Friday, January 8, 2010

The Awesome Nokia X6

If you live in North America and want a smartphone, you probably only think iPhone, or one of various Android devices, like the Motorola Droid or the HTC Nexus One. However, if you live in Europe, or as I do, in South Africa, Nokia dominates the market.

Nokia entered the touchscreen market with the 5800 XpressMusic, and has followed up with a number of similar, yet slightly differently featured 'entertainment' phones, like the 5130, which also saw the introduction the the successful "Comes With Music" package in South Africa. This offers consumers unlimited downloads to the entire Nokia Music Store catalogue, which currently has over 6-million digital tracks, and this offering is valid for a one year period.

Now Nokia has launched the X6 (note all future XpressMusic phones will now be prefaced by an 'X') in South Africa as it's new flagship model. At only 13.8mm thick it is less than half the size of the 5800, but now includes a 3.2" capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels. In a departure for Nokia, the X6 comes with 32GB of internal memory, as apposed to the microSD cards used on most of it's phones. It's also got a 5 megapixel camera equipped with a Carl Zeiss lens. With a standby time of over 400 hrs, a talk time of over 8 hrs, and 35 hrs of music playback, this phone sure has the power needed for all your entertainment needs.
Quoting from the Nokia Press Release:
"The Nokia X6 is the ultimate device for social butterflies, bringing friends and virtual communities, like Facebook, to the homescreen thus making it easy to socialise with friends and follow all the favourite blogs and celeb gossip. The device has a 16:9 widescreen which is optimised for photo and imaging display, web browsing, video recording and gaming."
I haven't been able to get my hands on one of these beauties yet, but I'll be sure to post my comments as soon as I do.


Thanks for reading.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Track your Daily Mileage with dailymile.com


I recently discovered a new on-line training log called dailymile, and it's a really great site whether you're a cyclist, runner, walker or swimmer. I have decided to use this to help motivate me as I try to resume my training regime.



What sets dailymile apart from other such sites, is it's social networking aspect. After entering your data from your training, you get the option to share it, with comments, on either Twitter or Facebook, or both. You can also add friends from within dailymile, and track your mileage against their's.


Your training history can be displayed graphically, and the charts have a great, clean look. Another useful feature is being able to plot your routes using Google Maps - I really like that it gives a distance reading, so you know exactly what you're getting yourself into! Other features are to add races and challenges, but I haven't quite got to grips with those yet. What I did like is the widget that you can add to a blog - check it out in the sidebar!


Lastly, there is a fun aspect too, based on the theoretical calories burned during your training. After only 2 days I've already burned the equivalent of 11.42 donuts! Now that's great motivation!

Thanks for reading!