Two days for N96 to release!
Yes it’s only two more days before the Nokia N96 releases to the market. As I said previously, this should be the final media release, which means that in few weeks it will hit the markets. It only depends on national regulators, networks, and logistics on the date of release to the public, all retailers usually differ.
Stay tuned to our upcoming review. For now you can appreciate Mobile-Review’s Eldar’s review.
How to be like Stavros!
March 23, 2008 by Meraj Chhaya
Filed under Applications, GPS, Hands-on, NSeries, Nokia, S60, Symbian
Mark Guim posted an in-depth guide on how to play around with your Nokia Sports Tracker and Google Maps in order to achieve what Stavros does: Position Art.
Of course most of us aren’t as talented as Stavros, but now we can atleast give it a try.
Instructions
Step 1. Use Sports Tracker on your phone to record your location data. You can choose to run, walk, or whatever and it will record your path.
Step 2. When You are done, select ‘Upload to Service’ on the workout summary screen on your phone. The data will be uploaded to Sports Tracker online.
Step 3. On the Sports Tracker website, the route will be displayed on a map. To get this map on our blogs, we need to download the data as KML file by pressing the KML button above the map.
Nokia Maps direct downloads
Martin Letis has posted a great way to download the Nokia Maps directly. Personally I don’t like the Nokia MapLoader, as the downloads are extremely slow, the application is strict on the Map downloads, and there is low functionality.
It seems that Martin agrees with me, so he went for a search on an alternate way to download the maps. He analyzed the HTTP traffic and found out what the GET requests were. He then parsed the HEX strings and got the Maps’ numbers. With this, you can just download them with a HTTP browser that supports downloads.
Inspired by this, Diabo, also know as 666, posted all the links on his website as well as few simple steps:
Run Nokia Maps on your phone once before you add any maps. This will create the required folder structure on your memory card.
Download, unzip, and drop into the appropriate folders on your memory card. On my Nokia the folder structure is cities with a subfolder called diskcache filled with subfolders called 0 to 9 and a to f, i.e. /cities/diskcache/0 to /cities/diskcache/f.
You can download maps for entire continents, individual countries, or individual regions within some countries. Download sizes range from one megabyte (Gibraltar) to over a gigabyte (europe or america). You’ll need a 4 GB card to fit the entire planet.
All links look like http://static.s2g.gate5.de/maploaderzip/0.0.9h/*.zip, where * is a number of two to seven digits. If a map doesn’t work properly on your phone (e.g. street names appearing at the wrong place), copy the URL into the address bar of your browser, change the URL to http://static.s2g.gate5.de/maploaderzip/0.0.8h/*.zip or http://static.s2g.gate5.de/maploaderzip/0.0.7h/*.zip, and try again.
Source: Martin Letis, Diabo
Edit: Thanks to Diabo for the clear up on the links
The Nokia’s N96 Small Battery
February 17, 2008 by M. Hussein
Filed under Blog News, Hands-on, Mobile World Congress, NSeries
The most concerning issue on the Nokia N96 is the small 950mah battery. We all know this battery performed poorly on the original Nokia N95 so why did Nokia decide to use it again with the Nokia N96? It is a very strange decision, but somebody was able to talk with the N96 product manager at the Mobile World Congress.
A bigger battery means a bigger device, so to Nokia it was more important to keep the device comfortable to hold in our hands. Also the software was made to provide all Nokias N96 more efficiency. So no worries about he battery. Right? Or not?
My friend Meraj, when he done his review to nokia N95, that deficiency in the device was an aspect that reduced the classification to him. We hope this not happens in the Nokia N96!!!
