And yet it started so promisingly. At the start of 2010, I was winding down a project and had dreams of taking a few less challenging projects for the next couple of months. Hence, the absolute flurry of blog posts in January 2010 (for me at least ).  And while the months following were less intense, what followed after was a lot busier than I would’ve imagined.

From May to September I spent 95% of my time in 4 African countries and Dubai. The work was challenging but  the team and I had an absolute blast. We designed a private cutting edge internal cloud for our client and this led me to change my primary focus from Technical Architecture to Infrastructure Strategy.

So for the next year or so, I’ll be focussing around the Business Value of Next Generation Infrastructures.  And, time permitting of course, I hope to blog more about what I’ve learnt. Not to say that I will completely ignore other interests such as Silverlight, WPF and mobile phones.

Here’s to a more productive 2011!

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These are my high level requirements for the the first version:

1. Keep track of all risks on  project
2. Keep track of all issues on a project
3. Upload a Microsoft project mpp file and create timesheets for resources to fill out
4. Keep track of all resources on a project
5. Calculate all reporting metrics that required by my company
6. Keep track of all to-do lists
7. Keep track of project milestones
8. Have a beautiful interface.

Some of these requirements will be a challenge for me. Especially 3 and 8. I’m not sure whether you can interface to a mpp file and beautiful design is not my forte. I’m very much a child of the “6-six shades of gray windows GUI” age.

The primary aim is to have a small project management aid on projects which are too small to justify the use of Microsoft Project Server or tools such as Clearcase, Clearquest and Sharepoint. Usually, on small projects, Microsoft project and excel would be the tools of the trade.  But tracking history on an excel sheet is hard and capturing time on Microsoft Project when you have a small to medium size team is time consuming.

I could have web apps such as basecamp but its not easy to get the necessary permission if you work for a large corporation. Besides,  where is the fun in that?

This will be a personal project so I’m not bounding myself to any time constraints. If this year is anything like last year, I will have very little free time available so committing to a date is pointless.

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• So what happened to those 2009 goals? (2)
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Looking back at those goals has also given me a chance to reflect on the past year. This time last year I was starting out on a new project as the technical stream lead for a SAP Human Capital Module (HCM) implementation project. My role on this project was the main reason why I have not been able to blog frequently and complete some of my goals. If you look back at the frequency of my posts, you will see that my last blog entry was in July 2009 which was right about the time we had our first go-live. Since then, we’ve had 3 more go-lives, each one more intense than the previous one. The project will hopefully be ending at the end of this month and I’ve got my fingers crossed that my next project will allow some time for  more frequent blog updates.

Enough of the pre-amble, here’s an update of my 2009 goals.

Goal 1: Increase touch-typing speed to 50 wpm with and accuracy of 98% or more by June 2009.

It took a little longer than expected but I’m now comfortably typing at an average of 52 wpm with an accuracy of 95% to 98% for non-technical writing. For technical writing this drops down to about 38 wpm with an accuracy of 90% to 94%, mainly due to the all those shift characters I never spent much time on. For anyone trying to improve their own touch typing speed, I highly recommend http://www.typingweb.com/. I haven’t used the site in a couple of months now, but I will be returning to brush up on the shift characters.

Goal 2:  Learn the WPF Framework by March 2009.

I had a lot of fun with this one. If you familiar with windows GUI programming the traditionally way, WPF GUI’s can be mind blowing. It’s easy to create really stunning interfaces but equally easy to create bloated and ugly ones. I’ve decided to put all that I’ve learnt to good use and create a little piece of software that will assist me in some of the more tedious activities I have to perform in my current role as technical stream lead. More on that in a later post though.

Goal 3: Learn Symbian C++ by April 2009.

This one never really got of the ground mainly due to my interest in the symbian platform falling away right around the time I got myself an iPod touch. The simplicity and ease of use of the iPod touch blew me away. Nokia have real challenge on their hands if they are to remain market leaders.  While I have no plans to replace my Nokia E71 with an Apple iPhone just yet, I can see myself seriously moving away from Nokia in 7 or 8 months time when I renew my contract. In a later post I’ll give my impressions of both platforms.

Goal 4: Improve my memory  (by learning memory mnemonics and other techniques) by September 2009.

Another goal that I lost interest in. I wasn’t really prepared for the amount of effort I would have to put in to make this a reality. I might revisit it this year though.

Goal 5: Create 2 robots, one simple and one intermediate, by December 2009

This is something I still want to achieve. I never really got around to it mainly due to amount of time I spent at work. I will definitely be revisiting it this year.

Scorecard

Looking at the above, it seems as my goal achieved rating for the year is a measly 2 out of 5. I will have to try harder this year or maybe make my goals more realistic. Lifehacker recently posted an interesting  article on goal tracking tools and http://www.joesgoals.com/ seems promising. I’m looking at using it when formulating my 2010 goals but more on that later.

Happy new year!

Related posts

• Some of my goals for 2009 and how I hope to achieve them (0)
• Increasing my Touch-Typing Speed – Kickoff (1)
• Beginning Development with Silverlight 2 (1)
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Some of you might be wondering why I’m using Silverlight 2 and not 3. Simple.  I’ve been playing around with Silverlight before version 3 was released. I’ll upgrade to version 3 once a good reference book on it is released.

What is Silverlight?

Silverlight 2 is a cross-browser, cross platform browser platform that implements a subset of the .Net 3.5 framework.  It aims to deliver advanced graphics and multimedia to enable Rich Internet Applications, or RIAs, for the web. Because its .Net based, you can develop Silverlight 2 applications in any .Net language including C#, VB and IronPython. The user interface can be developed in Visual Studio 2008 or Expression Blend 2. The user interface is defined using a declarative XML user interface mark-up language called XAML. A more complete version of  XAML is used to declare the user interface in WPF applications so the learning curve for Silverlight 2 should be almost flat for developers who understand WPF.

What do you need to develop Silverlight Applications?

I use Visual Studio 2008 as my primary development environment and all that is needed to enable Silverlight development is the Silverlight Tools for Visuals Studio 2008 add-on.

This installs the following:

• Silverlight developer runtime
• Silverlight SDK
• Silverlight Tools

A full list of what you need to get started is on the silverlight.net site. The beauty of it is you can download the free version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or the free Visual Web Developer and get all the tools you need to develop Silverlight applications. This, in my opinion, is what makes developing for the Microsoft platform so much more appealing than say Adobe development. Nokia has taken this further and released their entire Symbian development environment (Carbide) for free.

Examples of Silverlight Applications

There some really cool examples of Silverlight Applications out there. Here are some examples that I’ve come across.

1. Silverlight games – These are mainly Silverlight 1 games but the cool thing is that most of them have the source code available.
2. Microsoft’s Tim Sneath also has a list of Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 1.1 Applications
3. Silverlight.net has a really great gallery Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 2 applications. A lot of these come with source code and you can download and host some of them on your own site.
4. Scott Hanselman has also been collecting links to Silverlight sample applications.
5. Shawn Wildermuth has some great links on his site
6. Laurent Bugnion has a great blog on tips for Silverlight development. Laurent is also the author of the Silverlight 2 Unleashed book that I bought.

Silverlight as a competitor to Adobe Flash

Adobe flash is probably more pervasive on the web at the moment than Silverlight.  My reasons for starting in Silverlight rather flash is due to my development background. My language progression has been from C to C++ to Java and then C#. If I had started with JavaScript, I probably would prefer flash as the Actionscript language is very similar.  The biggest barrier for me is the cost of the development tools. With Silverlight, you can download Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition and Silverlight SDK for free. I have not been able to find  a free version of the flash development tools.

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These are some of the blogs I’ve been following:

1. Sites on Electronics, Robotics and Hardware Hacking

1. Make Magazine – The premier hobbyist blog. With this in your RSS reader, you don’t need any other blog. This blog is updated 20-50 times daily so if you haven’t looked at the feed for a few days, you’ll end up with 500 unread posts.

2. Symbian Programming

1. www.SymbianResources.com – General news info

2. www.Symbian-Freak.com – General news on Symbian

3. www.forum.nokia.com  – Nokia’s developmental forum

3. WPF Blogs

Way to many to list here. I imported the opml file for “WPF Disciples” group of blogs as well as “WPF Microsoft” and “WPF Community”

4. General Life Hacks

1. www.lifehacker.com – Using technology to improve your life

2. zenhabits.net – A blog on goal setting and motivation

3. www.persistanceunlimited.com – Cool blog on motivation and life skills.

These are just some of the blogs I follow. The full list can be found in the following OPML file.

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1. Create a new a new theme and in the process learn something about CSS and web design.
2. Move my blog from the free wordpress.com hosting site and onto a paid host and in the process learn something about website hosting.

The result is the site you viewing now. Not too shabby for a first attempt. If I don’t say so myself.

Web Design with CSS and XHTML

I was getting a bit tired of the my current  theme at the time and thought the time was ripe for a bit of a change. But none of the free wordpress themes I found appealed to me. I wanted a theme that was easy on the eyes, had fluid columns and was widget ready. After trawling through hundreds of themes, I decided to try my hand at creating one myself. And the more I thought about it, the more excited I became. The prevailing wisdom on the web though, is that website design is not for amateurs. You need to consider SEO, readability, colours, and in some countries their are laws on accessibility as well. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

First, I needed a good book.

I’ve always loved the Head First series of books with their fun and witty format. I tend to stick with books that tell story and have lots of colourful pictures. Luckily for me, they have a book on web design.

Head First Web Design (A Brain Friendly Guide) ISBN: 0596520301 ISBN-13: 9780596520304

Of course, even with a book that’s entertaining to read, I still get a little impatient try things out. So after  reading a first few chapters, I started sketching out a few designs. I settled on a three column design with a header across the page and a menu below that.

Once I had and idea of what I wanted, it was time to put the design into practice. That’s where the Head First book falls short. It discusses web design but it does teach you website creation. Head First has a different book on that.

Luckily, a friend loaned me a book on CSS.

Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter) ISBN: 0321525566 ISBN-13: 9780321525567

As with the previous book, I went through the first few chapters and learnt the basics of CSS. The syntax was easier and intuitive. But when it came to advanced layout techniques, it was a nightmare. Browser incompatibilities, box model, quirks mode -  I could not get the hang of it fast enough. But Mathew James Taylor does have the hang of it. He has tutorials on how to create quirks mode free layouts in CSS. I tried to following one of them but there’s some serious dark magic in there. So I ended up using his 3 column liquid layout instead.

Once the CSS was in place, it was just a matter of playing around with colours and tweaking things here and there, referring to the two books above where necessary, and converting the final design to a wordpress theme.

When I was satisfied I had a good enough design (for me at least) , I started looking for a place to host the site.

Web Hosting with Servage

You never quite realize how many web hosting companies are out there until you do a search for one. And each one of those companies have there fair share of horror stories. So the best way to find a reliable hosting site is probably word of mouth. A friend of mine was hosting his website for the past two years on Servage and had no issues. I decided to give them a try.

Servage offers the following

• 750 GB of Space
• 7500 GB Monthly Data Transfer
• Unlimited emails
• Free domain or domain transfer
• Unlimited domains
• Autoinstaller for the most popular web scripts

And many more features you can read about on their website.

Once I had my account, I used the one click autoinstaller feature to install wordpress and setup the mysql database. WordPress version 2.6.2 was installed so I used the wordpress update feature to update the installation to version 2.7.  Simple an easy!

Next, I exported my blog from the wordpress.com site and imported into my http://asifhamza.com site. All the content was now on a different server, but there were still a few issues that needed to be ironed out.

The Case of the Missing Sidebars

For some reason my sidebars were not visible on the new site. After some fruitless googling I finally figured out the problem. My custom wordpress theme had a file called SideBar.php which describes how to render widget ready sidebars. The sidebars where showing up when I tested on my windows vista laptop since Windows filenames are not case-sensitive. But my site was hosted on Linux where filenames are case-sensitive. The wordpress theme engine was looking for sidebar.php not SideBar.php. A quick file rename solved that problem.

The Case of the Missing Images

The second problem I found was that all the images were still linking back to the old site instead of the new even though they had been successfully imported. The old links were still embedded in the relevant posts. While I could have gone to each post and manually edit the urls, I used an Update Urls from Velvet Blues. 20 seconds later, the problems was solved.  As an added bonus, I found some helpful articles on blogging, wordpress and web design on their site.

The  Case of the Unco-operative Permalinks

The final problem I encountered was that my permalinks were no longer working. From experience I know that this is usually caused by the apache mod_rewrite plug-in not being enabled on the web server. A quick search on the Servage’s wiki and I found out that mod_rewrite could be enabled by enabling .htaccess support. All links were working within the hour.

Now that everything is up and running, I think it looks pretty good. Not matter what anyone else says! I spent the next week signing up for Google analytics and Google webmaster tools and looking for nice plug-ins. I also ending up with a better appreciation of the power of CSS. Its amazing what you can do with xml and a stylesheet and I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface.

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I must admit that I was taken in by all the negative press surrounding Windows Vista. So when my company decided to upgrade my laptop OS to Vista, I tried everything humanely possible to try and stay on Windows XP. But they wouldn’t budge. And so,  with great trepidation I started using Vista and found…………….I actually like it. It does take getting used to if you, like me, have been using XP for going on 5 years, but I haven’t experienced any of the horror stories I’ve read about. There have been times where I’ve run into a problem that had me stumped, like copying my Sysinternals applications to the program files directory and not finding them there afterwards (tip: Learn about Vista’s Virtual Store ) but on the whole it does feel a lot snappier than XP.

Installing Windows 7 from a bootable CD

My current OS is Windows XP SP3, so to install windows 7, I had to perform a clean install as the upgrade option only works if you upgrading from Vista. This meant spending a night backing up everything on my machine. Once that was done I could tell the installer to format my hard drive and perform a clean install.

That’s when my problems started. The installer copied the files across but then got stuck on 0% at the expanding files stage. Finally it came back with an obscure error message: Error 0×80070001.

A quick search on Google for “Windows 7 install error 0×80070001” did not provide any useful information. The closest I found was someone advising to burn the image on 1x speed in the burner as its most likely a DVD burn problem. Another guy suggested removing all connected USB peripherals. None of these solutions worked.

I double checked the SH1 hash of the downloaded ISO to make sure the ISO was valid. It was. Oh crap! This must be Redmond punishment for believable all the negative Vista press.

After sleeping on the problem for a night, I came up with the idea if installing via a 4GB memory stick.

Installing Windows 7 from a bootable flash drive

Modern BIOS’s have the ability to boot via a memory stick. Mine doesn’t. But I only found that out after  I had created a bootable memory stick by following these instructions. I created the bootable flash drive from Vista as no additional download was necessary. That’s when I found out I my BIOS did not support USB as a bootable device.

“No problem”, I naively thought. “I’ll just get the latest BIOS firmware for my motherboard”.  Luckily for me, the latest firmware did support booting from USB. And they provided flash file for Vista and DOS. And that’s when I realized that with no OS on my machine ( the windows 7 installer had formatted by main partition), there was no way I could run a firmware upgrade.  Double crap!

“No problem”, I naively thought again. “I’ll just create DOS bootable CD”. That was easier said than done. All the methods to create a bootable DOS cd just did not seem to work under Vista. And creating a Vista bootable disk was out of the question since I did not have the original Vista cd  (this being a company laptop).

That’s when I came upon the a truly brilliant idea.

Installing Windows 7 from a bootable flash drive and a bootable CD

When I tried to install Windows 7 from a bootable CD, I noticed that there was a repair option. You could get to a command prompt via this option. Would it be possible to access the flash drive via the command prompt? Yes we you can! So I popped in the flash drive and a short while later …….

Okay so the above screenshot is not actually taken from my machine (got it from the Microsoft site) but it looks pretty much the same. Except for the weird date.

I’ve been using Windows 7 for about a month now and its remarkably stable for a beta. The only issues I’ve been experiencing is a missing Canon Pixma Ip5000 driver and a scrambled image whenever the UAC dialogue pops up. The canon driver is a problem on my laptop as well while the scrambled image seems to be a common Nvidia Vista driver problem with certain cards in 7 series range.

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I must confess, I started learning to touch-type sometime in November 2008. But I had fallen off the wagon at the beginning of January. To compensate and motivate myself to keep at it, I decided to make this one of my top goals for 2009.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’m using typingweb as my teaching tool of choice. I’ve tried various touch-typing software,both online and offline, but somehow I just felt comfortable with typingweb. My results are posted below.

I’m not sure how the accuracy is calculated but as you can see, I was making steady progress until the end of December 2008. After that, I hovered around the 25 wpm mark.

After 2 months, I’ve noticed the following:

1. Aiming for accuracy is much better than aiming for speed. If you try and type too fast, your error rate increases and your frustration as well. Concentrate on typing accurately, by using the assigned finger for the respective letter.  Speed comes naturally as your muscles memorise the keys.
2. Constant and regular practice is a must. You need to build some muscle memory and this can only occur with regular practice. My feeling is that the minimum you could do is 3 times a week. I’m aiming for everyday.
3. Practice sessions should not be too long. You fingers start get tired after while. I find that taking a short 3 minute break after every 15-20 minutes helps maintain accuracy. I try and keep each session to a maximum of 1 hour
4. Posture and relaxed finger placement is important. I’ve found that I make significant improvements when I’m relaxed and sitting correctly. My error rate seems to increase as my posture deteriorates. I wonder if expert level typists have this problem as well.
5. The lessons can be frustrating but it does get better. As with all learning experiences, the first few lessons seem very difficult and you wonder if you ever going to master it. I remember this exact feeling when I was learning to drive a car. But, If you keep it at, it gets better.  I found that the second week was much more enjoyable than the first.
6. Review your problem keys.  You need to be constructive in your learning. Doing the same mistakes over and over again, and you’ll never  make real progress. I find that specific letter combinations give me the most problems as opposed to individual letters. For example, my error rate increases when the word has an “i” and a “u” in it.

At some point I should actually start touch typing for my everyday documents. I hope to do this when my speed is consistently 30 wpm and above.

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• Some of my goals for 2009 and how I hope to achieve them (0)
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The Importance of Setting Goals

One of the last tasks in my final year at university was to create my 1 year, 5 year and 10 year goals. We had an entire course on life skills and  goal setting. I remember the lecturer drumming into our heads  that goals had to be created using S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) principles.

Recently, while doing some spring cleaning, I came across the page on which my goals were written. Surprisingly, most of those goals came true. Even the ten year ones. This goal setting thing must really work!

So I decided to write down my goals for 2009 and track them throughout the year. These are not all my goals. Some goals I prefer to keep private.

Before listing my goals, let me recap the S.M.A.R.T principles.

Goal Setting Principles

1 . Specific

Avoid goals that are vague or ambiguous. Goals should be clear and specific. For example, if you plan to lose weight, a goal of “I need to lose weight this year” is not specific enough. A better way of stating it is “I need to lose 10 kg’s in 5 months this year”.

Your goals should also be stated in the positive. The way you think about a goal makes a huge difference.

2. Measurable

In order to track progress to your goal, it needs to be measurable. Being able to measure progress keeps you motivated. Some goals are easier to measure than others though. For example, it’s easy to track your weight loss but much more difficult to track improvements in personal relationships. 

3. Attainable

This means that the goal should be realistic and achievable. Planning to lose 50 kilo’s in 1 week through diet and exercise is clearly not achievable. Planning to be richer than Warren Buffet within a year is not attainable if you relying on blind luck.

4. Relevant

A good goal should be relevant and meaningful to you. This helps with motivation. If the goal is not relevant, why are you doing it? Look at each goal in your list and ask yourself this question. Why do you want to do it? What difference would it make in your life if you achieved this goal?

5. Time-bound

Each goal should have a deadline associated with. This creates a sense of urgency and helps to weed out procrastination.

My goals for 2009

Now that we have that out of the way, lets list my goals in no particular order.

1. Increase Touch Typing speed to 50 wpm, with an accuracy of 98%, by June 2009

After read this blog post on Coding Horror, I was inspired to learn touch typing. That post gives you a whole host of reasons why you should be touch typing. I’m hoping that an increased typing speed will make frequent blog posts a breeze.

I’ve already signed up for a free online touch typing course. My typing speed before starting these lessons was 48 wpm with a hunt and peck method of typing and 16 wpm using all 10 fingers. I plan to reach a speed of  50 wpm touch typing with an accuracy of 98% by June 2009.

2. Learn Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) by March 2009

WPF, Microsoft’s latest technology for GUI’s, is a quantum leap ahead of the UI technology that came before it. In a couple of years, most if not all windows applications will be using WPF for their interfaces.

WPF is a paradigm shift from the usual method of designing interfaces. Instead of creating a GUI by dragging and dropping visual components onto a canvass, you create the interface entirely in XML. Sounds cumbersome, but works surprisingly well in practice.  My aim is to teach myself WPF by March 2009 and start writing those applications I always wanted to write.

An example of the type of interfaces I want to create can be seen in the photoSuru application – a screenshot of which is shown above.

3. Learn Symbian C++ by April 2009

The closest I got to  writing a mobile application was a small “Hello World” application. This year I plan to make use of the processing power of the Nokia E71 and write all those mobile apps I really want to write. By April 2009, I should have a clear understanding of the programming stack.

4. Improve my memory  (by learning memory mnemonics and other techniques) by September 2009

I’ve always been fascinated by magic and mental-ism. My  two favourite performers are Derren Brown and Marc Salem. So it was natural that I would end up buying the books they wrote ( in the vain hope of becoming a master mentalist just like them).

Realistically though, I don’t even come close to mastering the necessary skills mentioned in these books. Mainly since I have the attention span of a goldfish. But the memory trick mentioned in both books does seem like a worthwhile and practical skill to have. So my 4th goal is to improve my memory using the techniques from these books. I  want to be able to memorise half a deck of cards by glancing at each card once. I should be able to this by September 2009.

5.  Create 2 robots, one simple and one intermediate, by December 2009

Nothing beats the satisfaction of creating something that makes other people go “Wow!”. Well at least for me.

I plan to create one BEAM robot and one Arduino based robot before December 2009. Nothing fancy and innovative. I will mostly copy designs other people have come up with.

And in conclusion

Well, there you have it. My goals are a mixture of most of my interests.  There’s some personal development, some programming and some hardware hacking. I’ll be using this blog to track progress and this should help with last years goal which was ” I will blog more frequently!”.

Related posts

• So what happened to those 2009 goals? (2)
• Increasing my Touch-Typing Speed – Kickoff (1)

Its that time in the life of my phone contract when I start to think about what phone to upgrade to. In the past I would start looking at whatever new Nokia phones and pick the ones that had all or most of the features I want.

These are the features I wanted for my last upgrade, roughly a 2 years ago:

1. Ability to write custom applications
2. WiFi
3. 3G HSDPA
4. 2 MegaPixel camera as a minimum
5. Memory Card
6. Video Calling

With the N80, I got all these features with the exception of HSDPA and perhaps the ability to create custom application. Yes you can create your own applications, but you now have to contend with platform security and certificates where as on previous Nokia phones this was not an issue. Anyone who has tried to install freeware on an OS 9 Nokia, will know what I’m talking about. You will have to sign the application yourself, which is beyond the average user. Programming the phone is still a nice to have though since I may want to, at some point or another, write a symbian app.

My list for my next phone is similar to the one above, with the following additions

1. GPS
2. Enterprise Email Integration
3. Minimum of 16 million colours
4. A responsive OS
5. No moving parts

4 and 5 above were as a result of my frustration with the N80.

I narrowed my selection down to the Nokia E71, Blackberry Bold and the Apple iPhone.

With all the hype surrounding the iPhone, it seemed an attractive prospect, but with no forward camera it lacked support for Video Calling. I’ve come to rely on this feature more than I thought I would. Also, feedback  from iPhone users, it seems there’s not support for basic features such as copy and paste, MMS and sending of business cards. Most of these deficiencies are probably solvable with a firmware update but they don’t seem to be high up on Apple’s priority list. I also did not like the fact the battery is not removable.

That left the Bold and the E71. The Bold has a much better screen resolution than the E71, and I was sorely tempted to go with it,  but in the end I decided to stick with Nokia. Especially after reading Joel Spolsky’s review of the E71.  Nokia also has a lot more applications available than Blackberry.

The E71 is quite simply, the best Nokia I’ve owned. I love the feature which show’s the contacts as you type on the home screen. Another plus for me (and one I have not seen mentioned on any review site) is the fact that a reboot is not necessary to change from 2G only mode to 3G only mode. I keep the phone in 2G mode to conserve battery life and switch to 3G when I need the higher speeds or when making a video call.

Speaking of battery life, if you been using  the any N-series Nokia, you will love the 5 day battery life of the E71. This is with the Mail for Exchange checking my corporate mail every 30 minutes. Your mileage may vary of course.

The screen resolution is a dream. I downloaded mobitubia to view youtube videos over my WiFi connection and I must say, there’s no going back to the N80 now. The quality is surprisingly good for a small screen. Why or why did Nokia not include a native youtube viewer in the same way Apple does?

Nokia has also released their entire Carbide development environment as freeware. Previously, only the limited express version was free. Now you can get the Developer, Professional and OEM editions free as well. This brings features such as on-device debugging to the masses. See the Forum Nokia website for more details.

On the whole, I happy with my choice. Nokia have made great strides in improving the responsiveness of the user interface. My N80 feels clunky in comparison. Hopefully the responsiveness stays the same as I add more applications.

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