First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR to ONE AND ALL! Like my best friend -d- said, what’s so happy about the new year? I don’t know. But come to think of it, noone wants to start their day, much less their year, badly yeah?
There are people I know that make up resolutions for the new year. But they ain’t gonna work. You know why? Cos’ if you have to wait for the year to start before you do something, you’re pretty much fucked on the willpower bit. One thing everybody should do all year, all day long though is to use their gadgets to the best of their abilities. People, alot of you have so much power in your pocket. But what most people do with their phones?
"Eh, my phone I think spoil ah."
"How come leh?"
"Dunno. You help me see leh."
"Okay. Let me see... WAH LAU. You have 7000 SMS in your handphone memory ah."
"Ya, why?"
"Piang eh, no wonder you think spoil lah! How your phone run with so many rubbish inside?"
Maybe because noone has told them how to properly utilize their phones, but more and more each day, the little gadgets that we hold so dear in our everyday lives, begin to take control of our lives with each passing day. Our music players, cameras, photo albums, contact list, just to name a few, are all squashed in that tiny little device. How many of us actually back up our handphone data? Let’s not even talk about all the other data. Just the contact list. Do you have a back up of your contact list? If you do, good for you. If you don’t, maybe you should back it up before you lose your phone and start the whole "its not the phone that’s important, but all the contacts inside" routine.
Anyway, back to my little gadget of my life. My precious little N95. If you have a phone bill that’s over 50 bucks and more than half of it is due to your overwhelming need to text someone every 4 seconds, read my previous posts about getting a mobile internet SIM card and hooking it up with a smartphone such as the N95. Today, I’m gonna touch on some softwares I use on my phone that gets me a little more productive for work.
Free Push Email
This one got me really excited. Really really cool stuff. How would you, if you’re the busy sort that gets email all-the-time kind, like to have your email appear in your mobile phone just like an SMS? Its not new technology. The users of Blackberry phones have been enjoying something like that for awhile now, and you also do have the option of checking your mail as and when you want or in a wifi zone. But now even you can have that option if you carry the N95, and for free too.
This little app and service is called emoze Free Push email, and not only does it work on the N95, it supports alot of other phones too. Why I like this app alot is, it works great with Gmail, really easy to setup, able to view attachements, and to compose a new email is akin to typing a new SMS. Really easy stuff, but super impressive. And if you delete a mail that’s on your phone, you can opt to have the copy in your Gmail server deleted too, or just to delete the copy on the phone.
Just in case you don’t get it yet, the whole idea of "push email" is the opposite of "pull email". When you set your device to periodically check for email, say every hour, your phone connects to the mail server and "pulls" the information at the stipulated time. To have push email though, your device is "always on" the network, waiting for new email to arrive at the server, before "pushing" it to your mobile device, making you look ever so cool.
Syncing With Google Calendar
If you have a free Gmail account, hopefully you’ll have heard of the Google Calendar. If you haven’t, this is the low-down on it: Google Calendar is basically a free online calendar where you can plan and organize your day-to-day activities and memos and have the ability to share that data with friends or colleagues. It’s a pretty simple idea, and since its online, chances of you losing that data is very rare indeed.
Now, I use the N95, which means I’m running on a Symbian S60 v3 operating system on the phone, so therefore I have a Calendar function on my phone. Please do note at this point of time, the Calendar app on my phone has NOTHING to do with the Google Calendar online app. I’ll make the link later. Anyway, on most phones, you can jot down little scraps of memos and birthdays even, and then save it as events in your calendar. You can even set an alarm that goes off to remind you that you need to pay your bills or meet some friends at a particular time of your choice. But if do use Google Calendar, and also rely on your phone’s calendar to get your day-to-day shit done, wouldn’t it be nice to have both apps synchronize so that you when you key in data on one device, the other gets updated as well?
Enter GooSync, the link between both worlds. You can finally back up your calendar data to an online database for free using this simple piece of software. Not only that, both sides get updated, so if you’re at work and you key in a new event, you’ll get the same data in your calendar app on your mobile phone after you sync it.
Now, if you think that’s all there is to it, here’s a little tip on how I make my push email work for me with GooSync: You can set up email reminders in Google Calendar, so if you have your emoze in your phone on, you can actually have the email reminders appear in your phone, just like sms reminders. Just a little back up just in case you ignore the native alarm you can set in your phone calendar.
Microsoft Office in N95?
Okay. That’s not possible. It is NOT POSSIBLE to install the entire Microsoft Office suite into your phone. You’ll have to be crazy to even imagine that’s possible. However, you CAN find 3rd party softwares that are NOT from Microsoft which will allow you to view your Microsoft Office documents. (Sorry, but I’ve been asked many times by different people this same question.) Apparently, some people today still think that you can install the same softwares that you do in PCs into your phone. Please don’t do that. Its really scary.
Anyway, if you use a Nokia smartphone (N, E series or running Symbian S60 v3 OS), they should almost come with some form of Office document viewer, like QuickOffice. Do note that you can only VIEW the documents, and not create or edit on them. To do that, you will almost indefinitely need to pay for an application that will allow you to do just that.
For most people, I’m presuming that opening Excel and Word documents ranks the highest on their list, but for N95 users, Powerpoint slides can also be included into that list. Why? Because we have a TV-out port that can allow us to hook up our tiny little phone to a projector and flash a Powerpoint slide onto a big big screen.
If having the power of editing Office documents is important to you, consider buying OfficeSuite by MobiSystems. Its pretty straight forward, and not at all complicated like other softwares available. Heck, you can open up native .doc files and edit them on your phone! That’s just one of the features available. Check out the link if you wanna find out more. Price is pricey, but if you need to have something like that, you should invest a little bit of money and make your phone a little pocket monster of a device.
That’s it for now. It’s late and I’m still up trying to educate a bunch of people I don’t even know existed in the first place. Plus its New Year’s day....... oh my God... I’m becoming of them.. befriend me, will you?
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