Zaheer Abbas Merali

Like many, I made use of the extra hour last weekend to extend my night out on Saturday. Alia and I were invited to an Eid party organised by a friend at a restaurant in Covent Garden. Of course with 18 months spent living in the centre of Barcelona and 0 days living in central London, my knowledge of the small roads in London leaves a lot to be desired. I decided with modern technology, I needn’t look on the map before I left with how to get to the restaurant. Alia was invited to a bridal shower of a friend of hers and would be coming back later so I was alone on the way. I decided beforehand to install an e-book reader for my Nokia 770 and a public domain book to keep myself entertained on the journey. Knowing central London and the parking situation especially on a Saturday night, I decided to take the tube into London (it helped knowing that on the way back I would have a lift). The tube was pleasant enough, I got to my local tube station and didn’t have to wait long for a train. In the train, there were a lot of weirdly dressed people. I realised later that the Saturday night just gone was the Haloween party night. Undeterred, I took out my Nokia 770 and started reading the book I had downloaded. I then realised first-hand what Josep meant when he told me about how great an experience it is reading e-books on the Nokia tablets. When I got to Covent Garden, I took out my Nokia N95 and went straight to the Maps application. I searched for the road that the restaurant was on and told it to plan a route there. The GPS lock was quick due to the use of A-GPS to get a quick fix. I followed the route with the application tracking me and reached the restaurant within 2-3 minutes. The last year way of doing this would have been to ask random people in the area if they knew where the road was and how to get there. With about 5 or 6 people asked on the route all giving me slightly different directions, I would have got there.

Since I got my Nokia 770 a few weeks ago, my main uses have been:

1. casual browsing and jabber IM
2. responding to Nagios alarms using the Terminal and openssh, wherever I am
3. testing the mosque’s audio streams using the Internet Radio application

The 1st and 2nd uses would be made much more efficient and less frustrating with a built-in keyboard. Also the GPS would be much better with a high-res screen like on the Nokia tablets than on the N95.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 2:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.