Hello everyone! My name is Nokia E71 and I belong to Rita El Khoury. She’s a very good owner and I can tell that she likes me a lot, she also treats me right, well, most of the time because sometimes she won’t pay attention and I end up falling on the floor. I know she has already told you a lot about me and about the stuff she uses me for, but I decided to write a diary of my daily routine to show you how good of a companion I can be to her, and how all the applications, accessories and tips she has told you about can come together and be useful in one full day. Here’s my story.
I spend most of the night charging up my battery so that I don’t give up on Rita during the following day: she’s a very extreme user and she does tons of things, so I need to be fully ready when she wakes up. Also, during the night, I keep the IMAP messaging client running so that she easily knows if she has new email when she wakes up.
Talking about waking up, I ring the alarm at 8am sharp, every week day. She has chosen a nice Lebanese prayer as an alarm sound, and I enjoy playing it every morning. Some days, Rita will be already awake at 8am, other days, she’ll be so tired, she’ll roll in her small bed and moan before turning the alarm off. Also, at 8am, Best Profiles will force me to switch to the General profile, and will make me launch the java Gmail client, Gravity, Handy Weather and RBC Ministries’ Our Daily Bread. Rita will then take me and read the daily devotional from ODB, close it, after which she’ll switch to Gmail to check her email and act upon most of it: reply, forward, archive, delete… She’ll then switch to Handy Weather to see what kind of clothes she’ll wear today, then to Gravity and check to see if there are new Twitter @replies or direct messages to her. Sometimes, she’ll take a few minutes to read the latest tweets, reply to some of them or check the links embedded.
Rita leaves home to the lab at approximately 9:15 am. She manually switches the profile to Outdoor, which triggers Best Profiles and forces me to turn bluetooth on, open the Music Player and mobbler. I’ll scan and find that the Jabra BT3030 headset is visible on bluetooth and connect to it. This is when Rita switches to the music player, opens a playlist (usually the one called Favorites) and presses play. I’ll start pumping her 6.5GB worth of music to her ears through the Jabra headset, as well as scrobbling her tracks to Last.Fm through mobbler. During her 50 minutes of commute, Rita will do one of 4 things: either launch the web browser to catch on Google Reader items, or open QuickOffice and start hammering blog posts in a new Word document, or use Nimbuzz and Windows Live Messenger to chat with her friends, or open CorePlayer and play a Heroes episode for example. Some days, she does a bit of everything at the same time. Oh and by the way, she launches most of these applications using a coded set of keys that only an application called CuteKeys understands, like for Nimbuzz she uses Chr + N. She baffles me.
When we get to the lab, Rita will press the mute key (between the volume ones) to pause the music player. This button is not supposed to do that, but there’s an application called MagicKey that teaches me new functions for some keys, I like it because it opens me up with new possibilities. Also, when we arrive to the lab, I will use the GSM cell info to know that we’re there and that I’m supposed to become Silent. Best Profiles helps me do that and so I’ll turn bluetooth off, close the Music Player and mobbler, and bring Gmail back to the foreground. This is when usually the most important part of my day comes. During the 8 to 10 hours that we stay in the lab, Rita will keep me on her desk or in her white coat’s pocket, ready for attack. Of course, she will pick me up every now and then to refresh the Gmail app and Gravity, or to open Google Reader in the browser, but that’s not my crucial role. See, Rita is in medical research working on molecular biology and cancer, and she’ll have missions for me during the day, so she’ll use cCalcPro to do the calculations she needs for her experiments, Mobireader to check some drug or medical information, or the web browser to find articles on the mobile pubmed site and open them in Adobe Reader, or to find some complicated lab research terms on Google. All is not work at the lab though, and some days, she’ll quickly open Shazam ID to identify a song playing on the radio there. It’s always exciting to see the looks on the faces of her lab colleagues when she picks me up and puts me near the radio for a few seconds: they know that I’ll find the song name and artist, but they always wonder how I do that. It’s a secret *hush*.
After she is finally done with her lab work, which can be anytime between 6pm and 9pm, Rita will head back home. Our commute routine from the lab back to the dorm is the same as the morning one (Outdoor profile, bluetooth on, music player and mobbler, chatting, rss, posting…) and when we get home, I also use the GSM cell triangulation with Best Profiles to switch the profile back to Silent, turn bluetooth off, close the music player and mobbler.
At home, Rita will usually first look at my battery status: depending on the days, I still have 3 to 5 bars left, so she’ll leave me be without charging. If she has finished writing one of her posts on QuickOffice, she’ll want to send it over to her computer. Before, she used to use bluetooth for that, but now, she’s been using GSpaceMobi to upload it to her Gmail account and catch it over on the computer. Some days, she’ll also use bluetooth or GSpaceMobi to send me installation files of new applications, games or themes. She installs a lot of those. I guess it’s because she’s a blogger and she has to stay updated on everything new. Then we might spend an hour or so exploring the new apps, or playing an old game, like for example right now, she’s fond of a very cute bubble game that she’s been aching to have on S60 for ages (- Ed note: story later). When she likes a game or an app, she makes me use Screenshot to take photos of my screen, it’s funny because I feel like I’m being my own paparazzi. Some other days, Rita might put me on the Brando desk stand which is comfortable and allows me to charge up. She then switches my Connection from EDGE-only (a trick she has been using to keep my battery alive all day) to Dual Mode, and opens Real Player to start streaming TV over 3G. I’m always fascinated by the fact that I can play TV stations, heh, take that big black boxes, I can do it too and I fit in a pocket!
Of course there are days when Rita uses me to take pictures, but I know that I’m not her favorite camera. I try to do my best, but I can’t help but see in violet through my camera lens. Anyway, if she took something worth posting, she’ll upload it to Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and Share on Ovi through Shozu. Also, Rita is a big fan of Google Maps: she uses it almost 3 to 4 times a week to find places around Paris, and to keep her location updated on Latitude. She also uses an application called Metro every now and then to find the best ways to go from one place to another using public transport.
Now you might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned a thing about calls or SMS. Actually Rita doesn’t do lots of calls or messages, but she’s been teaching me new tricks to call cheaply back home to Lebanon, as well as send free international SMS, but those are tricks that I’ll tell you some other day.
At around 11pm or midnight, Rita will finally decide to go to sleep. She’ll simply close most of the applications running (she leaves Gmail and Gravity), and she’ll plug the charger in. Then I’m off for a few good hours of rest so that I can be ready to rock the next day. That was my daily routine as Rita’s companion during weekdays, which is pretty different from the weekends when her usage is very inconsistent and unpredictable. I could start telling you about it, but the server on Symbian-Guru isn’t big enough to fit a story *that* long ;) .
