One week with the Nexus S.

I think I might like the iPhone 4, but since Jobs, in his infinite wisdom, refuses to sell it in India, or unlocked, or without a contract, I’ve done without one so far. I do have say that I did use the original iPhone for about a month before tossing it out the window. A fraud of a phone, it was worse than the worst Motorola brick phones I’ve ever had the misfortune to use. I do like the iPad, and the latest Touch, but the iPhone so far just ticks me off. Sour grapes, I guess.

Best Buy had a Nexus S on display, and the sales guy kept pestering me, as Best Buy sales guys do, that he had “just one left.”

So I bought it, and have had it for a week.

Before we get into the good, the bad and the ugly, let’s get rid of the downright stupid right now, shall we?

It can’t handle wifi proxies. I’ll say it again, slowly, so that the village idiots from Google can understand this. It doesn’t work behind proxies. I’m told, but can’t be bothered to check, that it does have options on mobile networks, and there are hacks available as well.

Why did Google do this? My theory is so that they can track location accurately. Why care about the fact that it makes the phone unusable in a corporate environment, if you can track users’ locations to better serve ads?

The good:

It’s fast, build quality is pretty good, but not in the iPad class, the UI is reasonably intuitive and in some ways better than IOS. The soft keyboard and spelling system is way better than IOS.

The Nexus S doesn’t come with Swype, pity.

Almost all the apps I need are available for free on the Android Market. There’s also a banking app from ICICI which doesn’t even exist on IOS.

Voice quality on calls is good. No one asked me if I was driving when I was driving, on speakerphone. Apparently Google has a new noise reduction algorithm in play; works really well, I guess.

I like the four fixed function keys, very usable both with and without haptic support.

The settings app is well designed, unlike Symbian. You don’t need to have a cheat sheet in your head to find settings – except for wifi proxies, of course.

Charging over USB is supported, which is a major convenience over the older Nokias.

Finally, since this is the Google platform reference phone, updates should come really quickly. The phone came with 2.3, and it updated pretty quickly and easily to 2.3.2 over wifi.

Compare with IOS which needs USB to do anything. Compare with Nokia, where updates depend on the device, the region, the operator and in my experience have been pretty poorly spaced out and unreliable.

The bad:

We’ve covered the wifi proxy scam. There’s another weirdness with wifi; it doesn’t always switch to a stronger AP. In fact I’m not sure that it even tries. I found a wifi analyzer which can switch APs at will, but the fact that you need something like this tells you that something in the wifi stack is really immature.

Bluetooth support is weak. I couldn’t get my Mac to browse the filesystem on the phone. It’s as lame as IOS in other aspects. I don’t use Bluetooth headsets, so I don’t know or care how good that support is.

The ugly:

Battery life, compared to the worst Nokia that I have, makes the Nokia look really good. The claims on the Google spec page are laughable. Change their days to hours and divide by two to get a real idea of how poor battery life really is.

Bottom-line: will I keep it or toss it out? My Nokia E71 was the best phone I’ve ever used. No touch screen etc, but the build quality and battery life were superb.

I find the Nokia X6 sluggish but usable.

The Nexus S tries hard to be state of the art and configurable, and kind of succeeds. The only reason to keep it over the Nokias’ is that Android definitely has developer attention.

The deal breaker right now is the broken wifi proxy support. Battery life being poor is something I can work with – charging overnight isn’t really a big deal.

We will play this game until I win.

This is my 4 year old’s rule for playing board games.

Ovi Music: review. One word: Rubbish

One of the attractions of the Nokia X6 was the free year’s subscription to Ovi Music Unlimited or whatever they’ve decided to call it this week.

What a load of rubbish … downloads on the PC don’t work. No way to diagnose the problem. You need WMP11, which by all accounts is another pile of steaming rubbish – it’s from MSFT, what do you expect?

Syncronizing music is another nightmare. It never works as expected. Sync should mean sync. Not for Nokia, oh no. For Nokia, sync means copy. Every sync adds duplicates (real or ghost ones, I can’t figure it out).

Deleting an album on the PC side wiped the entire library. Luckily it went to the trash folder, so if and when I have time, I can try to restore it.

Stuff you deleted on the phone mysteriously reappears. Connecting it to a Mac by mistake loaded up MP3s from itunes.

This software is so bad, words fail me. The only good thing is that I haven’t bought any music on this “service” and now never will, but I did lose my money on the device. Good bye, Nokia.

Nokia X6: Nokia’s going out of business plan at work.

Nokia Care Centre, CMH Road, Bangalore.

I wrote earlier about Nokia refusing to repair my X6, which failed with a rasterized pixellated screen. They claimed it was physically damaged, while (a) it wasn’t and (b) they could show me no signs of any physical damage.

I asked for a jobsheet to register my complaint and got one. Later I managed to get the phone number of a senior manager in Nokia and got him to have the case revisited. (Emailing the contact link on Nokia.co.in is of no use, as they’ll just quote garbage from their warranty. Apparently Nokia’s customer care centre employs lawyers full time to look for loopholes.)

So I get a call from the care centre that replacement of the screen has been authorized. A day later I get my phone back, but the IMEI does not match that on the jobsheet. So now the care centre guy says that they replaced the entire phone.

Very nice, but what happens to my Ovi Music downloads? Turns out that’s not a problem, as it’s really still my original phone as all the images and videos are mine. The PC recognizes the device as the same phone. Turns out I don’t have to do anything with Ovi Music as it’s still authorized.

What’s going on? I’ll tell you what’s going on:

They had originally swapped my new phone with another one which actually had a bad screen. They don’t expect most customers to check the IMEI number on receipt, and most are probably just too relieved to get the cellphone “repaired or replaced” that they don’t care what happened. The ploy didn’t work with me as I had kept the original bills, jobsheet, and followed up aggressively with Nokia India.

No wonder they’re losing market share.

Nokia X6: shoddy piece of junk, worse service

No wonder Apple’s eating their smartphone lunch.

Got the X6 in May, used it very lightly for a few weeks, and then a couple of days ago, the screen decides to pack up.

Guess what, Nokia Care claims *without even looking at the phone* that the phone has been physically manhandled, and therefore isn’t covered under warranty.

Let me count the number of Nokia phones I’ve used over the years – from the 9300i Communicator, E50, two E71s, and now the X6.

I guess screwing over long term customers is part of their “going out of business” plan.

Never going to buy or recommend Nokia again.

BSNL 3G with an iPad.

After you’ve got your USIM, that’s the same shape and size as a regular SIM card, but appears to have and extra pair of connections, get voice working. Takes a day or so. Then, in a regular 3G handset, send an SMS to get the configuration settings into your regular phone. I used my Nokia E71. The settings which came with the USIM didn’t work.

You’ll get the configuration by sending “Make Model” to 58355. In my case this I sent “Nokia E71″ to 58355. No quotes, of course.

The settings came protected by a PIN for some reason. Apparently this is 1111 for everyone. Why do is one of those BSNL mysteries. My data connection was up and running in seconds.

Finally cut up the USIM to microsim size, using instructions which you can get elsewhere. Pop it into your iPad, copy the APN across and you should be online.

I believe sending the SMS is what turned my connection on. The APN is bsnlnet without any username or password. But this didn’t work earlier despite my asking for data when I signed up.

Just for the record, the BSNL helpline is 1503, which you call from a BSNL line, of course.

Speedtest shows 2.6 Mbps download and 315 Kbps upload.

Macbook Air SMC update weirdness

My Macbook Air’s Software Update insisted on trying to download the SMC 1.2 firmware update everytime since it came out. Running the update utility just caused a strange dialog box to appear: “damaged or incomplete.”

Very annoying. I don’t know what made me run the binary from the terminal (shell) command, but that did the trick. The expected message showed up, machine rebooted, updated the SMC firmware to 1.2 and all is well again in Software Update land.