Friend View and my phone - so happy together

First of all, I hope you all had a great Christmas with family. I know I certainly did with my wife in our first Christmas here in Beijing since our move from Toronto.

I tried to upload version 0.830 of Nokia Friend View on my phone a couple of days ago, but for some strange reason, I kept getting "Certificate error, please contact the vendor". As cryptic as that error message sounds, I checked my certificates that Friend View would use and using my engineering background, tried to reverse engineer from which certificate was causing the problem. After deciding not tinkering with removing the certificates with the risk of making other software on my phone unusable (as is like with Windows machines), I decided to remove Friend View and revert back to the one that did work which was version 0.823. But, alas, I got the same error and couldn't install. Same for Nokia Image Exchange.

All I wanted for Christmas was having my Friend View back, because I couldn't FV on my phone and had to use the web. But seriously, it was probably good to have that break since I'm beginning to be addicted to FV on the phone.

Well, I'm glad to say that my phone and I are back to normal with FV reinstalled after I decided to reinstall my phone by flashing it. Thank you Nokia PC Suite for backing up all my data, all I had to do was restore after installing Friend View and Image Exchange, and it didn't take that long (maybe 10 minutes) to do the restore and I had all my applications and data back to normal. Boy, I wish it was that easy with reinstalling Windows on my PC.

So all is well in Friend View land for me and me and my phone are now happy. Onto enjoying the rest of the Christmas holidays, and hope you are also having a great Christmas holidays too!

Nokia SportsTracker Beta

One of the cool things with the Nokia N82 cell phone is that you can download an application called Nokia SportsTracker Beta which allows you to record your workouts like jogging or walking using GPS and accelerometer to track your speed, altitude and location on a map. I tried out this feature and just uploaded my walk from the bus stop that I got off to Oakwood residence . You can see the results of this walk here.

Let me know what you think by putting comments on this blog or on my SportsTracker Beta
web page!

Final torch relay in Beijing before opening ceremonies tonight

Today, I had the wonderful privilege on behalf of Nokia to witness and see the torch relay in our area (Beijing Economic Technological and Development Area). Today is the final leg of the torch relay before it enters the National Olympic Stadium for tonight's opening Olympic ceremonies. It seems so surreal that I'm actually here in Beijing and witnessing this live.

I managed to take some pictures which I've uploaded to Nokia's Ovi service using my Nokia N82 cell phone. Unfortunately, the most important event when the torch flame was exchanged between the torch bearer and the other one here at leg 114 (seen
below), I wasn't able to capture because my cell phone ran out of battery!



Here is a picture of me below.



By the way, you can view more pics from this momentous event from Ovi here. And if you want to try out Ovi (instructions here), it's quite nice, it seems to work pretty well and you can download the Ovi client on your Nseries phone to view pictures and your friends' pictures.

Testing out Nokia Ovi

Nokia has a software service called Ovi that allows for easy management and uploading of media from an Nseries Nokia phone to the web. We all have many photos and videos that we like to share with people. It's very easy to download these media to your computer, however it is very time consuming to share it with others. You need to find the media once it is downloaded to the computer, then select a web site that can upload those photos or download some software to allow you to upload to that web site. In my case, I use Flickr Uploadr or Shutterfly Studio which allows me to drag and drop which photos I want and I configure the web service with my account information and the name of the online album that I want to create. However, once that is done, then I have to go to the online album that I have created and then select all the recipients that I want to share with. With Shutterfly, it's really strange, you have to either share the album which is a cryptic link within an e-mail or you can make a special URL to a collection. But within that e-mail that is sent from Shutterfly, I can't change the title and message of the e-mail!

If I want to embed the photos to my blog then I can either link the entire album online or have to choose each photo separately with the embedded link. In Flickr, the link is cryptic and long so it becomes very time consuming. Sometimes, it takes so long that I don't even do it. How to make this process of uploading and sharing photos from your device much easier? Nokia aims to do this with Ovi.

You can subscribe to the Ovi service by making an account and then downloading the Ovi Suite program. This creates programs to synchronize your calendar and contacts with the Nokia Nseries phone (in my case the N82), and to synchronize photos and videos from the phone to a designated folder on the computer automatically. It also includes a Nokia Application installer to install apps on the phone, a program to view contents on the phone via a phone browser, a gallery to view the photos and videos, a 3D gallery that shows your photos in space by time. It also includes a Music Manager to help manage your music from your computer to the phone (like Apple's iTunes). To upload and share the photos and videos with your friends, you use Ovi's share service.

I then followed the instructions to upload the files using Firefox, which allows you to use the Web Publishing Wizard in Windows Explorer to publish to a web place which is Ovi. It's pretty easy to set up and use. In less than 10 minutes I was able to make a share on the web of my pictures that were downloaded from my Nokia N82 mobile phone. These are my photos of my tour around the city of Beijing.