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I am the sort of person who has a nostalgic connection for text messages, and you never know which ones are going to make you feel nostalgic in, say, three years or thirty years, when we've all got gigapixel cameras imbedded in our foreheads and don't need computers anymore except to feed and sleep (but that's another blog post, I feel). So every once in a while I realize I've got 870 text messages in my inbox and maybe it would be nice for my phone if I cleared out at least the monosyllabic ones, and deleting about 200 messages one at a time is a serious pain in the neck.
So there's a nice little function, which is pretty familiar to many phone users, called Mark/Unmark. Essentially anything you choose to mark will show a little checkmark beside it, and if you mark a bunch of things at once, it's much easier to delete them or transfer them or whatever it is you're going to do with them. Marking and unmarking works with text messages and anything that's in your gallery (pics, ringing tones, tracks, video, presentations, etc). It also works on browser bookmarks and contacts. Contacts can be selected into groups, tracks sorted into playlists, and pics can be sent, transferred, printed, organized into albums, uploaded online, used in a muvee, deleted, or made into a slide show as a single batch.
What you can do with a bunch of marked items depends on what the thing is. So play around with it—you might find a trick or two that saves you time or even inspires you to do something with a set of images.
One of the differences that's been highlighted between the two latest heavyweight mobile devices, Apple's iPhone and the Nokia N95, is the fact that the iPhone doesn't handle MMS messages. If you've noticed that your phone does them but you've never used them, now's the time to get yourself introduced!
MMS is multimedia messaging service. Which, never mind that—it means you can send pics and video and STUFF in what is more than just an oversized text message. It's a feature that's been a part of S60 for a long long time, but there are plenty of people who never use it. For shame! It's one of the more entertaining things a phone actually does.
To use it, just open messaging and create a new multimedia message. Key in your text, add a picture or sound or video, or even more than one, and then hit send. Alternatively, if you're viewing a picture, you can hit Options, select Send, and Via Multimedia Message. You'll notice this popping up in context menus whenever you're viewing or listening to something that can be sent by MMS.
So, here are the quick hits for Why You Oughta Use MMS If You Don't Already:
- A picture really is worth a thousand words. And if you're the type that wants to write a thousand words on your phone, I don't know what else to say to you.
- Show someone something you're shopping for, map directions, the spot in the park where you're waiting for them to show up with a picnic basket, a diagram you need them to see, a picture of the gang you're with in the pub as incentive to join the party (or deterrent, depening on how long you've been in the pub) or your facial reaction to their last SMS. If you need to show them something instead of describing it, MMS really works.
- It's instantaneous. You don't wait for a person to get to their email or to see them in person to show them on your phone. Just snap a pic and it's off.
- News and radio channels often have MMS numbers (or email addresses). If you happen to snap the right shot of an event, why not send it to your local news?
- Send to another phone or to an email address. Just key in an email address instead of a phone number. Even if you don't need to send any multimedia, this can come in handy if you haven't gotten around to setting up email on yoru phone but need to send a message to someone's email address.
- Many S60 devices come with a little application called "Muvee" in it. I'll be posting on that one later and I'll let you explore that one on your own for now, but it's been one of my favourites for sending something to really brighten up a person's mood. Simple, big on the personal touch, and extremely silly.
- Nothing says "I love you" like sending someone a new ring tone. It's possible with MMS.
- MMS is another simple way of uploading photos to a photo community like flickr or to a blog. Many of these places allow you to upload photos via email. Well, MMS can send to an email address, so it works just fine!
Not working?
First off, if your MMS messages aren't sending, it may be because you don't have the proper settings in your phone. If your phone didn't come with the settings already installed, try out Nokia.com support (quick links to settings if you live in the US or in Europe... otherwise just go to your region's support pages on Nokia.com and look for Settings). Another factor, which seems obvious but isn't to everyone, is that the person on the other end has to be able to receive MMS messages. If their phone doesn't handle them, your network provider will often use another solution, such as forwarding a link by SMS to the message.
What have I left out? I know that a large percentage of mobile-savvy people still never bother with MMS, but the criticism (too difficult or inconvenient) is really unfounded IMHO. It's all in good fun, and occasionally really useful.
So here's a first for Smartphonin'—a wee video-type guide to using copy and paste on your S60 phone. Didn't know you could copy and paste on a phone? It's true! Check out the video:
By now most of us are pretty familiar with the concept of group lists or mailing lists with email, and it only makes sense that this should also work on your phone.
In S60 phones, this is pretty easy. If you select any of your contacts, you'll see the option "Add to group" pop up in the menu. Or, from the contacts list, just hit the navigator key to the right to access your groups. This makes sending out mass SMS messages a lot easier if there's a bunch of people you frequently send messages to at the same time - whether that's for work, your baseball team, or "I love you" messages to all of your red-hot lovers (that'll probably get you in to trouble soon enough, though). Another nice feature is that you can use your contact groups to start up a Push to Talk call, if that's something you have from your operator.
Also, you can assign ringing tones to your groups, so you know whether an incoming call is from your center fielder or from a hot date. If you're dating your hot center fielder, I'm not sure which ring tone you'll get, but I invite you to try it out. :)
Some people have so many contacts that they sometimes get this Laura mixed up from that Laura or, even worse, forget who people are entirely. One solution that some people use with S60 phones is to organize their contacts into groups, so you get a bit of extra help in sorting which person is which. Just create a group for business projects, or your baseball team. Or, of course, your red-hot lovers. Might want to use a code word for that one.
Just a quick tip if you've ever had a brilliant (at least to you) idea about your phone: check out the Application wishlist and Feature wishlist on S60.com. The application wishlist is for ideas for downloadable applications for S60 devices, while the feature wishlist is for ideas for the S60 platform itself. They're then available for developers and the S60 team to use for inspiration. Also, if someone's already made the kind of application you're looking for, they can add a link to your wish. Check it out.
If I were a developer, surely I could make enough for a yearly trip to Malibu with my swish creative flair, but I'm a bona-fide ignoramus when it comes to code and I'm pretty happy to keep it that way, so I'm open to sharing my ideas.
"Good memory, but short" is something they say here in Helsinki, and I have a feeling it applies mostly to Great People You Met At A Party Last Weekend & You'll Never Ever Remember Their Names, Ever. This sort of thing happens to me a lot, it seems—I have a theory about my meeting a lot of people and my brain basically doing social memory triage and deleting tonnes of names and faces really shortly after hearing and seeing them in order to maximize the chances that I'll remember where I locked my bike, or what my own name is, etc.
But anyway there's something in S60 that really comes in handy when you meet a lot of people: assigning pictures to your contacts. What you do is snap a shot of the person, and when you get their name and number, set that picture to be their thumbnail. When they call you (or when you call them, or just look at their entry in the contacts) you'll see a little avatar-sized photo of them. This works great when about a week ago you were at a party where there were a lot of new people, or a conference where you met a bunch of new potential business contacts.
There are two ways to do it: when editing the contact details, choose "Add thumbnail" and you'll open the phone's gallery, where you can select the photo to use. Or, if you're browsing your pictures, you can select a photo, choose Use image > Assign to contacts.
There's a quick way to switch between applications on an S60 phone. This trick goes way back to even 2nd-edition S60 devices and once you find it, you'll never know how you lived without it.
Just press and hold the menu key (you know, the one with the kind of swooshy symbol on it), and you'll see a scrollable list in the upper left corner of the screen. To switch to an application, scroll to it and hit the OK button (or Select). To quit an application without going to it, press the C button and then hit Yes. It saves a huge amount of time. Okay, it saves maybe three thumbpresses, but it feels like it saves a huge amount of time (staggering, maybe even), and that's what really counts.
The first time a friend of mine showed me this, I did a total smack-the-forehead -why-didn't-I-realize-that- before thing, which is pretty much exactly the same way everyone else reacts when I show them. It's so totally obvious and smart, and yet a whole lot of people don't even know they have it.
I remember when I first got a phone that featured a calendar and all that jazz, I really didn't think I could be bothered to put in the time to start using it. I don't know if I just got bored on the train one day or if I got insomnia, but somehow I accidentally started to play around with the phone's calendar, and I have to say I'm a bit of a devotee. My schedule, I would bet a hot dinner, features a complexity set to rival, say, the Secretary General of the United Nations, so I really need to be able to access my calendar whenever changes to plans come up. If I get really, really honest: I have a calendar on my phone, I use Microsoft Outlook at work, but I also have a Moleskine dayplanner (to match my Moleskine obsession) that goes everywhere with me, and a wipe-off-use-again-get-that-nice-ink-all-over-your-fingers wall calendar at home. Looking at just my friends and family, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has an elaborate system worked out, but whether you're looking for redundancy in your timekeeping system, or a way to actually simplify your calendar habits, consider using your phone.
The way I've found that works best with my phone's calendar is to make sure I synchronize with my PC calendar at work. If you don't use a calendar application for your work or to organize your life in general, then you can just rely on the S60 calendar and you're pretty much set.
The biggest advantage of the phone calendar is that you can get a reminder (set a reminder alarm for any time, any day) and you're sure to get it when you need it. A book doesn't do that for you, and a computer only gives you reminders when you're sitting in front of it.
If you have recurring appointments, you don't have to key them in every time. Just type it in once and set it to repeat daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or even yearly. This is great for birthdays—you get reminded to send someone birthday wishes and bingo, your phone's already in your hand. (I have a feeling this feature might even have something to do with why my brother actually remembered to call me on my birthday this year. It's either that or Facebook, surely, but I'm not complaining.)
One more tip regarding calendar reminders: the newer S60 versions, such as that in the Nokia N95, allow you to set multiple alarm clock times, but with older versions you only get one (plus the snooze button, of course). If I had a flight to catch or something else important that required a seriously early start, I'd use the calendar to set a backup alarm a few minutes later.
Somehow, I find mornings a little less painful if I'm waking up to something that makes me happy. In the absence of a train of well-mannered and beautiful servants feeding me breakfast in bed, I guess it's enough to set a good song as my alarm tone on my phone.
Basically, all you have to do is pick your morning melody and transfer it to your S60 device, using Bluetooth, USB cable, infrared, or by downloading it off the web if you're so inclined. Even if your phone doesn't have an MP3 player application or a whole lot of memory, it's still possible. Check for "MP3 ringing tones" or "alarm tones" in your phone's technical specifications if you're unsure. Once your tune is uploaded, it should be accessible from the Gallery application, built-in to the device. Go to the clock application and change the alarm tone to your MP3.
The other thing about using MP3s as alarm tones is, because you're not going to be using headphones, the sound quality doesn't have to be world-class. So when you transfer the song to your phone, you can make the file a lot smaller than you would if you were putting it on your MP3 player. If you want sound quality of course, knock yourself out with a big file, but if your phone doesn't have so much internal memory, this can be a useful trick.
Just a word of warning: after a number of rough 6:30 AM starts, you might start to have mixed feelings about that song. I can't listen to Roisin Murphy's "Sow into you" without wanting to hit the snooze button.
The short answer: S60 is the software your phone runs on.
Phones are getting pretty techy at an amazing speed these days, and sometimes it's as though features become obsolete before you even know they exist. If you're like the vast majority of people out there, you have no idea what's really going on inside your phone (and that's basically the way it should be). But the upshot is that now there really is a lot more choice of features when buying. The tagline for the new Nokia N95 is "It's what computers have become," and they really mean that.
So if you're buying a computer, you make a choice between Mac and PC, and between Mac OS or Windows or Linux, based on what you want to do with it. It's the same way with phones. S60 does sort of the same stuff on your phone that an operating system does on your computer: it gives you the look on the screen, determines which features are available, and also gives you a system to use those features. Email, calling, internet, the alarm clock, the calendar, voice commands, and games are all handled by S60.
S60 has, in my view, some clear advantages: the user interface has always been intuitive (if you've used one S60 phone, it's easy to switch to another one), and it's developed by Nokia, so there's a lot of mobile expertise behind it. Also, just as with a computer, you can add or remove programs (applications, as they're more often called) as you wish. Even one year ago, most of the applications were a bit clumsy and visually... unfortunate, but now mobile developers seem to have picked up the slack and there's a lot of great-looking, truly useful stuff.
So how do you know if you've got the goods? Well, if your phone is a Nokia, it's probably running S60 software—especially if it's a newer model. Some phones by Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Siemens also use S60, so it's not an exclusively Nokia thing. You can also take a look at the complete list of phones on the S60 website.