mWallet by Total Wireless Solutions is a very nifty application. You don’t have to use every feature that it offers but if you decide you want to, it’s definitely a practical step. It only costs $7.50 for an S60 device and $6.50 for a UIQ device.

In its most basic form, this application is great for those with a bad memory or those who keep written record of absolutely everything. The feature that sets this apart from simply putting details in your contacts list or your notes folder is that it is passworded.

I was previously keeping my bank details in my phone, because it’s much easier and less messy than having to dive into my filing cabinet every time I need my personal information.

This application simply offers far more detail, ease of use and security.

As well as keeping my bank details in my phone, I was also keeping a small pocketbook with ALL of the email newsletters I was signed up for and all of the online clubs and memberships I had. Passwords, I’m sure you all know, vary from website to website according to their requirements: length, requires numerals, case sensitive etc so my passwords were also in this pocketbook.

Although these passwords may be for silly things like clubs and memberships (by silly I mean, no one has anything to gain by hacking them), the passwords may also be reused for something that IS important, for example, email addresses and social networking. It’s highly risky keeping them written down. Unfortunately, I took this risk to make allowances for my shocking memory.

I never went as far as putting my pin numbers in my phone, however, this resulted in various trips to the bank because I had forgotten my pin numbers for various cards.

With mWallet, all I have to remember and keep safe is one password and everything else is remembered and kept safe for me.

The categories mWallet provides you with are:

The category “Cards” includes:

And the category “Passwords” includes:

There are many fields under each category giving you options to keep extensive or minimal details. The view within each category is nicely laid out, enabling you to see multiple details at once.

It also has a personal notes category which is similar to the application “Notes” on most Nokia phones. It comes in handy if you want to make a protected note to come back to later. Unfortunately it only takes 512 characters.

The great thing about it is when viewing anything confidential (ie. PIN numbers, credit card numbers, passwords etc), it masks them by displaying them as asterisks as a further precaution. All you have to do is press options then unmask all and it will display them for as long as you need:

As well as this, if you leave it idle for a long period of time it will reask for you password.

The only fallback I can find for this software is that when you go to view your information, it displays it in the same editing form that you used to enter it. It makes it difficult to view all of the details you need at once. It would have been easier if it only showed the information you entered rather than having to scroll through several blank fields to find the information you’re looking for.

I will reiterate how great this application is for those of us with a bad memory. I’m a very organised person with a shocking memory. I even had to reset my password to log in and post this article. (And then I entered the new password into my mWallet so I can’t lose it). It’s a great product and is going to save me a lot of hassle in future. It’s more secure than carrying a notebook around, more convenient than having to go through my filing cabinet and more organised than keeping details in a txt file on my phone/PDA.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: S60, Software, Symbian, Symbian OS Related, UIQ

mWallet – Symbian Utility Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on April 19, 2009 at 11:07 am.

It’s been a week since I started using the Nokia N85 and in that time, I’ve found a lot to like and some things that left me wanting more. This last part of my series on the Nokia N85 will focus on:

• Built in applications
• Week wrap up

Although the Nokia N85 is called a smartphone, it doesn’t quite feel as like one to me. I know it has WiFi, a GPS and a camera. But one of my personal requirements for a smartphone is an easy input mechanism. The N85 does not have a touch screen or a keyboard, so that makes things a bit difficult for entering appointments, addresses, etc.

Let’s look at some of the other applications included on this phone…

GPS

The N85 has a built in GPS receiver, that requires a view of the sky to get a fix on the satellites. This phone also includes an application called Maps. Turn by turn voice guided directions requires paying a subscription fee, but you get a 3 month free trial to test it.

When you start the Maps application, you are presented with a globe that you can roll and zoom. I was using AT&T on Edge and it was a bit slow updating. Then at one point, it got stuck and wouldn’t zoom in or out.

By pressing the Left soft key (Options), you can search on popular destinations like gas stations, rest areas, etc and get driving or walking directions to their location.

Of course you can also enter your own addresses to navigate to, or navigate to the address for one of your contacts. The turn by turn spoken directions are handy, but street names aren’t spoken. The male voice just speaks the direction to turn, not the road name.

I found the GPS to work really well, but since it can be difficult to see the display in sunlight, it can be hard to see the GPS info on the screen.

Misc. Applications

Some of the other included applications are an Adobe PDF viewer, unit converter, Zip compressor, Quickoffice and a notes app.

The Adobe Reader application doesn’t work very well on the N85. One of the more obvious reasons is that this phone has a small display, so you have to scroll around a lot to see all the document. But the other reason is that it just doesn’t work worth a hooey. I tried several simple PDFs and you can see the results in these screen shots… Notice the large blocky Black sections? That’s not in the PDF file…

When I was able to get a PDF to load correctly, the resulting image quality was jaggy. Not good.

The unit converter isn’t anything super special, but little apps like this always come in handy from time to time.

The QuickOffice suite will allow you to load Excel, Word and Powerpoint files for viewing on the N85. If you want edit or create capability, you have to pay for a license…

I didn’t have any issues with viewing Excel or Word files, but I didn’t have much luck with powerpoint files… Again, a phone with a screen of this size, really does not lend itself well to working with documents.

Wrap Up

As usual, a week of using one phone ends with me ready to try something new. I’m just never happy… what’s up with that? The Nokia N85 does have a lot going for it. I really like the size. It’s almost perfect in that respect. The 5MP camera which takes very nice macro shots is a real plus too. I can’t fault the GPS or Wifi either for that matter. But when all is said and done, it comes down to the lack of a real keyboard. That tends to be a real deal breaker for me. If I didn’t text as much as I do, the keyboard  probably would not matter to me, but I do, so it does. So there you go… Even though the Nokia N85 isn’t going to work out for me personally, I still highly recommend it as a great little full featured phone.

Filed in categories: Wireless

Tagged: N85, Nokia, S60, Smartphone, Symbian, Symbian OS Related

A Week with the Nokia N85 Smartphone – Day 6 & 7 originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on March 12, 2009 at 4:52 am.

This part of my series on the Nokia N85 will focus on:

• The camera
• Capturing video
• Listening to audio
• Playing games

Camera

The N85 has a 5 megapixel digital camera with a Carl Zeiss auto focus lens and an LED flash. To use the camera, you slide open the lens cover over the lens. You can launch the camera application, but without opening the lens cover, you’ll be unable to capture images. I learned this the hard way duh…

Opening the lens cover will unlock the phone and allow you to take pictures right away. The on-screen icons should be familiar if you’ve ever used a digital camera.

There are even several scene modes that you can use if desired.

Captured photos can be saved in albums, tagged with GPS coordinates and played as a slide show.

Images can also be emailed and individual photo details can be edited.

Here are a couple example pictures. The camera does a pretty good job. I was happy with the macro capabilities. There are two things that do annoy me about the camera though. The main thing is that it is very hard to see the display (viewfinder) outdoors in sunlight. This makes it really difficult to take pictures and videos when you can’t see what you’re trying to capture.

The other problem with the camera is the shutter button on the Right side. It is very mushy feeling and kind of hard to press. You have to press the button halfway to auto focus and then all the way to capture the picture.

Video

In addition to capturing still images, you can also use the N85 to take videos.

Like the still image display, the video display shows you the necessary information.

There is even a night shooting mode.

And White balance settings.

Capturing video suffers from the same problems that I encountered while capturing still images. Hard to see viewfinder outdoors and mushy capture button. The capture button isn’t as big a deal though as you just have to press it once to toggle the  start and stop of video recording.

The main camera on the back can capture 640 x 480 resolution, MPEG-4 video and the camera on the front records at 176 x 144 resolution using the H.263 codec.

Main camera video sample (.MP4, 11mb)

Not bad video for a cell phone.

Front camera video sample (.3GP, 96kb)

Typical grainy low resolution video.

You can watch videos on the phone and find other videos to watch too.

Music

The N85 has a nice set of audio programs too.

There’s a digital music player for your .MP3 files, a Podcast player, FM and Internet radio players and even a nifty built in FM transmitter.

Music can be copied to the microSD card and organized into folders for artists and albums. Music sounds pretty good through this phone and I like that it has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.

It’s also cool that you can turn the N85 into a music player by sliding the display down (to the Right while in landscape mode) to reveal special music control keys.

If you enjoy listening to FM radio, you can do that too. You have to plug in a set of earbuds or headphones though in order to tune stations though. It uses the headphone / earbud wire as an antenna.

If you are more inclined to listen to streaming Internet radio stations, you’re in luck. There’s an app for that too. It can stream using your phone’s data connection, or via WiFi. There is a station directory based on genre, or you can add your own station address manually.

Games

This little phone can play games too.

There is a large selection of trial games that you can install either on the device itself, or on the microSD card.

The games are pretty fun and are great for wasting time while waiting in a checkout line. I tried several, including the oldie but goodie – Tetris.

The Nokia N85 makes a great little media device with its built-camera, camcorder, music player, FM radio, streaming internet radio player and games. You definitely won’t be bored with this phone. My only complaint is with the shutter button and even that isn’t a major complaint

The next part of my series on the Nokia N85 will focus on:

• Built in applications
• Wrap up

Filed in categories: Wireless

Tagged: N85, Nokia, S60, Symbian

A Week with the Nokia N85 Smartphone – Day 3, 4 & 5 originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on March 9, 2009 at 1:00 am.

You know how it is when you get a brand new phone, you have to adjust to the location of its buttons, navigation of menus, etc. That’s what I’ve been doing the last couple of days with the Nokia N85. This part will focus on:

• First impressions of the user interface
• Making and receiving calls
• Browsing the web

User Interface

Prior to buying the N85, I had been using the N80 off and on. Even though the N80 is over 3 years old and very chunky in comparison to current phones, I have always enjoyed using it because it just plain works. There is also something about Nokia phones that has always impressed me… they seem to be able to hold a signal better than most other phones.

A quick look at these two phones shows that the N85 is a sleeker version, updated with a thinner and shinier body. While I do like the thinner body of the N85, I find myself missing the individual buttons of the N80.

As you can see, the buttons on the N80 are all seperate physical buttons, while most of the buttons on the N85 are not. What’s the big deal? I can’t really put my finger on it (pun intended). I’m probably just being picky as usual, but for me the N85 feels slightly awkward to use. Interacting with the phone feels stiff and not as comfortable as on the N80. The N85 is also a bit ‘creaky and cracky’ when pressing the various buttons.

The Navi wheel on the N85 does have two unique features. One feature is touch sensitive. You can actually turn on a feature that will allow you to slide your thumb around the Silver ‘wheel’ to scroll through menu items. Think iPod nano touch wheel and you get the idea. In reality, the feature isn’t all that great. I turned it off after a day or so playing with it because it acted a sort of hurky jerky.

The other feature of the Navi wheel is the LED that surrounds the center button. You can turn on a breathing feature that will slowly fade the White LED on and off. It’s sort of like the power LEDs on Macbooks. Just a little eye candy…

Navigating the interface is not difficult. The main menu is accessed with the dedicated menu button in the bottom Left corner that looks like two planets revolving around each other. Pressing it will present you with one screen of icons in grid view. You can also show these icons in a list, horseshoe or v-shaped list views.

Making and Receiving Calls

There are several ways to initiate a call with the N85. If you have a Bluetooth headset, you can use voice dialing.

From the home screen, you can just type in the number you wish to dial with the keypad or hold down a number on the keypad if you have 1-touch dialing set up.

Another way to dial is to look up a number from your contacts list. Go into the contacts application and start typing a name using the keypad and the list will continue to filter as you type. Then you can go into the desired contact and select the number to dial.

When a call comes in to your phone, you will see the number along with their photo if the person is in your contacts list and has a photo associated with them. You can silence the call and have the option to send a predefined text message to the caller.

When you miss a call, you’ll see a message on the display and have the ability to see details about the call.

You can also view the call log, which includes incoming, outgoing and missed call lists. Press the Green call button on any of the entries in these lists will dial the number associated with that log item.

Like other Nokia phones that I’ve tested, this one does very well at holding a signal. I haven’t had any dropped calls yet and the audio quality on both sides of conversations is as good as can be expected here (Columbus, Indiana) on the non-3G AT&T network. Am I dissing AT&T? Yeah, a little…

I did find out that you will want to extend the phone (slide open the keyboard) when you are making or receiving calls with this phone. Calls do not sound as clear (to the other party) when the phone is closed even though I believe that the microphone is built into the bottom edge of the top sliding part of the phone.

Browsing the Web

For the browsing part of this review, I mainly used the built in WiFi because it’s much faster than EDGE speeds.

Browsing with the N85 is only a so-so experience for two reasons – text input and screen size. Typing in web address can be really frustrating using the numeric keypad.

And the small display can be a challenge as well. To see the entire main column of The Gadgeteer, I had to zoom the display to 50% normal size. The image above on the Left is at 100%. The image on the Right is 50%. It’s still readable, but not really comfortable.

Rotating the display to the landscape orientation does help considerably though.

Since the N85 does not have a touchscreen, you use the Navi Wheel to move around a tiny pointer icon to click on links. It’s not hard to use, but if you’ve ever used an iPhone or iPod touch, the N85 will make you feel like you’re trying to surf with your hands tied behind your back.

I would say my main issue with surfing is that I groan every time I have to enter any text such as a user name / password or web address. Using the keypad to enter even a few words gets tedious very quickly for me.

As you noticed from the screen shots shown above, you can watch YouTube videos on the N85 as it has support for Javascript and Flash Lite. When you click a video link, it will load into Real Player. It works pretty well through WiFi.

As a phone, the N85 does a decent job and I don’t have any real complaints. I would like to be able to use voice dialing without a Bluetooth headset though *. As a web surfing device, I wouldn’t use the N85 unless that was the only device I had nearby and I didn’t need to do any intensive surfing.

The next part of my series on the Nokia N85 will focus on:

• Using the camera
• Capturing video
• Listening to audio
• Playing games

* Reader Kenneth Wong pointed out to me that you don’t need a Bluetooth headset to use the voice dialing feature. All you have to do is hold down the Right select button above the Red end key. Thanks Kenneth!

Filed in categories: Wireless

Tagged: Nokia, S60, Smartphone, Symbian

A Week with the Nokia N85 Smartphone – Day 1 & 2 originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on March 2, 2009 at 1:00 am.