Having been using my Nokia N91 for a couple of months I dare say that I don't really have a need for an iPod or any other mp3 player for that matter. Why? Here's a couple of really good reasons why.

1) Transferring music from PC to N91
This is obviously the first and biggest hurdle in using any mp3 player. I must confess that I haven't tried iTunes with an iPod, but I guess you still have to click something at least once before your music is in the iPod.

I decided to perform a quick test with the objective to get songs to the device as easy as possible. With the N91 you have three options to do this:

i) Using PC Suite
The new version has improved music uploading and encoding capabilities. I tried it a couple of times, but must confess that it was a bit too slow for my taste. Would love to hear your opinions on it. Jukka wrote about this earlier.

ii) Synching with Windows Media Player
This I just couldn't get to work in short enough time. (Maybe cause I use Winamp to play my mp3's). I'll have to try it some other time.

iii) Using the USB mass storage feature
Being a lover of all things simple, this is my choice. Begin by plugging in the USB cable and selecting the USB mass storage mode from the phone UI. After that search for the phone as any other hard drive/removable disk on your PC (E:/ in my case). Then simply drag and drop the files to "MyMusic" folder. Wait for a couple of seconds and that's it. Your new favourite songs are with you - anywhere you go.

Selecting the mass storage mode

The next time to you go to the Music application, it asks if you want to refresh the collection. Select OK and the files you added appear to the list of songs. I guess doing the same thing with an iPod is just as easy - I haven't tried. But to me this was simple enough on the N91.

2) Search by song name
A small but very efficient feature is to just type in the song name you are looking. This is a feature you'll start appreciating once you have hundreds of songs on your device hard drive. I guess typing with an iPod is still a future feature...

Searching a Glodfrapp song called "Black Cherry"

3) All-in-one device
Call me a gadget freak or whatever, but having a full-blooded music player in my 3G/2Mpix/WLAN/New Web Browser -enabled phone...I really couldn't care less for another extra device.

...and oh, I forgot to mention that just recently I listened to music on the N91 for 7 hours (two back to back flights) without charging the battery. There was even battery left for reading emails between and after the flights.

Even though the 4GB hard drive is a fabulous thing to have, I don't think that is what makes the N91 such a good music device. Nor does the dedicated player keypad (which is nice ;-)). Getting the music to the device is really easy, finding the songs on the device is very easy and the battery life at least to me very acceptable.

What do you guys think? Would be nice to hear from you guys how do you see the music player's role in S60 devices?

I am a tech lover who hates messing about with the innards of tech. If I buy a phone with a browser and email, all I want to do is press a cute little icon that says "Browser" or "Email" respectively. If absolutely necessary, it can then prompt me for a password. Any arcane questions like, "what is your SMTP pop pqrst server setting...blah...bhah..." gets me fantasizing about pulling out the finger nails of whoever made such a nasty and unintuitive application.

Some might call it sacrilege. I don't think so. I love cars but would never raise the hood to get grease under my fingernails. For me, the pleasure is in the driving, the thrill of taking the corner hard, feeling the vibrations in your spine, enjoying the responsiveness of the chassis. For all this to happen, all I need to know about how a car works is, - where to put the key, or on a Honda S2000, how to push the starter button. In other words, being an enthusiastic driver and an enthusiastic mechanic are two different things. You can be passionate about either one or both. My hands are clean and I intend to keep them that way.

This brings my nicely to the subject of widgets, which are basically a tiny self-contained applications that typically runs in an environment called the widget dashboard. A widget dashboard is able to handle multiple applications at the same time. For those you who use a Mac know exactly what I am talking about, for those who don't, check www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard or http://widgets.yahoo.com. Or better still, get a Mac.

With its light application environment and low resource needs, widgets are perfect for the mobile world. And the good news is that now you can get them for your phone and it's developed by a Nokia Venture called “Widsets” (www.widsets.com). The solution consists of two parts, a webpage where you log in (with your PC) and search, make and subscribe (free) to widgets. And a client application that can pushed to your phone from the website.

To get started you need to visit www.widsets.com and get yourself an account. Once in, you have to choose from an every increasing choice of widgets. All you need to do is the "pick" a widget, and it gets added to your "MySet". Once you have selected all the widgets you want on the blue space (Screenshot 2), a simple click on "Mobilize Set" send link via sms to your phone. Click on the link and enjoy the show.

As the screenshot 1 above shows, what you get for your trouble is a nice beautiful spatial environment with nice icons each of which does what it says. E.g. the BBC news icon gives me news, the Flickr icon, lets me get specialized feeds from Flickr and Engadget allows me draw up my Xmas Wish List. And if the present set of widgets does not contain any kind of application or news service you want, you have a great (easy to use...believe me) tool that allows you to make a new widget. I was able create a Motor sport news widget in about 2 minutes that gave me RSS feeds from the BBC website.

The application works in background and uses pretty small amount of data to update applications. You can also check your data download rates using the "System Widget" that comes pre-installed.

Drive on!

I earlier teased you with a Flash lite 1.1 application, and promised that it would be available from here. This just to let you know that the file is now available. So if you have a device with Flash Lite player on it, go grab it and let me know what you think. Works best on S60 3rd Edition devices.

Have a nice week-end.

BWi

Usually we are quite serious when blogging here (except for Phil who is really the one getting us all to smile from time to time).

Well, after all it is the Swedish National Day today, and since I am a patriot, here are some apps from Handango with relevance to my country of origin.

And since I want to promote the wonderful Swedish language, this search helps you to locate a few dictionaries... Also some available for S60 3rd Edition, BTW.

Consider this a special treat for Swedish readers!

At Jamba's UK site, this is what I got when making a search using the word Swedish.

Ha en bra Nationaldag alla svenskar!

- Björn