Welcome to the NEW “The Nokia Guide” blog! This is a quick update to let everyone know that we are hard at work behind the scenes (especially with the images) to get the final site up and running to bring the latest news, reviews, tips & tricks and everything else in the world of Nokia. In the mean time be sure to subscribe to our new feed.

Thanks again!

Devin Balentina

After getting all my devices stolen, it was time to look for a new (main) device, sort of my everyday handset, the workhorse.  I had plenty to choose from. Could it be the mighty N96? How about the N85 with the impressive OLED screen?  Maybe the N82? Or just wait for the 5800 XpressMusic ? The N96 comes close to the N95 8GB I had, but adds an impressive 16GB of built-in memory and even a card slot for one of those capacious 16GB microSDHC cards, giving me a whopping 32 GB. Off course there’s also the DVB-H that I won’t be using for quite some time as you’d have to travel for thousands of miles to reach a country where it’s being used. The handset’s current price is well north of the $700 mark, making me rethink this decision. If it was going for around the $600+ range it would have stood a chance. The camera with its dual LED would be perfect for videos, but definitely worse than the N82, a device introduced back in 2007. The N85 isn’t quite available yet and while it has an impressive screen and improved battery life, microUSB charging and FP2, to me it seemed like too much of a wait for small upgrades. A solid device indeed, but I needed to buy ASAP. The same story goes for the 5800 XpressMusic, an impressive device, a breath of fresh air at an incredibly low price, but sadly it wasn’t available. My final decision, came down to an all-time favorite, in my opinion one of the best EVER from Nokia, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the N82 Black.

Choosing the N82 was quite an easy decision: it’s available, prices are reasonable and has everything the N95 and N95 8GB have, in a compact, candy bar shaped design. No sliders to worry with, no moving parts to break. The screen is indeed smaller than what I’m used to and I do miss the media keys, but you gain what is essentially the best camera in the Nseries line. For a device that was introduced last, yet not even the lastest can match it when it comes to it’s camera and flash. I could always buy fancy point-and-shoot digital cameras or one of those pro DSLR’s, but this I could always have with me and with quality images at that. It’s also a decent music player with improved audio quality through it’s top-mounted 3.5mm audio jack (very important) instead of the side-placed one on the N95 8GB. But most importantly, like I said, it’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Unlike the N95 8GB and N96 that scream “look at me” and sometimes even “rob me”, the  N82 is small and looks simple and you’d never guess  all the things it does by looking at it. The ultimate wolf in (black) sheep’s clothing.

Location Tagger has been updated to version 1, Beta 2. Among the improvements we can find: support for more devices and the addition of the “Show on map” feature. This will allow you to select Options, Show on map menu from the Logs tab to show the location of the picture in Nokia Maps. This feature works only on S60 3rd FP1 devices with Nokia Maps installed, such as Nokia N95. They also fixed  a bug where in certain situations the device’s battery is drained pretty quickly. But the most notable improvement is how Location Tagger deals with losing or not getting a GPS lock.

If you take a picture and there’s no GPS signal, the picture will be tagged with the last known good position in the last 1 hour. The previous version used a pretty much useless 10 minutes setting.  If there isn’t a recorded GPS position within the last 1 hour the picture will be put in a queue until timeout. You can set the timeout value from the Settings menu. If your device is able to lock the position before timeout, all pictures in the queue will be tagged with this new position.

A few days ago I wrote this rant here, about my worries with the whole Geotagging thing and this is a very good step in the right direction. But I still see room for improvements. First of all, how about clearly indicating which pictures got tagged and which didn’t like in Gallery or Share Online.  And most importantly we need a backup for those cases where you can only dream of getting a GPS signal. Location Tagger’s way of dealing with the lack of a GPS signal is good and should be ported to the Sports Tracker, as Sports Tracker has a habit of not uploading the pictures that didn’t get tagged. Tagging pictures with the last GPS location could be a temporary relief. But I think Nokia should start looking into the ability to calculate your position based on cellular towers. This is something that Google Mobile Maps for S60 has been doing for some time now on these very same Nokia phones. For this reason I don’t see why Nokia could add this feature to Location Taggger, Sports Tracker and Nokia Maps. This would be perfect for those situation where you will never get a GPS signal yet you want to be able to geotag your images. A good example would be a party in a basement. What do you guys think?

Via: AllAboutSymbian

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