[Hands0n]

Whooooo! Merry Christmas everyone. What am I doing up so early? In a word ...... "Kids" :D They don't have normal body clocks, yet. Not the younger one, anyway.

So did a 3G Santa bring you or your family any nice shiny handsets or gadgets today? It didn't happen here, we're waiting for the New Year when the Mrs' contract runs out and then its probably going to be one of the new SE jobbies. But quite a few electronic bits n pieces have landed overnight :D

Enjoy your day.

[chagle]

Boy - I've had fun!

I shall reply hopefully tomorrow... but get this... I've got my Nokia 6280 OK, good phone but I've only gone and bought myself a N73 to replace my 6280 on T-Mobile!

Should be here by the end of the week... :-)

So many toys... what's a boy suppose to do.

Glen.

PS - Off out Thursday to find a DVD Recorder (for the Tele type thing) with HDD. Another toy....

PPS - Happy New Year..........

[Ben]

Good luck with the N73! Going off the Mobiletoday tracker it hasn't been selling as heavily as it should have been. Sure, it has been in the top 10 for a good while now, but it's one hell of a Nokia that seems to have been a little neglected. Perhaps if we knew the networks stores figures then things might be a little different. Love mine!

[chagle]

Hi Ben

You got an N73 and an N80 too? :-)

What network are you using yours on?

Glen.

[Ben]

Vodafone. It's the only network that lets me use my phone the way I want to down here, albeit at a cost. I really should update my avatar some time... the N80 is currently living in my drawer at the office! ;)

[chagle]

Well to carry on the conversation. :)

I got a DVD/HDD recorder!! Brilliant for copying off the Sky+ box and sticking onto it's HDD (if you're running low of space) but also excellent for placing on DVD and 'sharing' with people.

Has a brilliant edit function... get rid of all those adverts!

Plus of course getting the SlingBox and N73 with my Christmas dosh..

Anyone else get any goodies?

Glen.

[Hands0n]

I got me one of them iPod FM Radio transmitters so that I can listen to the music collection in the car via the car radio system. Makes a big difference to trying to drive around with headphones on - not something I like to do often if at all. The quality is great. It also allows the kids to drop in their iPod when travelling around with them in the car. Nice.

Using the Christmas money gifts I picked up a pair of Maxtor USB2 HDDs with 320GB capacity from PC World at £69.99, half the price they should be. That was courtesy of an offer via the Daily Mail. I also got me a new USB2 HDD case by CoolerMaster for £29. I normally build my own USB external drives, but the Maxtor 320GBs were too good to miss. The CoolerMaster replaces some cheap toot that I bought at a Computer Fair that all but toasted a HDD when its cooling fan went phut!. No fans in the CoolerMaster, just stonkingly efficient heatsink design, so now't to go wrong in that dept unless the atmosphere loses its thermal conductivity effect :eek:.

Went phone-shop cruising in Bluewater over the Christmas/New Year week - there was stuff-all to interest me. The Mrs' contract comes up around 20/1 so we'll be probably moving her over to Vodafone (Family, STC, Passport) on a £25 contract. She's with O2 and is not getting value for money - espesh as their 3G signal here in North Kent is virtually zero!

I can't beleive we're the only pair who got leccy toys this year :D

[chagle]

Hi HandsOn.

Hey, I was thinking about getting one of those FM tuners for my Zen. The quality of good huh? Handy not having any additional cables/wires. What make is yours? I've seen cheap ones and expensive ones... so a recommendation would be great!

Talking about ext. HDD - I got a Buffalo Linkstation Pro for Christmas. It's blooming good! Any machine able to access it.. I had a Linkstation anyway, but this one is the newer/faster version.

What phone are you thinking about getting the missus then?

Do you still have your 6280 on T-Mobile? -- I must admit, I'm glad I did come back to Nokia.. I loved my Sammy (Samsung) but Nokia have some lovely features. Looking forward to the N73... I have too many toys to play with .. I haven't got time to go back to work next week!!

Bye for now.

Glen.:)

[Hands0n]

Hey Chagle, I see we're all up a bit late today :D

My FM transmitter is a "Fashion Pod" which I think came from Mobilefun.co.uk. I'm not sure they do a fitting for the Zen, but the quality is good providing I pick a frequency that is not in use nearby.

Not sure what to get the Mrs for her new contract - it will almost certainly be on Vodafone, so the choice is quite wide as their selection is good. I'm thinking that a Nokia will be up her street, but she's been on SE for a while with the K600i and so I'm also thinking of one of the latest SE, probably one of the W (Walkman) series.

I'm still on my Nokia 6280 with T-Mobile, and recently upgraded the WNW to the Plus version which allows me to legit use the handset as a 3G modem. Its great, I use it for the Laptop occasionally and the PDA quite often. I'm nowhere near using up the 3GB allowance though, so thats okay.

Looking forward to your impressions of the N73 when you get it. I must admit that it is a damn fine looking handset.

[chagle]

Hi HandsOn,

Yup - Was up still the early hours. Didn't go out.. was on call so couldn't really do much. So saw the new year on.. The London Fireworks were pretty good this year me thinks.

Thanks for the info on the FM thingy - Def got to get one of those!!

HandsOn, with the WnW - I assume in your T-Mobile account, does it give you a running total? I can't quite figure it out? I guess you can get the stats from the phone too?

Glen.

[Hands0n]

Nah, there isn't any kind of running total and even looking at the online bill it is not clear how much data I've used up before the bill (i.e. unbilled units). This is something T-Mobile have got to get their head round before too many folk blow their allowance and get hit with some ridiculous bill.

It is all very well making their FUP allowances, but unless we have some kind of metering or reference point [I believe that] it is entirely unreasonable to start billing folk for going over.

That said, even in T-Mobile's T&Cs there is only mention of them contacting the Customer if they go over, and then only throttling their speed if they persistently go over. Absolutley no mention of additional billing - but I'm too much of a sceptic to assume that they won't bill for going over the allowance. This is a case of me being entirely happy to be wrong :) But I'd hate to drop out of contracted use and into PAYG data rates!

Maintaining the running total on the handset is easy enough, I suppose, but hard to reliably administer and maintain without a disciplined approach. In the PC world there used to be software metering programs you could load up as a TSR. Not sure that the 6280's OS40 can support TSRs so it may be moot even if one existed for that particular OS.

To get at the Data Counters on the Nokia 6280 follow these steps;
Menu, Log, Packet Data Counter. The 6280 reports the data in the following reported quantities:

Data sent in last session
Data rec. in last session
All sent data
All received data
Clear counters (to zero them, you'll need your Security Code)


There is no apparent way of putting a short cut to the Logs or PDC in the GoTo menu, which is a pity.

I'm surprised how little mobile data I actually use in a month! In December (1 to 31) 68MB (10,815,771 sent, 58,587,185 received). But then I don't use the mobile data for "busy" websites, mainly text-based.

[chagle]

Hi HandsOn,

Just been playing with "My T-Mobile" Portal...

Gone into "View Recent calls"
View Mobile Data Uasage
Then 'Download Details of recent mobile data usage'

Opened the downloaded file in Excel, then did a SUM to get the total.. it gives it in KB which is easy enough to convert to MB etc.

That seems to be a good way of doing it? i.e. checking bandwidth?

Glen