cut in my mind, but admittedly, not good for discussion.

I fear I’ve got off on the wrong foot here. I have a cruel, dark sense of humour, passion for anything that has the potential to cause mass hysteria, and what can only be described as an obsession; with anything that has a micro controller and LED’s. I can’t pinpoint where that stems from, I can only nod in the direction of my parents and quote – “They made me like this”.

First computer at 7, first line of C++ at 11. Yep, that’s me. Computer geek, Linux guru, the kid that was asked to do friends maths homework.

I’m quite partial to metal music, again – not sure why. I don’t have some vendetta against the world and wish to commit suicide, I fit more into the nerd stereotype than metal head. Oh, and I hate maths. Or at least anything above GCSE.

You see, sometime’s I get brilliant ideas pop into my head. Like this one time when I thought it was a good idea to ride a bike up a slide. Not all of them end badly. I had one of these genius ideas a few days ago. It involved a WordPress blog.

Maybe this one will come to an abrupt end after a short lifespan, just like the others. I can’t tell. But then again, I might have started something to be proud of.

That pretty much sets the tone for what I will be writing here. A little bit of me, a bit of random, and some mind expanding ideas.

Now I must go, the phone’s ringing.

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