Thursday was the first day in a week that I had a reliable internet connection, other than with my Nokia N95-3 on AT&T’s HSDPA network. If you think I’m kidding, check my Jaiku feed. I’m clearly not. I left my apartment on Friday morning for a weekend trip to Houston/Galveston, and came home to a massive AT&T Uverse outage, which lasted until Thursday evening at about 10pm.
Luckily, I had my Nokia N95-3 with an unlimited data plan, and I used every single feature on it throughout the weekend. Here’s the full rundown of usage:
Friday
Friday I got in the car, with Christina driving, under the assumption that I could easily tether my N95 to my laptop, as I’ve done on random occasions before. However, for some reason, my laptop decided to throw up a PPP error whenever I tried to connect. I know it wasn’t the phone, because my Nokia N810 had no issues tethering for access. I quickly pulled up Google search on my N95 and found Joikuspot, to give that a go. Unfortunately, my laptop wasn’t a fan of the connection, and thus, I was left to blog offline on my laptop and use the connection on my N95 with the N810 serving backup duty.
At this point, I was really glad I’d setup my Gmail IMAP on my N95. I was able to easily keep up with email (which is becoming an important task, with my new S60 position), as well as open numerous attachments such as Excel and Word documents.
Upon arriving in Galveston, I used Google Maps on my N95 to determine the quickest way to Christina’s new job, as she had to do all her paperwork, and I used the GPS system on my N810 to find the closest WiFi (Starbucks, natch), even though it turned out that my laptop didn’t care much for the T-Mobile HotSpot there, either (stupid laptop). I then used Google Maps to get back where I needed to pick Christina up at, and called the Realtor, as we were supposed to meet her that afternoon to check out a few houses.
More Google Maps goodness as I-45 was completely blocked with traffic, so we took some backroads to find the house that the Realtor had emailed me the address of. Great success. We checked out the houses, and then I got an SMS from an old friend, to meet at a restaurant downtown. On a whim, I checked to see if Nokia Maps 2.0 could get me there, but unfortunately, Maps thought I was 3,000+ miles away, so it was useless. Back to Google Maps, we successfully found Nikos Nikos greek restaurant in downtown Houston.
Friday evening, as we went to check into a hotel, I discovered that I’d left my Drivers License at home, which we needed to get on the cruise ship, where our friends were getting married (the real reason behind the trip). Thus, at 10pm, we got a refund for the hotel room and hopped in the truck to drive 5hrs back to Fort Worth, grab my passport (for photo ID), and drive the same 5hrs back to Houston, to meet the Realtor again at 10am. Throughout the night, I used Jaiku on my N95 to keep myself awake, giving me active conversation and whatnot. I also used QuickOffice to read a few documents that I’d gotten via email and hadn’t had a chance to really read yet.
Saturday
Saturday was more of the same. TONS of email (odd for a weekend), and lots of Google Maps while looking for the various houses we were shopping. I kept up with the world a bit using Jaiku and Google Reader Mobile on my N95, and email. More Google Maps usage to find the hotel in Galveston, and I used the camera of my N95 to snap some pics of the house we fell in lust with, and let ShoZu pop those on Share on Ovi for me.
Sunday
Sunday I had WiFi in the hotel, but with alot of friends around, wasn’t online much. A bit of email here and there was all. Monday was the wedding, and that morning I used Google Maps to find an auto parts store to get new windshield wiper blades, as there was rain in the forecast. Once on the boat for the wedding, I jaiku’d a bit and then got a voicemail via SMS thanks to Spinvox, alerting me that there was a package stuck in customs, and I needed to give them a bit more information. Called back directly from the number in the SMS, which was really convenient.
As we left the ship, I got a few more emails, one of which included a few Word docs that I was able to pull up on my N95, read, and edit a bit before sending back. Easy peasy, all integrated.
Once I got back to Fort Worth and discovered that my AT&T Uverse was hosed, I spend a while working to get Joikuspot running with my laptop, and was eventually successful. I spent most of the next three days with an offline laptop and my N95 checking email and keeping up with RSS/IM.
You may recall last year, I decided to verify Nokia’s tagline for the N95 as ‘it’s what computers have become’ with my PC-Free For 30 Days attempt. After 7 days of an unconnected laptop, I can safely say that even now, my N95 is fully up to the task, if need be, of being my laptop. The only thing that I need to do that I couldn’t would be cropping images to a specific size for this blog, and my work at MobileBurn, since they use a different backend system.
What types of usage are you putting your S60 device through? Do you really use things that ONLY an S60 handset could do (for me, that’s the Jaiku client, and taking decent pictures) or could you likely get by with another OS, if need be?
