#80 Nokia/Garmin

[Simon]

Daves experience comes as no suprise to me, I've never liked Nokia phones, they have an award winning knack of making menu's un-intuitive and I can't beleive that all these years on you still have to reset the date and time if you take the battery out or that the alarm will not work if the phone is switched off.
As for garmin ? Garmin=garbidge, my sister bought a garmin satnav and as far as I'm concerned it's a load of rubbish.

So put nokia and garmin together and what do you expect ?

[armandas]

I can't beleive that all these years on you still have to reset the date and time if you take the battery out or that the alarm will not work if the phone is switched off.

I used Nokia E71 for about a year, and it didn't have these problems, IIRC. Actually it was a *great* phone. It seems that this time Dave ranted just to rant. In the end, the battery problem turned out to be Garmin's fault, and as far as stability is concerned, I didn't notice any crashes or anything (never used Nokia PC soft though). I was quite satisfied with how the phone worked with my Ubuntu laptop. I could use the phone as a modem to connect to internet!

I now have HTC Hero, and have to charge the phone every day or two. But that's the price I have to pay for a nice and big touchscreen (I mostly use my phone for browsing the web).

[TheDirty]

I always liked Nokia.

Only thing I learned from this blog is that Dave is a Pastafarian.

[Zad]

I really hope Garmin's domestic software branch is separate to their commercial and aviation people, because they don't seem to have great quality controls. I suppose the thing to remember about big-market products like this, is that they are not engineer led, but driven by managers and marketing people whose priority is to get the product up and running and on sale.

How is the Ovi Maps GPS for battery use? I am thinking of getting a 5230 or 5800 to replace my ultra-thin and ultra-useless Samsung X820. I like to keep my phone in a charging dock to make sure it is fully charged, and so I can see the screen. What idiot at Samsung decided that the display should be on all the time when it is being charged!

[EEVblog]

I used Nokia E71 for about a year, and it didn't have these problems, IIRC. Actually it was a *great* phone. It seems that this time Dave ranted just to rant. In the end, the battery problem turned out to be Garmin's fault, and as far as stability is concerned, I didn't notice any crashes or anything (never used Nokia PC soft though).

Ah, no actually. Countless users on forums have been complaining about crap battery life from day one, and they didn't use the Garmin software. The Garmin software was a particularly brutal combo though. Before I installed the Garmin software I got crap battery life too just like all the other puzzled users. It looks like that with only the most recent firmware and Garmin gone has it finally started to work as advertised.

Dave.

[Ferroto]

The guys who wrote that were probably software developers for PC hardware. Where you get 1-2gb of ram, a quad core processor, and a mains outlet to work with.

[Kiriakos-GR]

Another enjoyable video to watch , mostly because Dave express his feelings with such a passion.

When the average Joe, gets in to such problems, he usually keeps his mouth shut , because he does NOT like his friends to know that he just had it ( step on the banana ) , by getting the latest gizmo super phone ...

My likes on phones , are also the battery life ( a week at list ), phone list for 1000 records, and a fast 3G modem (Internet + email ) .

For GPS , I found what I was looking on the PDA devices with WM5.
That offers you the freedom , to add and remove  what ever software you like.

The only true issue with all those small to medium screens , are the visibility and fonts size ,
when you past your 40s ,  the smallest decrease in the health of your eyes , will force you to stop using this mini and tiny devices as mobile phones , for data logging or as GPS devices.

Only the screen of my PDA rx5915 , looks that I can tolerate for the moment as screen-fonts ratio.      
    
  

[xani]

Well smartphones have crap battery life in general, look at at any Android based phone like  Droid, Nexus One, or iPhone 2 days, maybe 3, amd builtin GPS just eats it like crazy when turned on

[saturation]

I don't own this Nokia phone but I have a Centro from Palm.  I found the rated hours of standby mode in mA versus the battery mAH didn't live up to the expectations and I had a problem similar to Dave.

There were also folks who complained the standby on the phone would not last one day, for some reason.  I did not experience the very short battery life until 5 months after owning the phone.

I located a mAH consumption program for the Centro and found that some applications, when engaged and 'sleeping' caused the Palm to draw mA of current in sleep, when it normally drew uA.  The mAH program allowed me to locate and disable these programs.  I also found that the basic phone program in Palm would at times not completely turn off, requiring me to hard reset the phone by pulling the battery.  This was the worst, because its undocumented, not consistent, is denied by Palm tech support as an issue and was not a 3rd party application but the one shipped by the maker to make the phone work!

Today, I get over 7 days of standby, and simply recharge the phone routinely on a Sunday so I just don't forget.

http://forums.palm.com/t5/Palm-OS-WinMo-Hardware/Centro-Battery-Life/m-p/255262/highlight/true#M49102

[EEVblog]

For those interested, I eventually got 2 solid weeks standby on the E71!
And that's with a 2 year old battery.

Now, if they could just fix the shit PC software that takes over your PC, and make the features more responsive it might be a decent phone.

Dave.