Before I left for London, I used to use my laptop or WiFi on my E61. That resulted in me getting my laptop out in Airports, Cafés and nearly any other place. Some would call it an addiction

Having left for London more than a year ago, I finally had the possibility of getting more or less unlimited internet on my phone, without having to sell my soul. That was a huge game changer. I could now check my E-mails, track support tickets – do anything really!, anywhere without having to get out my laptop. Great!

Then there were those weeks I had to head back to Belgium for family festivities etc.. I quickly realized that my 3 UK contract gave me way better rates for data in Belgium than my Belgian Proximus Pay&Go card. It wasn’t really cheap, it was just the lesser of two evils.

But now there’s a solution!

Mobile Vikings, a Belgian “next gen” MVNO finally saw what’s missing in Belgium. In the age of Twitter and hyper-connectivity, people want to be connected at all times. Either with their E71, BlackCherry or iPod Touch with phone capabilities. Pushed E-mails, Twitter streams and of course XMPP are just a few of the things people will start to use more. Just look at any other country where there’s contracts for mobile internet that are affordable.

Anyways, I immediately ordered my free SIM and ported my number. The SIM arrived 3 days after having ordered it, in a very nicely designed envelope (kudos to Mobile Vikings for that!). The accompanying letter told me to send a text from my old SIM in order to initiate the number porting process. That took about 2 hours, and I was ready to go! Topped up €15 and got my 1000 texts and 1GB of data. Worked like a charm.

Seeing as I was driving round the country quite a bit the next few days, I decided to put the Network to a test. Unlike the UK, Belgium has a mobile network that’s worth a fuck, so I was pretty optimistic. From experience, I never had any low coverage with Proximus. Never. Always good signal, and 99% even 3G (Three could learn something from them)!

Mobile Vikings use the BASE Network. First disappointment was that BASE has no 3G, but only EDGE. Having done a bit of research, it looks like BASE wants to enable the 3G network in the next few weeks, so keep your fingers crossed for that. Having said that, I was quite surprised how fast the EDGE network is. I could play Spotify tracks with only short buffering times (2-3 seconds) without any major issues. That’s really the beauty of Belgium. No one uses the data network, because it’s so damn expensive, hence it’s extremely fast! So I can’t wait until BASE fires up their 3G Network. That should be amazing.

Having spent 5 days with Mobile Vikings, I have to say, the network isn’t as bad as I expected it to be. I had issues getting signal in the Cinema (Proximus worked fine), and in some parts of Mol. But for the rest, it’s all good.

The only thing I still don’t get: How is the traffic accounted? On the site it says:

€2,50 per MB consumed,
starting from the first byte of each megabyte started.

That translates for me into: I use 1 byte, I pay 2,50€ for it, and my signal drops then, so I just paid 2,50€ for a byte. Right?! One thing I would urge every operator: charge per byte. Yes, indicate the price per MB, but the charging should occur per byte.

It’s nice to see that a group of people are getting Belgium prepped for the 21st century! So definitely get your Mobile Vikings SIM card today and join us! Just head over to: mobilevikings.com

PS: It is a great name for a Mobile Network!

I have spent all morning playing with the App, and it’s as beautiful as the client for Mac. The entire UI is not as “chunky” as Nokia’s Media Player, it’s more like an iPhone app, in the sense that it has smooth transitions between the different panels, which makes the entire experience very nice. As you can see on the picture on the side, you have something similar to Apple’s Cover Flow, which shows you the current previous, current and next track cover art. Another thing you should check out, is skipping in a track. It gives you big digits on top of the cover art.

All in all, very very sleek.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Spotify, if it wouldn’t sync your playlists in realtime. This is, pardon my french, fucking awesome! Like on the iPhone or Andriod, you can select which playlists to sync, and you’ll see it syncing.

Just a note at this point: Don’t even bother syncing a few big playlists like mine via 3G, unless you’ve got a data plan that allows you to download the entire Internet. I synced my Calm Mood and Various Goodness: Dance playlist via WiFi, which generated 1,15GB of traffic. So yeah, I wouldn’t even try that.

But the guys at Spotify have thought of everything. They added an option under More, which allows you to say that it should only offline-sync stuff when you’re connected via WiFi, which is probably a setting you should not change.

However, don’t be afraid to listen to Spotify tracks via 3G/HSDPA. Just listening to a few tracks on 3G won’t cost you too much traffic. It’s about 3-4MB per song.

I tested it on Three UK, and it worked surprisingly well. Just as good as the Desktop client, which I think is an amazing accomplishment!

So all in all, if this doesn’t make you upgrade to Spotify Premium, I don’t know what will! It’s amazing! The only thing missing is the possibility to queue tracks.

If this is a bit more than just a fancy video, this might just be the next thing. Would this explain that Nokia hasn’t really worked on Multitouch for their mobile devices?

I am convinced that Augmented Reality is the next big step, and looking at this Video, Nokia has figured it out!

It has everything the E61 had, and a lot more! The battery life is amazing, 3G or 3,5G works very well, Nokia Maps is very useful, and all the Symbian “Problems” are gone.

A thing which a normal person would expect with a Symbian Phone, is that it’s a bit slow. Not the E71! It loads the applications lightining fast. Best phone ever!

As I’m not really in the mood of writing a lot more, I have found by coincidence a post by Jim Louderback, whom I met this Friday at FoWA, which describes my feelings for the E71 perfectly.

You can read the post here.

On the way back from London, I talked to some guys in the Tube, one of them being an Solutions Expert for Apple, and they all agreed that the E71 would be the better phone, if you would compare it to the iPhone.

The iPhone has been beaten!

Over and out.

Nokia E71

Finally! The phone I have been waiting for has been released! About a year ago I bought the Nokia E61, and I have been extremely happy with it. It’s a great phone, and there are a lot of cool applications that run on it.

But now, Nokia has released the E71! If you haven’t heard of it yet, you should definetly read the full report over at boygeniusreport.com.

In short, it has all the features you could ever dream of. A 3.15 Megapixel camera with autofocus, flash, a secondary video call camera, built in gps, MP3/AAC/MPEG4 player, a normal headphone Jack…. it’s a dream phone!

Now, you might think, thats nice, but I will never be able to afford it. And thats where you’re dead wrong! Nokia.de officially sells it at 459€. Thats quite ok! I will try to get one for less ofcourse, but 459€ is very ok for that phone!

The full phone specs can be found over at gsmarena.

Over and out!

yesterday I acquired an Nokia E61, which turned out to be one of the best investments I ever did.

It’s a great mobile phone. You can install a ton of applications, and it has WiFi. Here is a small list of the things I currently do with it:

E-mailing

I have setup my E-mail account on it, using IMAP. It even supports IMAP IDLE, which is a really great feature if you have to pay for the data connection traffic. I use my WiFi mostly though, so I don’t really care.

Jabber-ing

I installed Talkonaut 3.0, which is a great Jabber client for Symbian OS. It supports alot of features, such as File Transfer and Jingle Audio. The key feature though is, that it supports data compression. This is very nice if you use it via 3G.

As you can see on the last screenshot, Jabber is the perfect IM Platform. Thanks to Jabber data compression, you can chat for nearly nothing using GPRS or 3G! That was actually the result of 1 day chatting.

Vodafone Live! and Proximus Mobile TV

You’re bored? Well just go onto the Vodafone Live! portal and watch TV on your E61! The screen is big enough, and it is quite cheap. Just 0,49€ per session. You have a choice of 30 live TV stations and alot of on demand content. I just watched the Looney Tunes! Great fun.

VoIP!

I call quite alot to foreign countries, which leads to a very high phone bill. But now I can call via my VoipStunt account on my Mobile Phone. The quality is as good as via the GSM Network. All that routed via WiFi means that you don’t pay anything for the calls. If you want, you can also call via VoIP over the 3G network. Haven’t tried that yet, but I will in a bit. Atleast VoIP calls via WiFi are that good quality, that you don’t notice any difference! And it is integrated seamlessly into the general OS.

A Keyboard!

You actually have a nice Keyboard on the E61. I hate writing SMS with these numbers, like on the normal GSMs. Now I have a full keyboard on it. Very easy to type. Even with my fingers.

A really good Webbrowser

There actually is a very good webbrowser on the E61. It’s based on Webkit, and even runs complicated JS. It’s very nice to browse the Web from your mobile phone.

As you can see, it displays perfectly!

iPod Video without stupid iTunes.

I wanted an MP3 player with Video support. That was why I was thinking of getting an iPhone, but that is not available in Belgium at the moment. A hacked one, would be a possibility, but it’s also quite expensive. But now, with the E61, I have a MP3, OGG Player and Video Player.

As you can see, I still love The Simpsons I need to tweak my encoding quality though, as in Fullscreen it isn’t that nice.

Google Maps & GPS

I also installed Google Maps on the E61. It is a really great app. The next thing I am going to buy, is a TomTom GPS adapter, so that I can use it in my car as a GPS.

What other application would you like to see on your Mobile phone? For me, I have everything I want on my E61. I can just recommend it.