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In the last few days I’ve taken a lot of photos with my new LG KC910 “Renoir”, and I’m quite taken with the camera.
Here’s a slideshow of photos taken with the phone – this will update automatically via Flickr:
I’ll do some more movie recording soon, and post samples here.
Adjust your sets, the look of my blog has changed!
I’m using the wonderfully clean and simple P2 theme by Joseph Scott, Matt Thomas, Noel Jackson, and Automattic. I’ll probably get around to customise it a bit, so ’scuse the scaffolding for a while 
Recently, my contract with 3 UK came up for renewal. Since I’m a frequent Skype user, I decided to stay with them and sign up for another 18 months. Despite loving my Nokia E71, a number of phones were offered to me free with my new contract. I plumped for the LG KC910 “Renoir” purely for its abilities as a camera – if I’m heading somewhere for the weekend, I can just take one device with me if I feel like it.
I’ve had it for a couple of weeks now, and, generally, I’m getting along with it.
The camera is just superb. The 8 megapixel camera is as good as any point and shoot, and the movie recording feature works wonderfully – my favourite setting being 640×384 widescreen – the video is crisp and colours well-defined. I’m very happy with the imaging functions, and that’s remarkable given how picky I am.
The video quality isn’t bad in low light either. Here’s a video taken at dusk, overlooking a river, with some bats playing over the surface of the water:
Bats on the River Avon from Tom Goskar on Vimeo.
The rest of the phone, well, after the E71, isn’t much to write home about. The interface is a bit clunky, the browser is passable, and the Java implementation is rubbish. But, it does the job – I can make and receive calls, and stab at the screen to send texts. I would *hate* to use it for Skype chat – the interface is just hideous – but making and receiving Skype calls works well.
I’m having trouble setting up my email too, which is annoying. It receives email fine, but sending an email with a photo attachment simply doesn’t work. This is doubly annoying, as it means that I can’t send photos to Posterous, Twitpic, Flickr, etc via email. I hope that I’ll work out how to fix it, or I’ll have to contact LG to see if they can help.
Still, the camera came with an 8GB MicroSD card which is easily accessible via a flap on the side of the phone, so it’s easy to take it out, pop into an adaptor and transfer to my Mac. I managed to upload a photo to Flickr via the web browser, but it’s a fiddly process.
So what about build quality? It’s quite a chunky phone, made entirely from plastic, which is a stark contrast from the metal solidity of the E71. But it doesn’t creak or bend, and is nonetheless sturdy feeling for a plastic phone. The touchscreen is plastic, so prone to scratches, and is resistive rather than capacitive, so you need to press firmly (but not too hard) to register a ‘click’. You can of course see the touchscreen yield under your finger in the right light.
All round, it’s not bad. If I’m using my E71, I miss the KC910’s camera – but if I’m using the KC910, I miss the elegance of the E71, and it’s great physical keyboard. Any on-screen keyboard is a pile of rubbish compared to the iPhone’s implementation, in my humble opinion, this LG’s included.
Expect more opinions as I play more with the Renoir (especially if I fix the sending email attachments problem).
I bought my E71 last year from 3 UK (as a PAYG handset) to replace the first-generation 3Skypephone that I had grown to hate with a passion.
The E71 has been such a wonderful improvement over the Skypephone in just about every way possible. But it hasn’t been without its faults. The camera shutter can randomly take upwards of 5 seconds to take a photo, some photos have a horrible purple hue to them, and I have been unable to get online outside of a 3G area.
As regular readers know, I’ve been very forgiving with the E71’s camera, even taking some of its faults to my advantage. But on hearing about new firmware releases for the E71 that fixes the issue, I was, to be honest hoping that 3UK would do the right thing and update their branded firmware soon afterwards. No such luck.
But still, I wanted those fixes and improvements, and despite waiting for many months, 3 haven’t given them to us. Thankfully, I’m not alone, and “Gerrymoth“, all-round Nokia fan and also on the 3 network, wrote a guide to debranding a 3UK Nokia E71 to a generic “EURO1″ phone.
In a nutshell, all Nokia phones have a product code stored inside them. When you connect your phone to the Nokia Updater, it compares the code in your phone against a list of available updates. If 3UK haven’t provided Nokia with a customised version of the latest firmware, then Nokia Updater tells you that there are no updates available for your model.
You can use freely available software, as described in his guide, to change the code in your phone from a code that identifies it as being tied to a specific operator (like 3) to a code that identifies your handset as being a generic, unlocked phone, in need of a firmware update.
I am now the owner of a generic, unbranded Nokia E71 with the latest firmware update, and much happier I am too! The camera is improved, I can get online in a 2G area, and it would appear that the already excellent battery life is slightly better too.
Time well spent.
[Update] De-branding does not affect using 3’s Skype client, so you can still use your free allocation of Skype messages and minutes on a generic E71 without any problems. I have also been told that this also doesn’t affect video calling. To download the “Skype for 3″ client (only if you’re on 3) go to http://mobile.three.co.uk/sdf/skypeupdate
I've just signed up to Posterous to give it a whirl, and I'm hoping that this text will also end up on my blog. Fingers crossed.
I’ve long been concerned about the proliferation of “short URLs”, whose use has gathered great momentum, especially in the light of microblogging services like Twitter.
Short URLs, such as those generated by TinyURL are convenient, especially when you only have 140 characters to get your message across. You can turn a huge URL, many hundreds of characters long, into just 25 characters or even less. Great!
Besides TinyURL, a proliferation of URL shortening services are available. Some that come to mind are bit.ly, tr.im, ow.ly, is.gd, to name but a few. And short URLs themselves are gaining use outside of microblogging services. You will see them in blog posts, emails (to get around the line-wrap-broken-link problem) and even on the printed page (see British Archaeology magazine).
But what happens if a short URL service were to disappear? The company or individual that runs it pulls the plug, and suddenly the web is littered with thousands or even millions of dead links. That would be bad. And it will happen.
I see the state of short URLs as a delicate balance. On one side, we have the originating (possibly long) URL. On the opposite side, we have the short URL. Hopefully, the original URL will work for many years. When I migrated the Wessex Archaeology website to a new CMS last year, I didn’t break any links. Some of those links have worked for more than 7 years, and I hope that they will still work in another 7. WA can make sure that they stay the same (and they will). But what happens to any shortened links that point to those pages? We can’t guarantee that same amount of longevity.
What happens to the TinyURL links in the printed magazine British Archaeology if TinyURL goes bust? They’ll break. But BA is available in many libraries and people do look at back issues. It would be nice if they could see the web pages mentioned in the articles, but there’s no guarantee that they will work because there are two parts of the equation that could go wrong. One, is that TinyURL disappears, the second is that the originating page is deleted or changes its URL without redirecting.
For short URLs that I create I would like my own control over at least part of that equation.
I’ve often heard the argument that the use of short URL services are only meant to be temporary, for links that are “here and now”. But how often have you come across something old, but still relevant, when doing a web search? For me, that’s a fairly frequent occurrence. Who’s to say what is quick and temporary today, isn’t actually really quite relevant and useful in the future?
By running my own URL shortening service, I won’t change what is being used elsewhere, but at least people looking at my Twitter stream, or wherever those tweets are syndicated to (this blog, for example), have a better chance of seeing what I’m linking to in a few years time. Especially if I plan to run my personal URL shortening system for as long as I’m alive and capable.
I suppose that one of the driving forces behind this is my training as an archaeologist (we don’t link throwing things away, generally, and that includes data). I can’t archive the pages I link to, but at least I can give folks in the future a better chance of finding what I’m linking to.
I have a nice short URL thanks to the .eu top level domain, so I will experiment with some different systems to see which works out – the simpler and easier to maintain the better. It’s got to last a long time…
[Edit] When I say “creating my own URL shortening service” I should clarify that I’m not programming one from scratch, but taking an existing GPL/Open Source URL shortener and modifying it for my needs (if it needs modifying)! I will probably have a public and private version, with varying functionality. Some good ideas are already flowing in through Twitter about identifying canonical URLs, which is great
That makes much more sense. I had always thought of URL shortening services as providers of transient convenience, i.e. to get across a long URL to someone quickly and easily (and online). However, the point you make about the possibility of dead URLs in the future, especially as print media such as British Archaeology and several newspapers are using them, makes a good point. I must say at this point it irritates me intensely when print media use shortened URLs as there is much to be gleaned from a URL and you have no clue when it is http://tinyurl.com/88dfgh – it also challenges the principles of referencing, but that’s a another topic.
Now, it might be argued that the short URL in print is no different to one online, i.e. it’s only meant to be for the ‘there and then’ conveyance of a reference or direction towards a website, and that if the original page is gone, what does it matter anyway? A few cursory searches using the search engine SuperMuseum of 2024 might find someone reading a 2003 article what the original author was referencing in any case.
Longevity has never sat well with web endeavours, always the point of attrition, but it is this resistance between speed and versatility of access vs. sustainability that makes the good web what it is, and will continue to be.
As this is meant to be your contribution to future-proofing this aspect of web communication, as long as you live and the web continues to work roughly in the same way as it does now, do you think the case you make above is enough to change people’s (esp Editors’) dilettante habits when it comes to their choice of service?
Are URLs getting that long? Or is it because it’s just tough to shoehorn a regular URL into a service like Twitter? Looks like the medium is affecting the data, instead of the other way around.
For most URLs, I’m sure that people take comfort in looking at the domain of where it’s coming from. If somebody says “Check out this YouTube video” and they link something from TinyURL.com then you aren’t able to see that it is taking you to YouTube.com and not another website. With the recent surge of URL shortening services, there have been a lot “passthrough” advertising methods. They’ll basically piggy-back the URL you want through another service that, say, changes all the advertising on that YouTube page to make themselves money. Or, it could simply be a spam-site that just makes money from you having visited.
A worst case scenario is that a service like TinyURL gets hacked, or a backdoor is found, which enables a malicious party to redirect URLs to specific spam sites. This is a very large security concern. Being able to see where a URL takes you (what domain) is important.
In the case of British Archaeology, they should know better than to use a third-party site to host their links. Who’s to say that they will be around in one year? How about 5? They are not thinking about information preservation.
Since you’re interested in using your own service Tom, if you have Google Apps on your domain, you can use Google’s Short Links product: http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=5143210+6352879591152674960
An alternate way to deal with these link issues is to create a link index somewhere online which you can publish your links. You can then tag links that you used on Twitter or Facebook or somewhere else by date, and have people find the real URL.
Sorry for being so long winded.
Hi Tom. Only just found your personal blog, amazingly, and I was interested to read this. I tweeted the other day to ask if anyone knew of a URL shortening service that could pass through parameters and, having had no replies, thought I’d write my own but I hadn’t got around to seeing if there was any nickable code out there. Good to know there is (and thanks to Tiago too for the tip). What codebase are you using, then?
In case people wonder, by the way, the point of passing parameters through is that one reason for using an URL shortener is for passing URLs to services like Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper and GMaps, which sometimes choke on complicated URLs (or nested calls to different apps). Being able to squish most of a URL down and tag on a couple of variables at the end could solve this. I realise the audience may be limited though.
A quick post to mention that a few native Symbian S60 Twitter clients are under development. I haven’t installed or tried any of these, but when I have the time, I’ll post my feedback here.
Gravity will be a commercial product, developed by mobileways, who already offer native S60 Twitter functionality within their WirelessIRC software. From some of the early reviews of the beta, Gravity looks like it will offer a fairly complete Twitter solution, comparable to many desktop clients.
[Update] Gravity has now been released,costs $10 (about £7), and a demo version is available to download. I played with the demo for about half an hour and knew right away that this is the best Twitter client out there for Symbian devices. So I bought it. I’ll probably do a full review of it soon, after I’ve been using it for a few days. In the meantime, if you’re a serious Twitter user, and have a S60 device (like a Nokia E71, N95, N96 etc) definitely give the demo a whirl on your device.
I Am Doing is developed by Marcelo Barros, of WordMobi fame (Symbian S60 WordPress app), and is written in Python. It looks promising, and he’s very active with its development.
TwitS60 is an open source project, which claims to be under active development. There’s nothing to download at the time of writing, so one to bookmark and check every now and then to see if it will be any good.
If readers know of any other non-Java Twitter clients for S60, feel free to let me know via a comment on this post.
i am using twibble (found this post throughit) it is ok.. Free but not as good as gravity
Gravity is definitely the best Twitter client on S60 – and it keeps getting better – the developer is very active, and from my own direct experience, listens to his customers. Absolutely worth the money if you’re a heavy Twitter user. Twibble is OK for casual users though.
JUst got to the end of my gravity trial, so searching out a few alternatives before I go ahead and purchase, although frankly I was very impressed with Gravity.
Tried a few java clients back before I used Gravity, and found them slow and cumbersome.
In terms of S60 clients there’s also Twittix: http://www.mojosmobile.com/studios/twittix.html However my brief usage of it finds it more cumbersome than Gravity, and nowhere near as pretty. A major point against it is that it freezes up while checking tweets, and as far as I can see doesn’t yet have some of the more fancy autoconnect/autoswitch features of Gravity.
It is a couple of quid cheaper than Gravity, but for the sake of a (cheap) pint of beer I think the extra polish currently availible in Gravity is worth it.
Hi James,
Thanks for your comment, and welcome!
I’ve come across Twittix but haven’t had time to try it – thanks for bringing it up!
From your experience with Twittix, I agree that it’s certainly worth the few extra pounds. Gravity is just such a pleasure to use, it’s reliable, and the developer is very active, while listening to his customers…
A short tour of the British Museum made shorter from Tom Goskar on Vimeo.
I took a little wander around the British Museum’s Great Court and some upper galleries, and filmed as I went on my cameraphone. The original video was 11 minutes long, sped up here by 800%, so I suppose it’s a 24mph walk about the BM…
The music is appropriately by A Single Voice, the musical guise of archaeologist and author David J Knight.
Today, 5th March, is St Piran’s Day. Lowen Dydh sen Pyran!
A quick update: while I initially liked the default Linux installation on my eeePC (Xandros) I rather quickly began to dislike it when trying to install OpenOffice. It also felt… clunky. So, I did a bit of reading about some of the eeePC blogs out there and came across eeebuntu.
To cut a long story short, I installed eeebuntu (after much cursing and Googling) onto a 1GB USB stick to give it a test run. To my amazement, on first boot, eeebuntu looked amazing. I played with it for a few hours and decided to take the plunge and overwrite Xandros. And I haven’t looked back.
If you have any variety of eeePC, it’s certainly worth a look.
More soon.
Hi,
Announcing the Full releases of eeebuntu 3.0!
Just to inform you that Eeebuntu 3.0 Standard and NBR editions are now available for download. Links are provided on our webpage!
For further information please feel free to email me : guitaraholic@eeebuntu.org
Or speak to me on the forums http://forums.eeebuntu.org
Thanks for your continued support of our project
Paul McDonough aka Guitaraholic
Eeebuntu Development Team
Kim 6:11 pm on 14 May, 2009 Permalink
To what firmware version did you update to improve the camera on your E71?
Tom 7:39 pm on 14 May, 2009 Permalink
200.21.118
deathwisher 2:09 pm on 30 May, 2009 Permalink
hey, i also just upgraded to v210 on the 3uk e71… but do you know what happens to the 3uk e71 warranty??? what are your thoughts , if something goes wrong on the e71?