It has been a while since I last wrote an N95 8GB Lebanon Ambassador report, but as I keep on repeating, I have been in bed suffering from an aching bronchitis that seems to last a while. You would think that a pharmacist would know the perfect cure for that, well think again. When nature strikes, there is no medicine that can defeat it quickly and efficiently.
Anyway, here it is, the 3rd report from my mission to get everyone introduced to the power of Nseries, where I tackle Email, YouTube and Medical Consultant. You can also read the first and second reports.
Day 6 – Checking Mail
In the last months, I have became an email junkie. I can’t go on for 2 or 3 hours without jumping in front of a computer and quickly typing “www.gmail.com”. It’s probably because of the nature of the blogger’s life, but whatever profession you have right now, requires that you fire up your inbox every couple of hours, just in case. The fact is that everyone you deal with does the same, that’s why they expect you to answer them in the next hours and not the next day nor the next week.
I don’t use Microsoft Outlook, nor Outlook Express, for the main reason that they are pc-based and I have always craved for a solution that is web-based, a solution that I can access from everywhere. That reason, along with the spam filter capabilities of Gmail, as well as its ease of use and threaded emails, made me switch completely. So i won’t be able to test any push-email solution. Fact is that everyone around me either has Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! as main email accounts, so it would have been completely out of place to demonstrate push-email to them.
My Own Impressions
Checking email on the N95 8GB is a matter of seconds: click the WLAN line on the standby screen, chose the WiFi spot, click start browsing and type gmail.com. Not more than 1 minute, add 1 more minute if you need to identify yourself in the WiFi environment. I was surprised by how fast and how convenient it was when 2 days ago, I was at the photocopying center waiting for 10 pages to be photocopied. I was done checking my email before the guy handed me the papers. I have never had a solution like this in the palm of my hands, and now that I think about it, I don’t know how can I ever go back to a mobile device without WLAN connectivity.
Letdowns? None. Simply fantastic. It does pop something related to security every now and then when entering and leaving the gmail site, nothing too annoying. It would be good if we could select and “always accept” option, but I can live with it.
People’s Impressions
I handed the N95 8GB with WLAN turned off to a couple of persons and asked them to check their emailusing WiFi. The first question was “where can I turn WiFi on?”. I guess not so many people know that WLAN is WiFi. We’re talking medical students crowd here, but still. Actually after looking at the screen for a while, almost all ended up finding the WLAN icon and clicked on it, but I was seriously disappointed that some didn’t have a clue. In both cases, after firing up the WLAN, the “Start web browsing” was the option that each and everyone selected. Being taken immediately to a screen with “http://www.” already typed made it obvious that they needed to write the address and there they were. Gmail and Yahoo users were delighted by the mobile versions that were so easy to browse through. Hotmail users got greeted with the huge hotmail page, which is something you can’t blame Nokia for. As an overall, you can’t time people for the first attempt at something, but you can see how easy it was making it work. The best sentence I heard was “I can check my mail while sitting here in the cafeteria waiting for my taouk sandwich (lebanese specialty, don’t ask) and talking with my friends? No need to go to the crowded Mediatheque or carry my laptop?! Cool!” there you go.
Day 7 – YouTube via emTube
Before I get started, the updated N95 8GB’s firmware wasn’t out by the time I demonstrated this, so I used emtube.
My Own Impressions
In little words: quite remarkable, easy to use, works like a charm. Too bad the built-in browser doesn’t support it.
People’s Impressions
YouTube still isn’t a very well known site in lebanon, we’re just getting out of the Facebook craze, and it took us a year to do so. I wonder how many years they’ll be stuck on YouTube when they find out about it. That’s just to say that viewing YouTube isn’t a necessity for people around me. Still, I demonstrated it. The ease of use of the application was something everyone noted, but the fact that it was an application didn’t leave such a good impression. Most of them had already seen the web browser experience a couple of days ago and noted how extremely well it does compared to a full desktop experience, so they were disappointed by the fact that it couldn’t handle YouTube by itself and needed a 3rd-party software to do so. The speed of download was another a major letdown, but we can’t blame Nokia for that, the WiFi network was jammed that day. Of course I told people about the updated firmware that allows native flash viewing from the browser, and that got a lot of smiles.
Day 8 – Medical Assistant
I downloaded all my ebooks to the N95 8GB. The 2 major differences between the N95 8Gb and my 3250 in regards to the same application and the same ebooks are: 8GB memory and 2.8″ screen. I can put all my ebooks without worrying about having my 512MB microSD full in seconds AND I can view and read any of them with a bigger screen and better resolution: more info on one screen and still easy to read. Also a very subjective thing I noticed was that the N95 8GB makes a better impression as a medical consultant than the 3250.
As I said, I already use my Nokia 3250 for medical information on-the-go. I have bought 6 great medical ebooks for mobireader: A to Z Drug Facts, ADR, Taber’s Cyclopedic medical Dictionary, Guide to Off-Label presciptions, Homeopathy, Differential Diagnosis. Along with some other free medical ebooks, and a couple of iSilo ebooks, I am able to cover the basic knowledge. Over the 8-9 months that I have had my ebooks bought, I have received a lot of remarks concerning them. In a world where the main use of a “Nokia” is to make calls or sms and the main use of a PDA is to “check medical information”, I have always been provoked to prove that a Nokia can be a PDA.
So when someone around me says the name of a medication or a disease, you can always see me delving into my pocket, taking my Nokia out and doing a less-than-20-second search. It is far more convenient than any other solution I know because I have tested WM for it and found it slower, much slower. Of course my WM device remains here for the rescue with the great 3rd-party medical freeware, but it is never my first solution. Teachers have come to notice “my 2nd brain” and many have asked me what device do I have: when saying it is a Nokia, I get a lot of “oh, they can do that?”. Many have also got used to asking me to check something out for them, during classes or hospital rotations: “Rita, can you see the generic name of that drug?” or “Rita, can you see if x drug does y side effect?”. It is great to see a small device like this being asked to answer questions like that. Of course we don’t base life-threatning decisions only on it, mainly because the ebooks date 2-3 years, for those there’s the online Pubmed, but we do answer simple questions.My main grief over the Symbian platform over the months has been that it doesn’t support lots of native medical software, and by software I mean real software, not ebooks. Anyone that reads Dotsisx knows that, and I keep on repeating it. Maybe I am heard, maybe not. But lately, Skyscape released their reader for S60, a much welcomed move, because they host many many must-haves for any respected student in the medical field. I haven’t been able to try it, but I am sure it’s great. I would like to see more medical software providers go the S60 3rd route, I would like to be able to throw my WM device in the garbage because frankly I am sick and tired of it, and not regret any software because they are all supported on Symbian. I would like to see S60 3rd get the “professional-platform” recognition that it needs in order to provide software for not only the medical field, but also architects, lawyers, graphic designers, and more. I bet the platform can perform so much more than the invisible limitations people are drawing for it and I want to see what exactly it can do. Skyscape shows the first step on the ladder, please someone take us higher!
What do you think about the profession-axed software I am asking for? Do you work in any field where you’ve seen some colleagues take out a Palm or a WM device to perform a professional action that you couldn’t do over your Nokia? Do you believe these profession-axed software will ever exist on a symbian and that the platform can handle them? Or do we need more processor, more RAM, and many other hardware improvements to go with the software?
