On saturday 20th of March I decided to check out the buzz at the MediaMarkt since they were having an offer “Buy 4 products, pay for 3″. Where the cheapest of the 4 products would be free. The interesting part abouth this offer was that you could team up with other people to get maximum discount, which would be 25% if everyone had something with the same price.

Anyway, I went and looked around at the laptops when this little baby caught my eyes. I was kind of looking for a new laptop which I can use for lightroom and would be much more portable for vacations and stuff. My good old trused Asus M6Ne is roughly 6 year old and had trouble with lightroom where cpu usage shot up to 100% and stayed there when I was post processing raw images.

Like I said, I was looking around at the 13 inch laptops and I already had this model in mind and the Asus U30 (new ones with the new i3, i5 or i7 cores from intel). But since they only had the older versions I started checkin out the HP DV3-2350ed. I liked the specs: i5 Core, integrated graphics AND dedicated graphics ATI 4550, 13 inch, 500GB harddisk etc etc etc … but the price wasn’t that nice € 999,- but since MediaMarkt was having that  offer I decided to see if I could get it with a nice discount. It had to be cheaper than € 780,- since that was the cheapest I could get it for online. I was lucky and together with 3 other people we managed to get a discount of 22,3% making it cheaper then the cheapest online price I could find at that time. So I ended up with a new laptop and I’ve been using it ever since. Battery life is great and I can work on it roughly 3 to 4 hours on one charge.

I do need to still get used to some of the things that are different in Windows 7 compared to Windows XP and since the HP DV3-2350ed comes with Windows 7 Home Premium. Ever since I tried the Windows 7 Beta on my Asus laptop (read here) I’ve been very impressed with it and have been waiting untill laptops started shipping with Windows 7 and meeting the demands I had for them. Because HELL NO I was NOT going to get a laptop with Windows Vista. Granted Vista seems to be good after SP2 came out but I didn’t want the hassle. I know since my gf Ana has a laptop with Vista and she has had a lot of issues with Vista. In short, I am happy with my new portable laptop and hopefully it will keep me company as long as my good old truted Asus M6Ne did because 6 years is a LOOOOONG time in the world of computers. The only thing I need to do is find a nice ghost image program for Windows 7 so I can make a nice image which I can restore shoud I ever want a fresh install. Or I need to check what kind of features Windows 7 Home Premium has concerning back ups. Yep, there’s still a lot to explore in Windows 7 for me. Time to start Windows nerding again …

After using my E71 for a little over a year and being very happy with it the gadgetgeek in me couldn’t resist and bought the E72. It’s an improvement in several area’s which made it worth my money to get it. No I didn’t buy the phone seperate, I renewed my contract for another year at T-Mobile and got a dicscount on the E72. Here’s a few pics of how the E72 looks like and in which colors you can get it.

As you can see the E72 isn’t that much different looking compared to its predecessor, the E71. Though ithad gotten a few nice upgrades in certain areas and works and handles a lot nicer than the E71. Main differences:

E71 vs. E72
3,2MP vs. 5MP
S60 3rd edition FP1 vs. S60 3rd edition FP2
normal d-pad vs. optical d-pad
2,5mm jack vs. 3,5mm jack
369MHz CPU vs. 600MHz CPU

E72 specific:
flash light, usb charging and come more things I can’t be bothered to mention

Anyway, since I’ve been using de E72 for a week my old E71 became my business phone. I swapped the simcard from my business phone (HTC Touch Pro T-mobile branded) asap into my E71. I can to everything with the E71 except for proper navigation. That’s what my Touch Pro had become to me for now haha. An PND (Personal Navigation Device) with Windows Mobile Battery life of the E72 has been amazing, but then again I can’t really say anything usefull since I’ve only had it for a week but it lasted 5 days on initial charge and I was playing around with it quite a lot and also using itas my mp3 player. So it this is what I can expect from battery life I will really like the E72. Because my E71 battery has been getting less throughout the year, only lasting me 2 or 3 days max with an average of 3 hours mp3 listening and some texting, calling per day.

There are a few changes that I have to get used to on my E72, the optical trackpad works surprisingly well but it’s still something I need to get used to and most of all, the menu’s have been rearranged. So I have to find my way again on the E72. Mail for Exchange works for synching my work e-mail but the only thing that’s not working properly is that it only gets a part of the e-mail and won’t download the full message. The same thing happens with the E71 but when you read the e-mail it will automatically download the remainder of the e-mail. Whereas the E72 won’t and doesn’t seem to have that option. Which kind of sucks. Hopefully Nokia will fix this problem in the next firmware. Or it might be an issues with how Mail for Exchange interacts with Zarafa (which we use instead of Microsoft Exhange).

Don’t know how long I’ll be using this phone but I know I’ll be happy with it for the coming year. Knowing myself I might buy an eventually follow up for the E72 when it’s going to be announced and released but I am guessing that will take another year or two. The E71 has been on the market for about 2 year by now so if the release schedule of the E72 can be used as an indication it will be end 2011 or early 2012 before an E73 is on the market. In the meantime I’ll be content and happy with my E72.

Well well well, on Wednesday the 7th of January Microsoft released Windows 7 beta for the public to test run and see how it works. Me being the geek that I am I couldn’t resist and download it to try out on my laptop (a 4 year old Asus M6Ne) which I did last week Sunday. I have never tried Vista because I heard so many negative things about it so I was kind of sceptic about Windows 7, eventhough people were pretty positive about it.

Vista has been plagued with the legacy of a negative reputation, this is because Microsoft changed the driver model and quite a few things at once. Most heard issues with Vista is the memory usage, resource hog, drivers that don’t work which means hardware not working, UAC popping up everytime etc etc etc etc. I am glad to say that Windows 7 is running quite smoothly and that almost all my hardware was recognized imediately. The only two things that I can’t seem to get working at the moment are the Intel Wireless 2200gb card and my pci modem. Other than that Windows 7 runs pretty smoothly. I really need to get my wireless card working and find a way to see if and how the CPU throttling is. Because I have the feeling that my CPU is running full clock speed, but that could be a figment of my imagination.

As a Windows XP user I really have to get used to how Windows 7 works, specially the control panel, administrative tools etc. But it is getting there, I am very pleased with the beta. Resource wise it takes about 400 – 450MB of RAM and it only runs about 40 processes and responds pretty snappy. But …. it’s a beta so not everything works properly (read not all software works). So I can’t fully use it like I would want to. But at least I can fiddle with it and get used to how it works. Yes I know, I am a geek, so sue me. Anyway here are a few screenshots of Windows 7 on my laptop. If you want to testrun Windows 7 beta this is the place to go: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

UPDATE:
I managed to get the Intel 2200bg wireless card working by downloading the 12.2.2.0_Gen_SW drivers and manually updating the driver in Windows 7 beta. You need to use the Windows XP drivers, the Vista drivers DO NOT work!!! That is why I couldn’t get my wireless working before. Only thing to do is to find the modem drivers and I am set to go. Now I can really start using Win7 beta as a replacement for XP to see how it works. That means installing software today. O_o Oh well, a geeks work is never done.

UPDATE 2:
Damn, the CPU isn’t throttling dynamically. It keeps running at max clockspeed (in my case 1,7GHz, Dothan Pentium-M). This is quite disappointing to be honest. I was hoping Win7 would be able to use speedstep to dynamically alternate the CPU clockspeed to conserve power and so that my fan won’t be on most of the time. But then again, I was kind of expecting speedstep not to work since the fan keeps blowing most of the time when working in Win7. Time to google for an solution, which hopefully can be found. Oh and before people start thinking about changing the power settings in Win7. I already did switch to Power Saver mode and fiddled around in those settings. But alas to no avail. So if someone knows something or has a solution please post here. Other than that, Win7 seems to be working properly.

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Yeah people I got a new phone to play around with and use. That’s what you get for loving gadgets. Anyway, I was eyeing this phone and is slide couterpart (Nokia E66) when I was still in China but for some odd strange reason I wasn’t able to get it in Beijing, they were selling it in Hong Kong though but I didn’t go there during my one year stay in China. Oh well, it would have been nice to have Chinese characters on it like I have on my Nokia 6300. I did a firmware upgrade in BJ for that. There probable will be a way to get Chinese on it but that means hacking and tweaking my E71 which would mean losing my warrenty. So that is not gonna happen anytime soon, unless I go to China anytime soon and get an official upgrade in a Nokia store there. Here a picture of the Nokia E71 for the people that are wondering how it looks like. For the specs, just go to the Nokia website and search for it, if you want a phone with the same spec but without the qwerty keypad, look up the Nokia E66. Same phone but in a slide version.

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Anyway, I love this phone. Qwerty in a small package, metal casing, all the funtionality I want and might need. Man the only thing that might be an upgrade is something like the SonyEricsson X1 aka Xperia but then with symbian instead of WM (Windows Mobile). For the people that remember, I also have a HTC Tytn which I still use but less frequently. I liked the HTC Tytn basically because it gave me a touchscreen and qwerty keypad. I needed a PDA with phone capabilities, but I dislike WM because it’s not really made with the thought of it being used as a phone. As a PDA it works very well, I used to browse, mail, use word and navigate (Tomtom) with it but as a phone it’s not as intuitive imho. The UI (User Interface) is something that can be drastically improved, look at the various software that has been made to make WM more usable as a phone. Two examples of these are HTC Touchflow & SBP Mobile Shell. Specially all the software from SPB made WM that much better in terms of usability. Microsoft GET you act together and start thinking of USABILITY!!! And not just on frigging eye candy!!! Hope this will get better with WM7 but I’m highly doubting it, but who knows. Microsoft might surprise me, which I really hope they do at the end of next year when WM7 should be released.

WM is kind of a mixed bag in imho and has it pros and definately it’s cons, just like Symbian for that matter I think. But anyway both have their merits and I will probably won’t be using my HTC Tytn anymore but as a back up should something happen to my E71 (which I doubt, but you never know).

After fiddling around and customizing my E71 I must say that I am really impressed with what Nokia pulled off with the follow up of the E60 & E61i (the previous candybar qwerty business smartphones from Nokia). The only thing I need to do and find is proper navigation software, because Tomtom stopped releasing their sofware after version 6 for symbian and to get that working with the internal GPS will involve quite some tweaking and fiddling around. Which I’m not gonna do, also because the maps for version 6 are probably outdated which would mean I might end up in the middle of nowhere. Guess I will have to take a look at Rout66, Navigon and all the other players on the market that sell their software for the E71.

Let’s see how long it will take before I get myself a new phone. But untill that time, I’m gonna enjoy using this phone.