9th December 2007, 10:40 pm
Well I picked up my new car and sold the BMW on Wed last week. I’ve already posted in my forum what car I was going to be getting but for those of you who don’t know then let me introduce you to my new car, the Dodge Nitro 2.8 CRD SE. Now it’s a far cry from the BM and something I didn’t think I could see myself driving or really liked seeing other people driving tbh but over the past few days after falling for it on a test drive, I can honestly say that it’s one of the better ‘vehicles’ I’ve owned so far. The BMW was fun but having to avoid pot holes when driving it become such a chore that I found driving it quite boring, it turned heads when it was clean which is probably also what helped sell it so quick, only took me 9 days which I don’t think was that bad.
Anyway, enough about that car now, it’s gone, someone else is driving it and I hope they enjoy it. For me, well for the next 12 months at least, I’ll be sedately plodding along in this beast. Whilst the spec on it is a lot more basic than the BM and it doesn’t quite look as nice as the SXT model, it turns heads everywhere. People stop and stare whilst I’m driving down the road, you see people drooling down their windows as they push up against them to get a better look. On the flip side of the looks is the space and 4×4 feature of it, this swung it for me when thinking about the bike rides I’ve been on and the few times I went to the lake district last year, I’m hoping that this will increase the time I spend doing both of these and it will make it more comfortable and accessible.
I never used to be one who liked seeing people driving ‘trucks’ around, especially if they did nothing more than go to work or drop the school kids of in them. Whilst I will be doing a bit of the former, I’m hoping it will see a lot of the country side and I do still cycle to work so why shouldn’t I be able to have a little something I like in my life even if it does have the carbon footprint of about a rack of servers or 10 
Try one, you might like it.
p.s. you can find me lingering around www.nitroforumz.com now 
9th December 2007, 01:22 pm
Well I’ve been running my Nokia E90 for about 3 weeks now and I’ve got to say it’s the best phone I’ve owned so far - one of the main reasons is Wifi, I use it casually when I’m at home, girlfriends or work where I have Wifi access and it is really good. Now I know you can get a lot of other phones with Wifi in them so let me carry on by saying that I really really like this phone for all of the features it has, but the Wireless makes it more useable.
The inbuilt GPS is really good, the signal lock on can take a bit longer than my N70 + Bluetooth GPS but a firmware update should be out soon for the E90 in the UK that has AGPS support which will basically use your data tariff to transfer a small amount of data which should help to get a GPS lock in a matter of seconds. The mapping software itself is good and handy for finding things out no matter where you are but if you are going to use this as a replacement for a TomTom device like I was, then a subscription to the voice guidance system is a must and tbh, rather cheap compared to other options out there.
Web browsing/Email. I use the phone to check my personal email via IMAP and it works well enough, the features provided are very basic but for keeping upto date on things whilst your away from your normal PC then it’s fine. The web browsing is pretty good and I’ve found very few sites that I either can’t access or use all of their features. The random disconnects I experience during anything wireless related is annoying so i’m hoping this will be fixed in the coming firmware update.
The keyboard when you open the phone up is perfectly adequate for short term use, I have fairly big fingers and don’t really find that this gets in the way, my biggest problem is hitting the M key rather than the N key on occasions. The shortcuts that are available are useful and even though the keyboard lacks an escape key, you can use the shortcut key of CTRL + [ which isn’t so bad, a lot of apps use the red cancel button instead or you can send a special character in things like puTTY.
Software wise, the standard tools you get with the phone are handy. The alarm could do with not defaulting to the following day after a certain time. I have however installed puTTY, a vnc viewer and an old nokia vpn client which I am yet to get working for the latter. The former two apps work perfectly fine and allow me to connect into works network from anywhere required. I am waiting for NewNet Marketing to update their catalogue of software so that I can do full remote out of bounds access into our core network equipment. Installation of 3rd party sofware is simple, you will probably want to change the certificate check feature so that you can install some software.
The screens are both very clear and good enough in size to make this phone a useable device even if it does stretch the old pocket out a bit. My biggest gripe with it so far is the speed at which it does things, quite often when I’m checking my imap mail account the device will appear to have crashed and fail to respond. Leaving it a short while will see everything catching up again but none the less, it is quite annoying. It’s not something that I can replace anytime soon as I’m locked into a 18 month contact but tbh, do I really want to change? I don’t want or need a iPhone thank god.
