Useful Technology
My N95 comes with a whole host of features, some of which I won’t discover for another year. They are either really gimmicky or just don’t apply to me as they satisfy some edge case of a power user I am not familiar with. I can’t imagine using my phone to create a spreadsheet and the few times I have tried to open a PDF using the native viewer, it has thrown an error. But the N95 does come with an application that is not only cool on paper, but is actually incredibly usable — the radio app.
I no longer have to use a WAP browser, navigate around on a tiny screen for a ’streaming radio’ link on a webpage and hope that my phone can understand the stream’s MIME type. I just launch the radio application, browse radio stations by state and immerse myself in the soft sounds of my local NPR affiliate. If I get a phone call the radio fades out, then comes right back in when the call is over. Podcasts are great but I tend to run out and they require a certain level of management. This is real time, live content that I tap into constantly. Today it kept me company on laundry day.
Other things I am excited about: SenseCam being used for dementia patients (me and DelGaudio were doing the same thing with WayMarkr, not sure who the patients were), Ajax on Rails coming in the mail and Flickr having an uploader that isn’t terrible.
