New mobile phone

Since none had any protests against me and the Huawei U8800 joining in a wholly matter-of-money, I brought this beauty home today. The picture does not really do justice to the crisp screen, but that’s because I suck at photography, or at least not have a tripod to place the camera on for long exposures.

The Titan is not that much larger than the Hero, the screen fills even more of the front but is only a diagonal 3.8″ rather than 3.2″ in the older phone. But the screen resolution is twice that of the Hero, and this is quite noticeable.  When viewing the Hungersite page in Opera, for instance, I can now clearly see the tabs on the top showing the other more or less worthy purposes that share its space, such as the Breast Cancer site and the Literacy site. On the old phone, I could only see smudges which I identified by their placement and shape; they were not actually readable.

Somehow it feels like I have passed an invisible threshold, and actually have moved from simply a “smart phone” to the long awaited Datapad, the handheld unit for interfacing with the world. Web browsing, mail and even moderate amounts of writing are only marginally harder than on a small computer.  Arguably, the thing is a small computer.  I suspect this is how iPhone owners have felt for a while, for one of the things that gadget actually did right was prioritize the screen resolution over pretty much everything else. It may seem overkill for such a small screen, but it is our window to the world (wide web) after all.

The problem of my manly sausage fingers remain, although it is slightly helped by the slightly larger screen estate. Seeing is one thing, hitting is another. For surfing, Opera’s latest mobile browser offers a help: If I hit more than one link at a time, the program automatically zooms in on the spot so the links become large, and waits for me to press again.  I have not needed it to repeat this procedure so far, so it works, and it works quickly.  Typing is another matter. Swiftkey does correct some errors, but I still notice that my right hand still has a tendency to hit the keys to the left of where I intended.

It took some time to download the apps I was used to from the Hero: Opera (the browser), and clients for my three types of blogs:  LiveJournal, Blogger and WordPress. Since my blogs have different purposes and audiences, I don’t particularly want one client app that can post to two or all three of them. That would just make it easier to confuse what I was doing, and I would probably miss out on some features.

Then there are media consumption apps,  Spotify (European music streaming service) and Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

Some apps were already loaded right out of the box: Twitter, Facebook and Gmail, a camera app, and the indispensable alarm clock.  The thing also comes with a text message app and even voice calls, whatever that may be good for…

One unpleasant surprise was that the Titan uses a microUSB instead of the more common mini USB contact for recharging and syncing to computers. I have plenty of the old ones, which fit a number of gadgets, including the Sony PSP. I habitually recharge the mobile phone off the PC when I am sitting at one, and even at night (I have a netbook beside me at night, connected to the stereo.) None of these work anymore. There was a cable in the box; but while the phone fits excellently in a shirt pocket, the cable does not.  So I bought an extra to bring with me home. It was rather expensive too. I distinctly remember putting it on my desk after testing it and deciding to put it in my bag after I had finished whatever it was doing. It is not in my bag though, so presumably I mistook planning to do for actually doing. A human trait, at least!

So now the weekend has begun, and my office is locked until Monday, and I have no way of recharging the new smartphone. I still have the old phone, though. Luckily it is not yet broken. Only outdated.

25 thoughts on “New mobile phone

  1. Can you install your speech-to-text program on the phone? It would be very useful, I’ve thought, on my iPhone. I haven’t looked for anything with that ability yet, mostly because my fingers are not “manly sausage fingers” or however you put it (ha!) and I can type adequately, for certain values of “adequately”, on the screen.

    • You are in luck! There happens to be just such a program for the iPhone/iPad: Dragon Dictation!
      http://www.dragonmobileapps.com/apple/dictation_overview.html
      If your phone did not come with the newest version, you may want to try it.

      For Android, there is a combination program called FlexT9 which includes Dragon Dictate.

      Android has speech recognition already, but hardly capable of reliably understanding a foreigner. It should however not be long before the mobile phones have a processing power similar to PCs a couple years ago, and that should suffice. All I need is stay alive and the future comes on its own!

  2. Does it work for texting, or is it simply text that you can paste into texting, e-mail, whatever? (Yes, I am totally stupid about such things, and have posted this knowing I am exposing my stupidity to the world!)

    • It should in theory work wherever you could have used the on-screen keyboard to enter the same information. I am told that it sometimes stops after a while, so may be less useful for long texts. This may be a bug with certain programs though.

  3. Apparently you are supposed to be able to do anything you can think of in the “astral world’ or in a lucid dream…

    • Me neither. And I don’t even want to bungee jump with my body, much less with my soul. I’ll have plenty of time to play dead once I’ve died, thank you very much.

      And yes, I’m more worried that I might like it than that I might not, although either would be bad.

  4. Have you had a lucid dream?
    I had a very brief one. Which was bascially “Wtf. I’m dreaming?” Five seconds later I woke up.

    What makes you assume that OBEs would be a bad thing?

    • I have had a few lucid dreams, and one case of lucid dreamless sleep. It is possible to train oneself to lucid dreams, but I don’t want to. I am responsible all the time when I am awake. I don’t want to be responsible for my dreams as well! When I sleep, I want to kick back and relax, just watch what my subconscious is throwing out of my closets. ^_^

      Since I read quite a bit, the easiest way for me to notice when I am dreaming is when I read. In my dreams, the text tends to change, so that if I read the same page twice, it will contain two different texts. Some people keep a small slip of paper in their pocket which they take out and read through the day until it becomes a habit. When they do the same in their dream eventually, they will notice that it has changed and know they are dreaming.

      Actually my dreams tend to be pretty crazy and bear little resemblance to my real life, so this option is probably better suited for people with more ordinary dreams.

  5. What is lucid dreamless sleep? Between deep sleep and dreaming sleep?

    “I am responsible all the time when I am awake. I don’t want to be responsible for my dreams as well!”

    Let’s not forget that the dreams take place whether or not you remember them, or control them…

    So you could be sinning in your sleep… 😛 🙂

    Do you think morality applies to that world?

    Is it possible to astral project or have a lucid dream involving other people? That would be pretty awesome.

    • Oh, I am sinning LIKE CRAZY in my sleep. That’s a major reason why I want to stay the hell out of there. Or stay out of the hell there, as it were…

      By lucid dreamless sleep I mean the deep sleep in which nothing moves, there is nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to feel, no thoughts being thought. Just a vast, dark nothingness in which the awareness exists alone like a tiny flame in the middle of an ocean. It was actually way cool, but I have no idea how to do it again. Perhaps I never will. It is years ago now and I was sick and tired, and suddenly when I fell asleep I somehow forgot to turn off the consciousness or something. And then I just sank into that place. Weird stuff.

  6. But can’t you control what you experience in lucid dream?

    Is that the no-self experience I’ve been chasing after?

    • In the dreamless state, there is nothing to control. You just are there. Even though you are aware of being there, there is no desire for anything to appear. It is actually pretty cool, not scary at all. I understand that some long-time meditators experience this more or less at will, but for me it was an accident.

  7. Why are you scared of OBEs?

    I have a feeling playing dead while alive is different from playing dead while dead.

    Hopping between limitation and the unlimited is different from always being semi-unlimited.

    Butterflys were meant to fly free.

    • To be honest, it is not so much that I am afraid of OBE as that it is not part of my reality. In much the same way that I am not afraid of UFOs, but I probably would wet my pants if one of them actually abducted me. ^_^ It just does not seem like something I would either want or expect to happen.

      Your OBE (and UFO) may vary, in which case, good for you. I think OBEs are somewhat more achievable than alien encounters, of course, but the similarity is that I have no wish to experiment with them.

      As for butterflies, if we could all just attach wings and fly away, I am sure it would be a lot more popular!

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