gali

I’m just about old enough to have spent my teenage years being schooled without the disruption of mobile phones. They spread across the country something like wildfire just as I was finishing my secondary education and moving towards University. In fact, my first mobile (a Philips C12, oh to be ignorant of how technology would change) was something I bought in the summer before University primarily as a means to maintain contact with friends moving to progress their educational careers around the country.

Back in those days, I had a little book with a load of phone numbers noted down in it, for when I wanted to make contact with friends, though I rarely used it. I could remember the 6 digits I needed to contact most of my friends, or for the place I worked. Certainly I could recall numbers I needed at will.

Now I could recall my own number without hesitation, and only then because its a very easy to remember number. The modern requirements of remembering a number have been made harder by the prevalence of mobile phones, which require the ‘area code’ part of the number to be retained in memory too. Read more…

My current phone is a Nokia N97, Nokia’s current flagship N-Series “device that does everything”, and a handset that has received a wide range of reviews and commentaries from wondrous praise through to damning criticism. As with many products with such reviews, every review has some basis in truth.

The lack of kinetic scrolling beyond the web browser is disappointing (at least until the v20 firmware is released), especially given I own an iPod touch with all its omnipresent smooth scrolling. The QWERTY keyboard, while being something I missed since the days of my 9210, is probably the worst Symbian powered keyboard I’ve had the pleasure of using – 3 rows, and interesting choices of placement for some common symbols slows down text entry. Gone are the days of the Psion Series 5′s amazing keyboard that I could thumb type on almost as quickly as I could my PC. And on top of all that, while Symbian is well established, familiar and pretty robust, it is still growing into the world of the touch screen.

And yet, despite the various little quirks that irk me on occasion, especially when I consider the competition, I still feel I made the right choice in paying full price to buy a N97 off contract, and that it is perhaps the best handset I’ve used, and a better choice than the competition for the range of jobs I need it for.

I’ll now move onto the biassed part where I cover the things I feel I need in my phone. I’m the first to admit that this is strongly influenced by previous handsets I’ve had – I’m very much of the opinion that when I upgrade my phone, I shouldn’t take a hit for any hardware or software features that I’ve taken for granted from my previous handset (which was a N96 for a few months, preceded by my ever trusted N95).

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I’m going to use a homegrown system for scoring things when I actually come to reviewing a product. Note that not every blog post is going to be a review – many may simply be comments on what I’m considering or actually playing with. On the other hand, a review might not be several pages of in depth text – it may simply be a few words and how I feel scores should be allocated.

I’ve decided on four categories for now. If they don’t prove sufficient, I may reconsider at a later point. Clearly, the first category is where many reviewers would focus, but I believe that they all deserve a reasonable voice in the sorts of reviews I’m hoping to do.

Each will be given an integer score between 0 and 9. I’m intentionally keeping the score to single digits for the scores. I don’t feel a range of 5 is sufficient to distinguish between things, and I think a percentage would end up too arbitrary. At the end an overall score will be decided based on the average of the scores leading up to it, rounding down any decimal values to integers. Yes, this means an average score of 8.9 will be rounded to 8.

Here are my categories:

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Welcome to Gali, a new blog I’ve decided to put together as somewhere to express some of my thoughts. I suppose it will be considered to be something of a technology blog, but since I find myself primarily in a situation where I only have access to a selection of gadgets.

The purpose of Gali will be to look at a range of gadgets, technology, hardware, software and perhaps a little entertainment media along the way. There’s always room for another blog in the vastness of the Internet, but I intend to very much focus on the actual use of things to achieve certain results, mostly pertaining to day to day life.

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