RaSchi’s Valhalla

For a couple of weeks already I had some trouble with Gna’s touch screen. It seemed to send it’s controller the signal as if someone touched the lower right corner of it (where the battery indicator is located). Thus the backlight of the screen was switched on and depending on the lock being applied or not, the message to unlock or the battery status dialog would appear. As you can imagine, having the backlight illuminated all times drains the battery terribly. Stand-by times of less than half a day were the consequence. Since I played with the thought of replacing Gna anyway (which was postponed due to other “investments” of higher urgency), I finally did the move.

Last night I picked it up on the way home and at home, I played with it for a couple of hours. First of all, the best part of it was the WLAN connectivity: Hooking it up to my WPA2-protected WLAN was a breeze. Open the connection manager, scan for the available services, choose the one, select the encryption method, enter the key. Open the browser, select the connection profile, off you go. One thing I was worried about before was the jog-dial being stripped of an axis. With the P910 and predecessors, you could scroll the wheel, push it into the phone (similar to a mouse click) and you could push it up or down (which would be used by application similar to a middle and right mouse button). Tracker, for example, used the latter two moves to force a screen lock and to unlock the screen as well as to close an application (and that is to really terminate it, not just to send it into sleep mode in which it still occupies memory). For me, this was probably the most used button on the phone (I use the address book for placing calls most of the time, so no digit buttons to push for me). But the P990 has added two buttons to the ones it’s predecessor had which standardize the functions I used the wheel for in Tracker. There’s a back button (which does the application closing) and there’s lock switch, which does the screen locking. I still have to get used to their locations a bit, but that should be feasible, it’s just different fingers that do the task now. The buttons are in good reach. For right handed people, that is. I have serious doubts that this will be convenient to use for left handed people, but that probably was the case for predecessors already.

Stay tuned for more reports.