I’ve had the Lumia for about a month and although my “new phone experience” was pretty much wrecked by Orange being unable to activate my new sim for 3 days I’m glad to say the phone itself has managed to redeem the situation and  impress me passed what I had expected.

The Lumia is a good looking phone even when in the rubber case that comes in the box, which is great since one of my biggest gripes with the iPhone is yeah it’s pretty and everything, but I’ve not seen a case that doesn’t make it look utterly rubbish. the phone also feels good in the hand and quite natural in my pocket. The screen is bright and crisp in dark and light conditions although I find myself forever rubbing it against my sleeve to get fingermarks off it, which is probably more due to my OCD than a functional issue as finger marks don’t obscure the screen at all. I guess the finger marks lead to my first worry about the phone; although, touch wood, there are no scratches or sign of wear on the gorilla glass screen I would like to add a screen protector, unfortunately due to the curved glass the screen protectors on the market don’t seem to offer full screen coverage, which would not only look rubbish but also be inadequate to protect the screen from damage.

One Massive thumbs up for the Nokia hardware is the use of standard micro-USB charging / sync port meaning I didn’t have to run out and buy spare cables in order to charge at work / car as my car hands free kit uses the same charger as does the Archos 101, my current tablet PC.

Bluetooth support, an issue I often hear people complaining about, has not been a problem for me, as it not only copied my contacts from my iPhone without any dramas it synched without problems to my Nexxus Drivesleek Pro Bluetooth Visor Car Kit, my in ear hands free kit and also my cheap Bluetooth stereo headphones. The bluetooth stuff is also much more useful than my iPhone ever was as the voice dialing support is good and the voice texting is great, don’t get me wrong it’s not perfect and struggles much more on the shorter messages than the long (I guess the text to speech works better with context) but I’m much more comfortable with sending a quick text than calling someone, so the ability to do that while driving with 3 simple voice commands, “text xx” “I’ll be home in half hour” “send” is great.

The Windows Phone 7.5 (WP7) operating system is great, the tile system is a breath of fresh air from the sea of icons that I had on the iPhone, not only is it pretty as hell, the live tiles makes them a bit more interesting and useful but not in an ugly way like the android widgets. A quick swipe from the main tile screen is the all apps screen which although being a long list is not hard to navigate and the alphabetical nature of it fits nicely with my logical mind, once you have enough apps to warrant it it’ll let you click a letter to jump straight to that section.

The social integration of the phone is pretty good, if you want to update all of your social networks at once it’s all there for you, also checking the accounts is also right there too, you can also check all your social network time lines in one place too, if you’re in a stalkerish mood you can even check all the time lines of one of your contacts too. the combined messaging app is ok, but to be honest whilst it has the ability to have the battery sapping msn and Facebook messenger I think it lacks the ability to use the deeper Facebook message system meaning to complete your Facebook mobile experience you still need to have the app or visit the mobile site.

The contacts are very neatly sortable by linking to many accounts and picking one to filter by. Basically I have my Windows Live, Google, Facebook and Twitter accounts set up on the phone, the phone automatically links the contacts together across the accounts (so you can see everything combined about a person) , I then filter my contact list to show only the ones on my Google Account, which only contains my important contacts so these are the only ones shown when I click my contacts, but, when you click search it searches all the accounts so you still have everyone to hand if you need to find someone you wouldn’t normally call or if you have people you would rather not talk to you can keep their number in your hidden contacts so you’re not caught off guard if they call you out of the blue.

I think the biggest surprise of the phone is that Bing actually has a great set of mobile tools, music recognition, visual recognition of QR codes, barcodes,  and much more, and the local scout which simply tells you what there is about your location.

The only thing that lets the Lumia down at the moment is some of the apps I used on the iphone, mainly Paypal and 1&1 server monitoring aren’t yet available, although I’m assured by Paypal theirs is in development, and as more people get WP7 phones (and I recommend you consider it) that’s sure to change.

The upgrade took much longer than expected as the girl who served me, spotted my geekyness and offered me a new “not yet on the system” plan, the panther connected 31, which needed to be manually written out instead of the normal, click, click, print, sign, process Orange normally have.

The panther connected 31 plan is essentially the panther 26 plan but also includes a 3G dongle and an extra 750mb of data to share between the phone and the dongle. Although I doubt the dongle will get much use the extra piece of mind 750mb of data is worth a fiver extra per month.

Having not had a chance to play with the Lumia in much detail before I was approaching WP7 as a noob, but was happy to find my way round it quickly, most things are where you would expect them, although the use of the horizontal space is a little weird to get used to as I’m used to the vertical only iPhone.

After my initial play, I left the phone on charge and waited for the “your new sim is now active” text messages, which, although from experience normally takes a couple of hours max, didn’t come before 5.30 I was ready to leave work for the day.

Unfortunately after leaving my car radio playing all day I had a flat battery so tried to call the AA from my pre-upgrade iPhone, which I had found been disconnected, My new Lumia still showing “invalid sim”. I borrowed someone else’s phone to call the AA and while waiting called Orange from the iPhone (dialing any number on that handset put me through to upgrades). The guy from the Orange Indian call centre was not overly helpful and after the usual take the sim card out and turn it off and on again procedures he told me “in half hour it’ll be all good” playing the things take time and it can take 24 hours card.

9am this morning, a long half an hour later by anyone’s standard, I gave Orange India a call again, after the normal off and on again, and checking the sim card number, the guy told me the sim transfer was complete and it looked like my sim card was faulty and said he would transfer the call to another department and then hung up.. I called back and the woman insisted rather than transfer me to the department the other guy was going to, I had to go through the off and on again, and checking the sim card number again, then offered to send me a new sim via royal mail, I told her having a working phone on Tuesday would not be acceptable and asked if the Orange store could do anything today, she said I could get a new sim from the Orange shop and they would be able to transfer the account onto that and it’ll then take a couple of hours and be done today, of course I would have to pay for the sim, but that’s ok as she would credit my account with £5 which should cover it, not wanting to be without the phone for another 4 days I said I would go into the shop.

Although I hate the town on Saturdays, I went to the Orange shop where I explained the situation to one of the guys who said they couldn’t give or sell me a new contract sim as I was advised and said he would check to make sure they have activated the sim and got on the phone to the upgrade people, he then handed the phone to me and went off to serve another customer. So I was in the Orange shop on the phone to India again, and continuing the trend, I got a new story, this time the guy said the transfer while appearing to be completed has not worked and he was escalating it to the level 2 support team, I don’t need a new sim and I should be back on in 3 hours, but it can take 24 hours, but he was sure I would have a working phone in 3 hours. The guy also said he would give me a weeks free line rental, I explained that I would rather have a working phone. I left the shop, drove home and tried to forget about it. 5 or so hours later, still no change with the phone, so I called for an update, which came in the form of “level 2 haven’t got back to us yet”.

Now over 12 hours later, nothing…

So much for the “new phone experience” I’ve been looking forward to.

When backing up the database at work, I transfer the database from our ubuntu fileserver to the Dropbox on my windows 7 pc, which is a pretty painless process but the cloud version was only as current as my last backup and I often need the most recent copy at home with me…

I finally got time to look at this situation and went about installing Dropbox as a service on our ubuntu box, so I could copy files locally on the ubuntu box, installation itself is a pretty simple process.

I then spent several hours trying to move the Dropbox folder from it’s default location to a more suitable location to no avail.

At this point symbolic links became the answer to not only my inability to move the Dropbox folder in a headless unixx server but also to the other major annoyance Dropbox has, like USB Pens, duplicate files on my development PC (I’m a bit anal, and have different hard disks and partitions for each area of my work.

Symbolic links are basically links to other files or folders that the system treats as the source files or folders, so for example, I have website “A” in folder X/Y/Z so in my dropbox I have a folder called websites and then a symbolic link to folder “Z”, this means if I chance files in X/Y/Z these files are automatically sent to the cloud by Dropbox.

Benefits of Dropbox + Symlinks

• Backups & Currency: Files are automatically backed up to the cloud on change.
• Organisation: Files anywhere on your PC can be synced not just the files in your Dropbox.

Creating symlinks is very simple in both Windows using the mklink command and Linux using the ln command and work with Dropbox on both.

With the introduction of the large card reader from Barclays I was no longer able to log into my internet banking at any pc other than my desktop, as I’m not really going to carry that thing about wherever I go. HSBC have introduced a similar device however have improved with a much smaller design, although even with the addition of a loop to attach it to your keys, it’s not small enough for me to consider attaching it to mine and carrying it everywhere. Oddly enough HSB have issued it’s business customers, you know the sort of customer who would tend to do internet banking from one PC, Vasco authentication tokens which I would be happy to attach to my keys and take everywhere. So it’s now more convenient in many cases to go to a cash machine to check my balance.

On a side note, something that really bugs me about these  calculator like devices can’t also have simple calculator functions?

Size and Weight; the size of this tablet is great, it’s very thin, but you don’t feel like it’ll snap in two. Although widescreen is not my favourite aspect ratio for screens, it’s certainly not offensive, and it’s marketed as an entertainment device so it’s to be expected. The weight of the 101 is very light, however the weight is not evenly distributed with most of the weight being over the ports, I think I would prefer a little extra weight over the other side to balance it out even it it added to the total weight.

Screen; the obvious focus point of the unit the screen on the 101 does not disappoint, it’s clear and crisp. Although the viewing angle is not brilliant it’s good enough to be usable without problems and it’s bright enough to see in bright daylight.

Touch screen; the multi-touch screen is accurate and responsive, however as you get closer to the edge it seems to loose a little bit of responsiveness. I think you notice the edge problems more as it’s where the main  home, menu, search and back buttons are so you have to press them a lot during every day use, this doesn’t bother me massively, but there is room for improvement. As the main reason I have the pad is to blog on the move the touch screen is the make or break for me and this does very well.

Connectivity; for me the power to extend this device is one of the obvious benefits over the iPad is the ability to extend the Archos through the memory card slot and USB port. The Archos has a micro SD slot which can be massively useful if your camera takes SD cards as you can use a micro SD card in an adapter in your camera, then take it straight to the tablet to view or upload, you can also plug your camera or a hard disk into the standard size USB slot. The HDMI output is great for watching movies from hard disk on your TV.

Other Hardware; the camera is not really something I would see myself using, so I can forgive the fact the quality is a bit crappy. The screen orientation switches between horizontal and vertical smoothly on movement and the threshold for each seems fine, it’s never flipped when I’ve not wanted to making me hold it at a different angle. The kick stand is a nice touch and allows the tablet to be held at a very wide range of degrees. The battery life has never been an issue so far, even with heavy wireless usage in a poor signal area, or video playback the battery life is great.

A few seconds in I had set up the wireless and un-installed a bunch of the bundled applications, streaming music and videochatting was not something I could see myself using the tablet for, and it was on to installing apps I could see myself using. I was a bit disappointed to see Appslib instead of the Android market and even more so the lack of the WordPress application in it. Fortunately a quick Google brought up a helpful post detailing the easy steps to install the marketplace on the Archos and within a few minutes I was browsing the marketplace and downloading apps like WordPress, Xconstruct, Slice It and Angry Birds, I was ready for my holiday so I popped the Archos on charge overnight.

The first time I got a chance to use the 101 was on the plane, the tablet combined with slice it made the 3 hour trip fly by for both me and Vicky so as a time passing tool, I would have to give it a big tick. Over the holiday the combination of the 101 and stolen wifi also lead to a lot of the anxieties of leaving my online businesses with no-one to look after them, they don’t need constant supervision but the second your unable to keep check something goes wrong.

The main thing I used the 101 for when on holiday however was for blogging, as you can probably see, it was good to be able to write about the holiday each day when I got back to the hotel instead of doing a single “Spent a week in Tunisia, from what I remember it was good.” post, unfortunatley I hadn’t thought about the microSD in an adapter and didn’t think to take the cable for my camera so all the posts had to be saved offline till I got back to put them together with pictures.

Another great thing about the 101, particularly over the iPad, is the ability to get apps that would never get into the apple store, such as a torrent client which allowed me to enjoy an episode of the Big Bang Theory on the plane home.

While in itself this is not a complicated thing to do, it is a little fiddly to get the coordinates right for the link or if you’re not familiar with fixed positioning and negative margins.

PLEASE NOTE: Although you can only see and click the ribbon the transparent portion of the image is still over your content, this will stop any interaction with elements such as links underneath it.

So on to the code.

HTML (if you want to be able to click the ribbon):

<div id="RibbonSmallRight">
	<img src="whiteband_translinkimg.gif"
	     width="100" height="100"
	     border="0" usemap="#RibbonLinkMapSmallRight">
</div>
<map name="RibbonLinkMapSmallRight">
	<area shape="poly" coords="100,42,43,100,3,99,100,1"
	      href="http://yourlinkhere">
</map>

HTML (if you don’t want to be able to click the ribbon):

<div id="RibbonSmallRight"></div>

CSS:

div#RibbonSmallRight			{
	position:fixed;      /*fixed position is in relation to the viewport*/
	left:100%;           /*start at the very right of the viewport*/
	margin:0 0 0 -100px; /*negative margin brings this back into the viewport*/
	bottom:0px;          /*the bottom the the div is at the bottom of the viewport*/
	z-index:1000000000;  /*attempt to make sure this is over the top of everything else*/

	height:100px;
	width:100px;
	background-image:url(whiteband_small_right.gif);
	background-repeat:no-repeat;
}

Graphics:

The Banner

Transparent Image

The day started overcast but it looked like the rain would hold off, at about 11am the sun came out so we headed to the port again to buy gifts for the folk back home, as it was the last day we put the 20dt we would need for drinks later that night and counted what we had left to spend. We went to a mini zoo and botanical gardens in which the animals were mainly birds, unfortunatley I’m not convinced they were happy, many with bald patches and the young camel and one of the emus were pacing about. After the zoo we avoided a conman, “You recognise me? I work at your hotel… bla bla… I show you the shop, special sale”, with the great phrase “maybe later” and headed off in the other direction.

We found a number of shops that we hadn’t seen before and spent a long time trying on sunglasses, even though i had bought another set a few days before, so long that it had time to mini-storm and dry up. While fighting over getting a set of Oakley or Police glasses I managed to decide I didn’t need another set, quite an achievement for me, not however replicated when I spotted a number of wallets in designs I liked. Bartering started at 45dt and ended with me getting a Diesel wallet for 15dt (£7.50). We then found a real supermarket with real stuff in rather than all touristy stuff and got a few things to take home.

On the way back to the hotel we were greeted by the tradesman who the day before we bought the trainers from, I’ll give him credit, he asked how the trainers were and remembered i was looking at the Diesel bags the day before. I picked out a bag I liked and the guy took me to the back of the shop where he likes to do his haggling, he showed me the bag and all its pockets and made the offer of 75dt, I  told him I was looking to pay more 20dt he went to 60 and I offered 25, he said he made no money at that and I said all I had left was 25 so he showed me the bags he could sell for 25 and asked which I liked, “the one in your hand” I replied and made my final offer, of all the money in my wallet, and showed him the section I was keeping the 20dt for dinner drinks and the change which was full of what amounted to copper, as he didn’t see the 40dt in the other section of my wallet he agreed, which worked out at 31dt (£15.50).

At dinner Lotfi, our waiter, had saved our table as he has every night with our drinks ready for our arrival, the queue was massive but the steak pie made up for it and as always the dessert selection was huge. Later on we packed ready for our departure the next morning.

As we wandered about and Vicky kept falling off her shoes as they were wet, she decided new shoes were in order. With an aim in mind Vicky seemed less bothered by the pushy traders, unfortunatley, not wanting converse and being quite picky about the style of sports trainers it took us quite a few shops to find a pair she wanted.

Having priced up the trainers in a few of the fixed price shops I knew I was looking at about 45dt (£22) for a pair of (fake) Addidas trainers so when the guy suggested I  pay 75dt I countered at 15dt, about fifteen minutes later, I had bought two pairs of trainers for the pricey sum of 60dt (£30). We looked at a number of other shops but finding nothing of real interest we headed back to the hotel.  After drying out and a spot of dinner we spent the evening watching Halloween films on Fox Movies.

The rain let up so we went to some of the local shops to haggle some more and stopped at a local cafe for dinner, during which the heavens opened again, it was warm so we decided to walk back to the hotel. The walk in many places turned into a paddle, with water flowing down the roads at about half a foot deep. It was more amusing than anything else as we tried to find the shallowest path to cross the road.

The weather cleared up and we took 20 minutes to clear the water from our balcony, then chilled out, over the course of the evening the weather was up and down and we had another thunderstorm, which isn’t a bad thing.

The day started early with a quick breakfast and on the coach for 7:50, we were on our way, via lots of other hotels, to El Djem a Roman Amphitheatre. The coach was nicer than the day before  with more legroom, which was good since after we travelled via every other hotel and it was two hours before we finally arrived at El Djem.

El Djem stood tall at the top of a bank, the streets paved with the usual traders pushing scarves and trinkets at every passer by, the entrance to the amphitheatre was painless as the cost was included in the price of the trip, we did however have to pay 1dt (50p) in order to use a camera. When we went into the amphitheatre we could see it was very well preserved and after a short introduction in the centre we were left to explore. Most people headed up, but Vicky spotted a staircase heading down so we went to see where it lead.

In the depths of the amphitheatre there was a maze of small rooms where they kept the animals all joined by a long corridor, the corridor was lit by a few lights placed in the roof recesses which made it look spectacular, I  got a few photos before more of the tour party came down and ruined the atmosphere, I guess I’m still not a people person. We headed up the many steps to the top, there was plenty of arches, columns and other features to keep my camera busy for the whole hour we were there. On the way back to the coach we stopped for an obligatory photo with a camel and it was back on the coach for a short drive to our next destination a mosaic museum.

The mosaic museum was nice, but again hindered by the presence of other people who had no issues with walking in front of a guy taking pictures. To combat the presence of people we hung back and took a slow walk through, as we knew nothing about the place we were visiting it was a nice surprise to find the museum was built in front of the building they were taken from so we had a look round a number of the mosaics in situ then back on the coach for an hour back to the hotel.

The hotel once again stepped up its game with food, although it creeps me out that I much preferred the vegetable balls and poached egg on toast over meatballs. We then chilled out for the rest of the evening.