The Nokia n97

And now the blog temporarily becomes "Davids tech review". As an owner of a Nokia N series phone since 2005 with the release of the n70 (and a nokia fan all round, except for a brief flirtation with Sony Ericson and Motorola) , it was inevitable that I'd end up with the next model when the option arose.

Having had a ipod touch for around two months now and loving every little inch of it, I was really tempted by the iphone - The wireless stuff and web browsing on the ipod touch is awesome, and to have the same facilities wherever I went would be brilliant - but to have any model with more than 8gb storage (I have a 16gb touch) is ridiculously expensive from o2 - and as I have a wedding to save up for, I'm trying to drop the price of my monthly phone bill. I'm not willing to pay nearly three hundred quid for a phone and have to sign into an 18 month contract at the same time, especially as I'm trying to get away from o2 who I've found next to useless.

So, the n97. The same gubbins in the box; charger, earphones and controller, thin manual that doesn't really cover anything, an easily mislaid cleaning cloth for the screen and the phone itself. And, Brucey bonus, 20 quid of credit for the nokia music store. Wasn't expecting that.

First impressions after a day of use? Nokia are wise not to market this as an iphone beater. Apple really have it in the bag regarding making a gadget for ease of use. The iphone is way more intuitive in many regards; I've only had to refer to the manual for my ipod touch once, and that was how to do a hard-reset after it crashed.

The n97 has its quirks which I'm learning how to counter step by step. The widgets on the main home page seemed to keep vanishing, until I realised that it was an accidental swipe of the touch screen that toggles them on and off. I missed two phone calls on it yesterday because I couldn't work out how to answer the thing - obvious when you know how but not even touched upon in the manual -a Black and White style gesture to first unlock and then answer the incoming call is needed; not so straightforward in my casino drinking exploits of last night. The facebook widget seems to forget my login details, and - worst of all - when I come back I have to reactive the wireless scanning again to avoid paying for data fees; The beauty of the ipod touch is that whenever I'm in range of my wireless network, it picks it up without being prompted.

It sounds from the above like it's just been a catalogue of disasters, but far from it - I'm starting to love this phone. The build quality and battery power are great, as per most nokia phones. The 32gb of storage is more than enough, and having got past the niggles I'm finding the interface straightforward enough to use. The display is clear and the audio from both video and music are crystal clear.

But - and this is a feature I love - the best thing is its full Qwerty keyboard, the keys of which are large enough to hit and tactile enough to know when you've hit them. If only it was backlit, it would be perfect.

My only major gripe - and this isn't with the phone itself but with Nokias music store, thanks to the twenty quid of free credit - is that I purchased three singles - Two from The Bills June Acklands daughter La Roux (yeah, I'm sorry) and the new Basement Jaxx one and two albums - Angles by Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip and the new 'best of' Faith No More one. All except FNM are fine - Every time I try to play it I'm told that I don't have the rights for playback on it, because of fucking DRM. I've tried their troubleshooting (rename DRM rights folder, blah de blah) to no avail - When everybody in the industry seems to be giving DRM up, why do Nokia insist on this antiquated protocol?

From the sublime to the ridiculous

The last two days have seen me witness dramatic opposites in the field of customer service.

Starting with the sublime; Ordered a new phone (the Nokia N97 - review in the next couple of days; Early tests are promising but with a few annoying quirks) from mobiles.co.uk (the online department for the carphone warehouse). Ordered it by lunchtime on Friday but had a few questions about it and the new Orange contract I was taking - all queries were promptly and efficiently answered by their staff, emails informed me of every step of the ordering and dispatch process, and the phone arrived via Royal Mail at 7 a.m. the morning after. It's unfortunate that it's the examples of good customer service stand out when it should be unusual to get bad service, but all kudos to mobiles.co.uk for an incredibly enjoyable and efficient ordering experience. Unlike my bad experiences with o2, for example, for whom the term 'customer service' is a foul and dirty phrase not to be used in polite company.

And then to the ridiculous; Yesterday evening saw Tara and I meeting up to celebrate our friend Ruths 30th birthday. We were meeting for a meal at Singers Bar & Bistro at the Ricoh arena which would then be followed by spending the rest of the evening at the nearby Isle Casino. After having a few drinks at the bar, we sat down to eat. We were presented with a disappointly brief one page food menu (which, I note from the link above where a .pdf file of one can be viewed is completely different to the options we had last night).

I ordered garlic mushrooms on toast as a starter, followed by pan fried saffron marinated chicken in a chorizo and bean cassoulet for main.

As the starters began filtering out to the table, nobody had even come to the table asking us what drinks we wanted. Members of the party had to scour the place looking for the wine menu - It was only when we asked a waitress to do so that they actually asked us what drinks we wanted; By now, we'd been making our own way to the bar to buy our own thus making her requests redundant at this stage.

The starter? Garlic mushrooms were nice, but so I'd expect for six quid for a small plate of fungi. Unfortunately they didn't provide me with a steak knife, so I'm unable to comment on the stale piece of toast that accompanied it - no way was my measly dinner knife cutting through this hardened beast. Complaints were made; Waiter told us there was no more toast so came back with a small of plate of croutons - by which time, all of us with the same starter had finished all the mushrooms (We'd waited for so long for the starters to arrive, we were all half starved at this stage), so they were quite unnecessary.

The main courses began arriving on tables - well, some of them, at any rate. Steaks were delivered cooked to the wrong requirements with the wrong sauce or no sauce at all (or in the case of our friend Hannah, the sauce arrived in a small espresso cup but the steak sadly didn't arrive for another hour, and even then at the end of the evening when we were all ready to leave - and to add insult to injury, her well done steak was quite, quite rare). Our friend Chandra had a fly in her lamb; "Don't say it out loud or everyone will want one".

My pan-fried Chicken in Cassoulet? The chicken was overcooked and dry, and the heat varied in the cassoulet depending on which quarter of it I approached. Tepid, cold or just right. The Cassoulet was dotted with evil bullets of rock hard chorizo which must have been hardening on a shelf in the sun for six months. Many of our party had been regularly complaining to the staff - we were now at the stage when half of us had finished our meals and meals still hadn't arrived - or had arrived and had been sent back. The menu only had eight options on it, for Christs sake, and none of these were what you could term complex dishes - how easier could it be to get them all out on time?

In the end we only paid what we thought the meal was worth. They gave us free champagne - small consolation - and we all walked out almost four hours after we'd gone in confident that we wouldn't darken their doorstep again. Awful, awful place. The small consolation is the hard worked staff were all a great bunch - odd how the management vanished though the second our complaints became more vocal.

"Our opening times are as follows and booking is recommended for dinner to avoid disappointment"? More like "Our opening times are as follows and we recommending avoiding dinner to avoid disappointment".

As for the Casino? I'm not a gambling man, but people watching is always fun. Watched some guy lose around 600 quid on the roulette tables. Wesley Snipes gave him a bad tip. Gambling idiot.

Drag me to Hull

At the risk of this blog turning into Davids Film Review (or more to the point “Dave moans about films he thought might have been half decent”), I had the pleasure of seeing Sam Raimi’s new horror Drag Me To Hell yesterday evening. For a film that must have cost a tenth of the budget of the abysmal Terminator 4, it was easily ten times as good – and it’s also a fine return to form for Sam Raimi after the bloated crowded mess of a film that was Spiderman 3 – (a film which went wrong for exactly the same reasons that Joel Schumacher single-handedly temporarily killed off the Batman franchise – a case of “lets throw as many villains into the film as we can!” – both films are of the school of ‘lets throw enough shit at the wall – some of it is bound to stick’)

Drag Me To Hells story is clichéd as hell and nothing original – it tells the tale of Alison, a humble (yet ambitious) bank worker who pisses off a gypsy. Before you can say “Two pounds a go on the dodgems” or “Want to buy some lucky heather?” she is subsequently cursed by our aforementioned peg-seller and all hell (literally) breaks loose as she finds herself in a fight against time to stop herself being (ta-daaaa) dragged to hell!

It’s laden with Raimi’s typical hyperkinetic directorial style and filled with lashings of Tex Avery style cartoon violence – (At one stage somebody drops a conveniently hanging anvil onto someones head, for petes sake). There are few parts of the human body that don’t end up flying around in its perfectly paced 90 minutes - It’s not quite Peter Jacksons Braindead, but it’s not all that far off it. It’s a cliché to refer to a film as a roller coaster ride, but this sums Drag Me To Hell up perfectly. It barely lets up, is genuinely scary (especially considering it’s only a certificate 15) and I was entertained throughout.

On another note, I’ve just ordered a spanky new Nokia N97. I really wanted one of the new iPhones, but I’m that pissed off with O2 and that flabbergasted by the prices of them to get anything 16 gig or over, I’m changing service provider and getting the new Nokia flagship model. Reviews on the web seem vary varied, so I’m slightly worried it’ll be shit – but I’ve had an N series Nokia for around five years now, and I’ve been thoroughly impressed by them so far.

McG and Uwe Boll, you're first against the wall when the revolution comes

After being misled by positive reviews by the (usually trustworthy) sources of Empire and Death Ray and being admittedly quite excited by the trailer and write-ups I'd read, I made the mistake of going to see Terminator: Salvation yesterday evening with some friends.

The only two positive things I can take away from the evening is that (1) My friends are still talking to me, and (2) It features the excellent Michael Ironside who is guaranteed to enliven even the shittest B Movie.

I'd honestly thought it was scientifically impossible to make a new terminator film and for it not to be better than Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Science, however, has been proven wrong.

I remember as a child watching the original Terminator, watching the future war scenes and thinking "Wow. I would love to see a whole film about this". Along with all those people who demanded another Indiana Jones film after the first three, I say this - be careful what you wish for.

Friend of sound engineers worldwide Christian Bale stars as John Connor, gravelly voiced (and seemingly inept) leader of the human resistance, a team of phonomenally well equipped perfectly coiffured freedom fighters. It's reassuring to know that even after the machines have all but wiped out mankind, that dental and hairdressing establishments are seemingly thriving. The resistance have discovered a crate labelled "plot device" that could end the war against Skynet once and for all. Or at least a tiny bit of Skynet, or there wouldn't be a sequel.

There now follow a series of special effects and many, many explosions. Occasionally the film threatens to add character development but luckily McG rescues us from this just in the nick of time.

The post-pub pick-apart conversation was more fun than the film itself - there are spoilers in this, but if this bothers you I don't really give a shit - If you're going to see it, you deserve everything you get. Questions posed were as follows; What does skynet actually want? Why doesn't it just use poison gases (and poison humanities collective asses)? How come the (admittedly cool looking) Motorbike terminators have "collision control" allowing excellent driving skills, but fail to see a rope strung across the road in plain daylight? How can a military field hospital perform heart surgery on two subjects they haven't even checked for compatibility? If T-800s have nuclear fuel cells capable of levelling a small city when destroyed, how come Sarah Connor didn't wipe out herself when crushing the T-800 at the end of the first film? And lastly, why?

Tara thought it should have been called "Terminator: Nonsense and explosions". She's spot on.

For time travel dramas, I'd recommend the excellent Timecrimes. Rubbish name, excellent film. Low budget with a small cast, but tightly plotted and entertaining throughout. It shits on high-budget high-testosterone no-brainers like Terminator: Salvation from an obscenely great height.