It’s fairly obvious if you meet me, that I have a mobile phone fetish. I’m not able to meet the stringent demands this sort of fetish has, financially speaking. There are just too many handsets released, too often. Couple that with the high price of switch carriers, and it’s an expensive habit to have. So I buy when I can justify(read convince wife) it, and when I can’t I spend my time trying to optimize the mobiles that I do own.
Awhile back, I got caught up in the Palm Treo. My father had one, and I just couldn’t help myself. It was a decent phone, but not much more. It was large, cumbersome, and when it came to it’s ability to synchronize with my Mac, it fell short. This wasn’t necessarily Palm’s fault, but also the fault of Apple. I ended up passing the Treo on to another soul, and bought myself a Nokia N80 with the Symbian OS on it. It was my first Nokia, and I was lured by it’s sexy black finish.
I’m happy so far with my purchase. As a mobile nut, I know there are trade-offs with handsets, but this one has done well so far. Not top-notch, but well. I enjoy the web browser immensely, and the camera takes smashing photos when I can hold a steady hand. Drawbacks on this model are speed, and memory issues. Not enough of either. Still, this Nokia suffers the same fate that most mobiles do, poor synchronization with a Mac.
Two days ago, Nokia released a bit of kit that may help gap the divide that many of us Mac users feel on our mobiles. Their Nokia Media Transfer is a bit of software for the Mac that allows you to synchronize your Nokia and applications like iPhoto and iTunes. It’s really quite a nice application, and still in development as this release is a beta. I’ve posted some screenshots of the install process. I’m totally tickled that this was released.
I expect this will spur me to take more and more banal shots of my life, only to be shared on Flickr. For those who are annoyed by such drivel, my apologies. I also think it’ll be nice to have my podcasts available whenever and wherever I go. Since the N80 does video, and many of my podcasts are actually vidcasts (video podcasts), this should work nicely. My favorite part of the application is it’s use of Bluetooth. I hate the cords. Burn them all.
Grab the Nokia Media Transfer if you own a Nokia, and if you don’t, well....go buy one. What do you have now? A Razr? Egad!!