One of our readers Gemma sent us an email asking for a short how-to on using your Nokia smartphone as a 3G modem. Given that it’s something I felt like a great deal of our readers would benefit from (if they didn’t already know ) I decided to take up the torch and do a quick post showing this.

As we all know, when buying a Nokia device, Nokia provides their software suite installation CD in addition to other accessories. Although the CD itself is not mandatory for installing the software suite (It’s just as easy to find on the internet) the majority of users will gain access to Nokia’s Ovi Suite or PC Suite via this method.

1st step:

Install the darn thing! As much as you may be inclined to do without it there are quite a few features included with this that’ll amongst other things, allow you to use your mobile phone as a modem!

2nd step: connecting your phone to the PC.

This can be accomplished in two main ways, Bluetooth or via the USB cable provided with your phone. Either method works, though for faster download  speeds it’d be best to go the USB route (saves battery life as well!)

3rd step launch Ovi Suite or PC Suite on your PC.

You’ll be greeted by a screen much like this one. (For the sake of privacy my photos, contacts and text messages have been removed LOL )

Provided that your mobile has been connected via USB, it’s really a very simple matter.

Click there and voila, you’re phone is a USB modem. This is a free feature on every sim-free/unlocked Nokia that I’ve ever owned, EVER. I’ve never incurred any extra cost for doing this and for those conscious of your data consumption, Ovi suite will provide information on the amount of data transferred and the time elapsed since the connection was opened .

[Jay: Alternatively you can share your 3G connection over WiFi with apps like JoikuSpot. This is free, and the paid premium version will let you secure your connection. I like the USB function too as it also charges your device (if that's a feature)

Do be careful as some networks prohibit the use of your connection as a modem/data tethering. Also note that it becomes so much easier to consume data when browsing over PC.]

As a bonus feature to this little How-to:

How would you like to be able to send and receive text messages on your phone and reply to them without ever picking the phone up? Click on the messaging section and you’ll be brought to an area where you can back-up all the messages on your cell either manually or every time your phone is connected to your PC, send text messages to any contact you desire, read conversations in threaded, IM-style fashion and receive unobtrusive pop-up notifications on your desktop every time you receive a message.

This feature is VERY useful for texting while in class!

NB. Don’t know what the scenario is for you mac users out there, but I’d imagine it being a somewhat similar procedure provided a PC-suite-esque program exists.

Send your tips and article suggestions to tips@mynokiablog.com!

Blog-N8 has found a pic of the silicone cases, official accessories for the Nokia N8 called CC-1005. Now the N8 has already passed scratch tests due to it’s super durable anodized aluminium casing, but just in case you wanted that added bit of protection or just wanted to give it a different look.

The official Nokia page calls them a second skin. Perhaps if you can’t decide which N8 colour N8 to get, there’s always the possibility of changing them with official and third party skins! Like if you’re getting a rebellious green but you’re in a professional setting – hide it with the black silicone case. Or vice versa, you’ve got a black N8 and want some colour on it .

These cases surfaced a couple of weeks ago on play.com coming in yellow, black, blue and pink and can be bought for £5 each (via Mobile Review forum member, though I forgot which one)

CHECK IT OUT on play.com (no not being paid by play.com, they’re just the only ones with a price listing)

They’ve got all four colours as well as other N8 accessories (cases). They’ve even listed the black N8 for £449.99 Sim Free. In comparison, a year old iPhone 3GS is 599.99GBP.

Blog-N8

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BACK STORY

A couple of weeks back WOMWorld sent over a bumper box full of accessories and odd items like wigs, plastic flowers and fake snow.

With that, I was supposed to make a video.

I didn’t really understand it at the time, and even if I had understood the brief, I was buried under a mountain of revision and exams. :S

Due to the ashcloud and such, the deadline was moved to 24th May, giving me some time to have a go at WOM’s video challenge.

My friends told me sweded is meant to look super amateurish so that’s what we’re presenting here on our take on sweding Nokia’s Simple Human Solutions ad.

It’s 2min 45 seconds long, and after that are behind the scenes/deleted parts.

[Someone was almost hospitalized due to one scene ]

Original video

Yes, it barely looks anything like the original, haha, but we didn’t want to just replicate it. We wanted a sweded ultra low budget touch :p. e.g. drawing on the computer screen instead of an animated computer screen. The recording venue, hahaha.

WOMWorld sent over some Nokia original accessories last week but I didn’t get a chance to really share my findings with you guys due to exams.

Ha, I should really be revising. This wasn’t meant to be a review (haven’t used it long enough really- but best to get it done now than forget eh), but it sort of turned into one.

Video will be updated some other time. YouTube is currently giving me stupid “The upload failed due to an unknown error”

Somehow it’s appeared.

In the mean time, I’ve taken some photos of the BH-505 which is now probably my favourite of all Nokia’s headsets. Wired or Bluetooth.

Prob my favourite audio accessory ever really. I was surprised as I didn’t expect this at all to be this good.

Why do I love it so much?

1. Design

• It is unbelievably comfortable to wear.
• It is light so it doesn’t drag your ears or squash them.
• It is extremely secure. Great for any sporty activities (I think that’s what this headset originally aims for) but even more so just for everyday use, so you can bop your head to your tunes without fear of it falling off.
• It feels invisible – you forget you’ve got it on.
• it is invisible (design is small, discreet, and hides away if you have enough hair :p).
• Very strong, flexible material (it’s somewhat very springy – bend it and it jumps back to original shape),
• has nice rubbery/velvety feel all over with metal music player control buttons. It feels great.
• This trumps the BH-214 for me as it kills all wires.

2. Well Placed Controls

• It’s great and all having music controls but annoying when it’s hard to use them.
• BH-505 has the easiest placement of buttons.
• Volume rocker on the right, skip/back rocker on left.
• Call/End button on right
• Play Pause Button on left.
• It’s such a breeze to use – even if you’ve got a big woolly beanie.
• Power button is at the curvy bendy bit. Very easy to press, good location as you won’t confuse this as the play button and turn headset off.
• Power button can still be accessed when worn
• You get three coloured light indicators to indicate connection. Green, red, blue.
• Green is when it’s just turned on. It may seek a previously paired phone and connect automatically.
• Intermittent blue when connected
• Flashing blue is when in pair mode (long hold of power button.
• Brief red when you’ve turned it off.
• Oh – it’s very easy to pair (bluetooth)
• THE CONTROLS WORK WITH PC TOO. ^_^ Very nice pausing movies with BH-505

3. Sound Quality

• Excellent sound quality
• VERY LOUD! It can get super, super loud if you want it to! Warning!
• Bass is fantastic. I’ve embarrassingly used “Candy Shop” over the years to listen out for that distinctive rumble and it can give my Ultimate Ears Super.Fi Extended Bass a run for its money.
• Excellent stereo separation.
• Videos sound great too. Very immersive.
• Connection over bluetooth is very strong. There are no disruptions in connections when phone is in pocket (does with BH-501) and I can be at some distance away from N900 with this.
• Calls – pretty good. Need further extensive testing but it’s clear on both ends (though being sound isolating, it sounds weird hearing your own voice dampened – eerie sensation)

4. Sound Isolation

• BH-505 uses passive sound isolation techniques, i.e. creating a vacuum with those silicone buds to prevent external noise affecting your music.
• Against the BH-905 (which has active noise cancelling with 8 microphones) the BH-505 outclasses it in terms of sheer noise blocking.
• That’s because the BH-905 sits over your ears so any gaps will let sound through (although it is still an excellent solution).
• The strength with the BH-905 is that you can achieve sound isolation at lower volumes due to that active sound cancelling, but with BH-505 you will need to ramp the volume a little bit more.
• That of course depends on how loud ambient noise is anyway. Outside traffic – 60-70% cuts it out completely. A little dangerous, haha.
• In doors, you could set it to about 40%.
• It’s not simply due to the silicone buds. Many other similar in ear buds do not produce the same sound isolations. E.G. my Shure E2C>Super.Fi (not advertised for noise cancelling) and I might even say the BH-505>Shure E2C
• Material/Fit is of course important. You need to get the right combination to fit you. The default buds were perfect for me.
  

  

5. Battery Life

• A really strong point in Nokia’s headsets recently.
• Haven’t ever had it die yet but so far >24h 60% volume with lots of standby time.. Will rigorously test this out after exams.
• Charging is really quick. Haven’t charged it that many times but it goes blue (full) in under an hour?

Charging Port

Charging port hidden. Bit fiddly to open but fortunately you won't be needing to charge too often.

6. Price

• It’s about 50GBP depending where you look.
• I feel gram for gram, for me, this is a superior product to the BH-905 (160-250GBP!)
• I’m not an audiophile (maybe Devin/thenokiaguide) can point out where the differences are in audio quality but for the majority of users this is an excellent headset.

Negatives:

• White. I don’t know how easily this may get stained.
• The battery flap is a touch difficult to undo if you haven’t got long nails
• It’s not mine. Ha :p
• 
  

We’ve seen photos of the Laser Cut stands for the N900, now here’s a video.

• Demonstrates how to assemble stand
• Shows the improved viewing angle
• Tilted N900 can now be used without falling over
• Differences between the wooden and acrylic stands
• Stress/Break tests

Weapon Stand - the stylus is set like a mighty SAMURI sword! In the right lighting it looks like it's floating.

The Maemo Community isn’t just about software. From talk.maemo.org one of the users is creating custom cut stands for the N900!

Now, the N900 already has a stand, but you might want to enhance the angle a little more. Plus,

• this one has a rest for the stylus,
• is more stable on both sides [you can press the screen and it move about as much]
• it would look marvellous on the office or home desk!

Pricing? Where to get one?

The wooden models will be priced as follows:

One for $10. That includes shipping.
Two for $15. (The “home&office” set)That includes shipping.
Three for $20. That includes shipping.

Clear acrylic stands will cost:

One for $17, shipped
Two for $30, (The “home&office” set) shipped.

The order form is filling up: Click to head over to talk.maemo.org and see what it’s all about.

I guess it would also fit other phones, like the 5800?

I’m not a proper audiophile, but I do really appreciate good quality sound that’s uninterrupted by outside noise. Thanks to the crew over at WOMWorld, we’ve received the daddy of all stereo bluetooth headsets to try out, the Nokia BH-905 with active noise cancellation.

I’ve been exciting about the BH-905s ever since hearing about them in June. Possibly on paper, it is the best stereo bluetooth headset.

• 10 microphones, 8 for active noise cancellation, 2 for picking up speech
• Can be used wireless as standard, or you can even attach audio cables to use with devices that don’t have bluetooth. (Great for saving battery too – you can listen via BH-905s when the batteries are dead)
  • Comes with 3.5mm, 2.5mm, 1/4″ and aeroplane jack adapters, as well as extension cable.
• Pretty long battery life, up to 40h with noise cancellation when wired, or 16h wireless [though must see what they're like myself]

I got to try them ever so briefly in September during a OneDotZero detour to the Nokia Flagship Store (R.I.P.). Above right is WOMWorld’s Robbie modelling the BH-905.

But now I can have a proper go at trying them out. Here’s our unboxing of the BH-905, photos and video:

“Listenin via nokia bh-905 is a little like the first time I tried sound isolation earphones. Stunning how it blots out outside sound!” a tweet sent whilst listening to music from the N900 on the BH-905. They’re also pretty loud.

I don’t know about you but my earphone cables are always in a mess. When I’m travelling and set up a “gadget bag” the cable tangles are horrific.

In general day to day use, my earphone cables always manage to spontaneously knot themselves.

Here’s one solution – Proporta Cable Tidy. It’s a neat little double ended magnetic clip that ties your cables [not just earphone variety] together.

It would have been perfect had they been slightly longer so they can wrap around longer bundles of cables. However, you can stick two together to get around some extra girth.

Check out my video overview below, tidying up the cables of the Ultimate Ears Superfi 5.EB and the Nokia WH-205 that comes with the Nokia N900.

If you remember just over a week ago, we received the Cable Tidy along with other Proporta Accessories so stay tuned as we’ll be covering them soon.

I made a comment in a post about N900 photo samples on Friday how my Proporta charger wasn’t working*. I would have loved to have used it last weekend when I was testing the N900 in London, instead I was plug-socket hunting and siphoning electricity whenever I could.

The Proporta owners saw that post [thanks to All About Symbian's Steve Litchfield], informed me that Proporta do offer 2 year warrantly of electrical accesories and long story short they’ve sent over a replacement as well as some extras for reviewing (arrived yesterday).

I’m snowed down with some deadlines at the moment but here’s a “preliminary unboxing” just to show what accessories I’ll be covering soon.

• Turbo Charger 3400mAh – Absolutely essential accessory for mobile users (especially power hungry models like N900 and N97) who travel, holidays, road warriors, site seeing, just long day out and about away from sockets…
• Turbo Charger 1200mAh – business card sized to be even more pocketable
• Cable Tidies – keeps my headphones from being tangles
• Beach Buoy – waterproof pouch for when going to the beach or swimming. Waterproof for up to 5 metres.
• A few extras  didn’t anticipate – car USB and world USB chargers.

* It turns out the white charger was working and I just happened to have tested it with 2 defective cables. Initially the cable had worked when charging via pc, then didn’t via charger. Now the cable doesn’t work at all. Conclusion – the fault lies in the cable.

The main charger is absolutely fine (though none of the chargers can charge up N900/N97 using Nokia micro USB cables)

Here’s a bunch of Nokia N900 unboxing videos to whet your appetite a bit more:

1. Tnkgrl and N900

2. Slashgear and N900

3. Steve Chippy and N900

4. MickyFin and N900

The box is similar to the N97, Matte black with embossed image of the phone: Inside, box contents include:

• Nokia N900
• Nokia Battery (BL-5J) – 1320mAh
• Nokia High Efficiency Charger (AC-10) to Micro USB Charging
• Nokia Stereo Headset (WH-205) – Some nice, decent, in-earphones
• Video out cable (CA-75U) – for TV out, watch what’s happening on your 3.5″ N900 screen over to a much bigger TV/Projector
• Nokia charger adaptor (CA-146C) – attaches to traditional Nokia pin chargers, either the classic fat one or the new slim one
• Cleaning cloth