Here is the phone that doesn’t need to compare itself with the Blackberry Storm or Apple iPhone. The Nokia N97 has been announced and should hopefully grace the shelves in the new year. It is definitely the successor of the greatest phone to date (the one and only N95).

It’s key features are:

• 3.5 inch touchscreen with haptic feedback.
• 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and a dual-LED flash.
• 32GB of internal flash memory, expandable up to 48GB with a 16GB microSD card (WOW WEEE!!!).
• GPS with A-GPS and compass sensors, with a new touch-driven Nokia Maps 2.0.
• 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, HSDPA, Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP support for wireless headphones.
• 3-row physical QWERTY keyboard.
• Full screen touch screen keyboard.
• Alphanumeric (old-school text’ing).
• Handwriting recognition using the included stylus.
• Standby time up to 430 hours.

NokNok have a good article on the phone and plenty of mouth watering photos of the phone.

After downloading XboxMCE05Lite-enu.exe from the Microsoft Media Extender website, I came across a small problem. The bloody program wouldn’t load. (See Image). The annoying part is when you go into the Add/Remove programs in the Control Panel, you will not find the “Update to Media Center Edition 2005″ listed, so that message is a waste of time.

The actual problem is that when Microsoft made this media extender, Windows Service Pack 2 was current. I have Windows Service Pack 3 loaded and they have not made instructions for this change of service pack.

Anyway I found the solution on Jason Tsang’s Blog and he has kindly included instructions for everyone. They are pretty simple to follow if you know how to use your command prompt (You would be surprised how many people don’t even know what the command line or command prompt is!). So open the command prompt and type the following or cut and paste this line:

reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\HotFix\KB895961″ /v Installed /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Once you are done, you will see “The operation completed successfully”. Now try running XboxMCE05Lite-enu.exe again.

Note: There is a New Media Center Extender update (KB956148) available from Microsoft.

Wow! this is cool. You can now add themes to your Google Mail or Gmail. There are a whole bunch of choices.

Google do have some awesome logos for the various famous days of the year. Todays one is no exception.

Oh well, I am sure if you live in a “nice” neighbourhood, you will be hearing a knock or two on your door tonight from the trick or treat kids. Lets hope they look like these two else there will be no sweets.

It's Friday & it's Halloween - Enjoy!

There is a cool new application for your mobile/cellphone called “trutap“. which allows you to send group messages, SMS and email from your mobile phone for free.

It is very similar to EQO Mobile & Slick which also allow you to chat to friends on IM (e.g. MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo etc) and post to blogs, photo-sharing accounts and social networks - all from your mobile phone.

What makes “trutap” stand out from the other applications is it’s ability to allow one to use Facebook chat on your mobile.

There is a new version of Gmail for Symbian & RIM phones or phones supporting J2ME. Version 2.0 is available at http://m.google.com/mail

It looks good and they have added extra support for multiple accounts, so one is able to switch to other email addresses. Extremely useful if you have more than one mail address.

There is also offline support which is great if you are on a train writing an email and about to send, when suddenly you are going through a tunnel or in an area with no reception. The email gets saved in your Outbox, and when you have signal again, the email is sent automatically.

Did you know Gmail has it’s own blog. Check it out, it’s very good.

Damn, I can’t believe I can put a 16GB micro SDHC memory card in my original Nokia N95. There seems no reason now for me to upgrade my phone. It just shows you how smart this little phone is even if it came out over eighteen months ago.

The price of memory especially in the SDHC department has come down so much over the past year. I think I paid £80 for my 6GB twelve months ago, and now the 16GB sells for £50. (Insane)…

Here is a mobile phone compatibility chart from mymemory.co.uk just in case you buy the memory card and discover it does not work in your phone.

There is a new firmware out for the Nokia N95. I had a bit fun yesterday after I upgraded to V30.0.015. For some reason or other it conflicted with a trial application called “Handy Shell“.

I was unable to remove the Handy Shell application, and every time I started the phone it would just lock up with a message “Phone start-up failed. Contact the retailer“. Did a search on Google, and found a whole lot of solutions, which didn’t work for me. After a couple of Q&A on the Nokia Forum, I decided to re-install the firmware, which fortunately fixed the problem, but I was unable to use my latest backup. Actually I think the latest backup contained the Handy Shell application, which was the root of the problem.

Don’t get me wrong, the Handy Shell application is brilliant, although it came out before V30, so perhaps it does not like the new firmware changes. I don’t know, but my phone is back to it’s former glory, faster than before, and has a few extra features namely (as seen on Nokia Addict dot com).

- Maps 2.0
- Nokia Search 4.0 with google plugin
- Share on OVI added
- Comes with music extension
- Mosh & OVI bookmarks added to browser.

Changes/Improvements include:
- Download! application updated (v3.1.50)
- New basline for Startup settings
- New baseline/upgrade to music Player
- Baseline update for Flashlite3
- Current consumption improvements
- New basline for VOIP
- General error corrections

I was doing a search for N-gage in Google, and noticed that Google is actually warning us of sites that may harm our computers. How clever is that?

If one clicks into the link, there is another page with a warning, and you can go one step further and actually see why Google say it may be harmful. This is exactly why I like Google so much. Over time I would imagine they will be able to tell us all sites that are malicious or contain viruses or spyware.

If you want to read all about this “safe browsing” then vist http://www.n-gage.com/ngi/ngage/web/uk/en/home.html

There is this great new application called Mobbler, that allows you to login to LastFM account on your mobile and to stream music. The set up is pretty basic and it worked very well provided there was signal.

I tried it out on the train this morning, and it was not as reliable as I had hoped. Once it loses connection, you have to manually reconnect. (Lets hope this gets changed in newer versions as it is a right pain if your phone is buried in your pocket).

Overall I like where they are going with this application and would highly recommend using it!

Note: you need to have an account on LastFM before trying to use this application. You can sign up here.

If you log into LastFM on the web, you’ll notice they have updated your library, which is very cool.