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About Dr. Detroit and the Nokia N95 vs the V3xx

Previous Entry Dr. Detroit and the Nokia N95 vs the V3xx Mar. 27th, 2008 @ 08:13 pm Next Entry
I never did have those drinks. I guess I'd reached my saturation point. And so now, several days later, I'm having a few more drinks and what do I decide to do? Finish Blogging! Some of which was written but not uploaded during my previous session.

Dr. Detroit is a mediocre but fun movie where Dan Ackroyd (Ghost Busters, Driving Miss Daisy) plays a square geek (Clifford Squidlow?) who winds up in intrigue with a band of hookers (Fran Drescher - the Nanny; Donna Dixon - Busom Buddies/Spies Like Us/OMG), ???) and their pimp (Howard Hessman - Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP) masquerading as an addled super-pimp in a James Brown style. (And James Brown actually makes an appearance.) Seriously. This was a bit ahead of time, in that the four hos where a blonde American, a JAP (Jewish American Princess), an Asian and an Black. Diversity in crappy comedy!

Ironically, in the movie, Dan Akroyd marries Fran Drescher. In real life, I may be wrong, but I recall he actually married Donna Dixon.

Pop trivia: Howard Hessman's character ended as Mr. Pago-Pago. Heehee!

Despite all this, there' s no actual nudity or mature content in the movie. In fact, it avoids anything like mature-content.

Did I previously mention that I own Doctor Detroit on LaserDisc? Yes, how cool is that! Very 80s, for like the most 80s movie I know! But of course not so great for picture quality.

There's no direct link between Doctor Detroit, Shaun Cassidy and the two phones. But sometimes things all come to a head at the same time.

So recently I bought a new Nokia N95-4. This is a "smart phone", by which we apparently mean "stupider than a feature phone". Most things the V3xx does, the N95-4 does about as well. Both play music, videos, do 3G/GSM, run J2ME, etc. The N95 has a larger display, better video camera, internal GPS, can run S60 apps and has an A/V jack lacking on the V3xx, but the V3xx runs J2ME applications much faster and fits in a pocket more easily. The N95-4 is shorter and slimmer, but quite a bit thicker. (It's also quite a bit shorter/less-wide than the iPhone but thicker than that also.) The N95-4 can do a better job of multitasking. Overall, it's a better phone, but the slow J2ME (compensated for by running on "phone" rather than "card" RAM) and the exposed display vulnerable to damage do reduce the benefit somewhat.

Anyhow, so I've had Motorolas for a very long time. And had ported my contacts to them from Palm, so my data was decently rich but very Moto-specific apparently. Nokia doesn't do Moto, and I don't do Outlook, so this left me in a lurch...

Just to convert my contacts (phonebook) from the Motorola V3xx to the Nokia N95, I had to do the following:
  • Because I don't use Outlook , I couldn't use the standard import/export.
  • So I had to boot to Vista.
  • Export from the Motorola to Motorola Phone Tools
  • Export from MPT to a CSV file, specifying a comma delimiter.
  • Import from CSV to Vista Contacts
  • Import from Vista to Nokia Phone

That's quite a few steps.

To maintain the contact list, I have moved fully over to my MacBook. The V3xx and MacBook never really got along. Apparently while I assumed they were fully communicating at least on contacts, it turned out that the V3xx was ignoring roughly 2/3 of them. Either the SIM or the Phone RAM contacts; I haven't checked which. And getting all the event (Calendar) data over took a lot of work and an external program run from Terminal that still couldn't process repeat-events.

But the Nokia iSync setup speaks fully compatible contact and event data. Which is very nice, once all are configured.

There is a wrinkle. Leopard (and Tiger) come with a Calendar app that can accept ics (iCal/CalDAV) requires in email, but... it insists on responding. There is no choicel Which can be troublesome if you forward the appointment for the sake of getting it on the calendar, since your response...
  • Comes from the email recipient on the Mac, not necessarily who you were originally (i.e. you at work)
  • Cannot be prevented like it can be in Outlook

My work-around is to turn off the WiFi ("AirPort") before accepting, and then delete the responses from the outbox.

But even so, the N95 is a much more capable multi-function phone that the V3xx, at a cost primarily of money and thickness.
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