Nokia N95 8GB

I’ve been looking to upgrade my phone for a few weeks now, and just the other day I was in the Nottingham Vodafone store asking them what options were open to me once the ‘upgrade window’ opened on November the 25th.

They couldn’t tell me what deals I could have, as their computer won’t let them until nearer the time. The lady asking all my questions then told me that if I’m not too worried by a new number, I could pay up the last remaining months of my contract and get a new phone now. I went away, thought long and hard about it overnight, then decided to go out early and bag myself one of these bad boys.

The original N95 is a good phone, but suffers from being silver and purple, and having a tiny memory card. I’ve also heard how the battery is embarrassingly puny for such a feature-packed phone. The N95 8GB has 8 gig of memory (funnily enough!), it’s a nice sleek black and also has a stronger battery. It’s similar to the N93 I previously had, and it’s also a nice bit of continuity as far as I’m concerned!

The phones features are well documented all over the internet - and I’ve already had a play on them in all of the Vodafone shops I’ve been in - but even so, I’ve not been off it since I brought it home yesterday.

The Sat Nav application is quite useful, even for a non-driver such as myself. The navigation feature can be made for either ‘by car’ or ‘by foot’ and you can change what will show up on the maps. For example, what shops are around, where the nearest ATM is and so on. Plus the prices for the full Sat Nav facility really isn’t that bad. £45 for a 3 year licence is really good value!

The music player isn’t drastically different from the one on the N93, which isn’t a bad thing. For a phone, the MP3 player is fully featured. I’ve got 3gb of music on there, more than enough to entertain myself with.

The camera is a big improvement on the N93, the extra two megapixels show, and the pictures now look half decent. The video is the same quality as the excellent N93 camera, complete with the massive memory I now have a fully functioning camcorder!

There are games on there too, the N95 has an N-Gage application ready to play downloaded games when the service starts next month. It looks similar to Xbox Live, using the same features and ‘game points’. There are two trial games on there, Fifa 07 and Asphalt Street Rules 3. Both are brilliant achievements for a mobile phone, though with all that is on the N95, it’s hardly a phone anymore - more of a mobile entertainment device!

Come to London

Spent all of yesterday in the in the capital.

Iain flew out to China today so I went with my parents and him to see him off. We went extra early (5AM!) and managed to get into London at around 10am. Iain needed to be at Russell Square near the SOAS so we drove near there, then decided to go out towards Selfridges for a while to waste time until we met with Iain again.

Previous visits to London have all been on the train. When I’ve needed to get across the city it’s either been by train, foot or tube. Yesterday I experienced London by car - and it was fucking horrible. A simple journey such as Shaftesbury Avenue to Marble Arch was made a nightmare by the crazy one-way system. Plus my dad took a wrong turning and managed to end up in Chelsea!

An hour and a half later, we were on Oxford Street. We met back up with Iain after a short look around Selfridges - mainly the always fantastic foodhall - then made the painless journey to Heathrow.

Thankfully Terminal Three didn’t seem that busy and Iain managed to check in smoothly. We waited a while with him in the Departures. What strikes me about Heathrow is how shitty it looked for such a large and important airport! It became clear that they were redeveloping it though, which is probably just as well. Iain left us after having his last cigarette for about a day (!), he didn’t waste no time going out to the Departure Lounge - such was his excitement.

We went back on the less busy M25/A1 - though we copped a bit of traffic down near Stevenage which set us back a bit.

After, that we stopped once more for a drink and then another final stop for a meal at Little Chef. I’d always thought how nice their Olympic Breakfast looked, so decided to take the plunge and order this greasy nightmare.

It was great, though my heart is probably still complaining about it all, though after 11 hours sleep last night I’m no longer shattered! I’m a bit pissed off though, as it seems my Pure DAB radio has died. It doesn’t seem to acknowledge the DC adapter anymore, and won’t charge the ‘Chargepak’ batteries anymore. I can work around this by buying separate Chargeable batteries, but it’s an expense I can’t afford at the moment!

I’m also close to upgrading my much maligned phone. I’ve had good use of it, but I want to change it to the N95 to stop all the jibes about how big the N93 is! I phoned Vodafone and they told me that from November 25th I can upgrade as it’ll be 60 days before the contract ends.

Lesson One

A lesson to any English kids out there wanting to excel at sports, don’t bother - it won’t get you anywhere!

England lost out to South Africa in the Rugby and Lewis Hamilton lost out to Kimi Raikonnen in the F1. To be honest, I failed to get excited about either. Rugby confuses me, my dad has explained it to me more than once but it just seems so needlessly complicated. Unlike many other bandwagon jumpers, I refused to get caught up with it all.

While I’d have been happy that England had done well in a sporting event, I couldn’t have reached the level of excitement that other people were getting to. It was the same with F1, now there’s a sport which bores the hell out of me! If it isn’t football, it isn’t interesting as far as I’m concerned!

It’s not all failure though, I took part in a pub quiz yesterday and we came away with second prize! We’d done badly in the quiz, but it seemed as though the rest of the pub had. We got 39 out of 60 which was second best score and received the prize of a beer token each. Sadly the bar had closed at that point, and indeed half the team had gone home, but the token remains in my pocket for future use…!

I’m off to London this Wednesday, Iain’s leaving the UK for China and as I have nothing better to do on Wednesday’s, I’m coming with him. Once he gets back here, he’ll be living in the capital, so it’s wise to get to know London a bit better.

Man Behaving Madly

It’s been an interesting few days since I last posted…

With Sky being installed on Sunday morning, we then had a Christmas dinner. Complete with crackers and everything! No, we hadn’t gone mad, we were doing it for the benefit of my brother Iain. He’s off to China next week to be with his Bulgarian girlfriend Aleks for the next three months, this means he won’t be here over the Christmas period.

Mindful of the lack of christmassy stuff in China, my mum made sure he got a good old fashioned Collison family Christmas dinner. Iain now has one week to sort out what he’ll be doing and how he’ll live for the next three months in a country so different from his own! I’m accompanying him down to London next Wednesday to see him off with my parents, seems he has to meet someone in the capital beforehand so it all works out.

Monday was a bit bollocks. Roadworks on the A52 between Radcliffe and Nottingham are about to begin, and they’re doing overnight work to prepare for them. Seems that these guys working in the dark hit a gas pipe so large, it broke and had to be completely replaced. The whole of the A52 from Gamston to Bingham had to be closed, leaving traffic forced to use the A46 and the A612.

I knew chances of getting to work on the buses - on time - were slim, so made use of the much underused Radcliffe station. Getting to work within ten minutes makes a change from the long, winding route on the roads through West Bridgford. Plus the train was cheaper too, at least it was with my Young Persons Railcard.

On Tuesday I got a new telly! The 28-inch JVC TV came, complete with a stand which was an arse to put up. The box itself was absurdly massive, taking up most of the living room. Not very eco-friendly and all that, but still, i didn’t give a shit - I’ve got a new TV!

Sorted

The Sky engineer came today.

He phoned up late last night to tell us he’ll be here between 9am and 11am, so I made sure I was awake and presentable by that time. He came at 10am, installed it all and was gone within an hour. He’s even managed to make the Sky box work with my notoriously dodgy Goodmans telly.

I had my doubts that the Scart connection would be okay, as the Scart socket on the TV has long since stopped working properly. But it works fine with no problems (at the moment!). To go with the snazzy new digibox, I also have the new differently coloured Sky remote! Yay!

Now Sky is all set up and working okay, it’s on to the TV. I’m about to buy this JVC telly to take the place of the (unbelievably still working) Goodmans TV that has been in the family home for five years or more now! CRT televisions aren’t as easy to buy anymore, so buying it over the web seems like the only option.