WOMWorld/Nokia "Experiences"

-
WOMWorld/Nokia have recently unveiled their "Experiences" page. It offers a view of the devices they currently have out on loan and the cities where said devices are currently being evaluated.

Privacy concerns mean that the devices are mapped only to the city where they've been sent, not to the actual address of the person trying the device out. For example, as of writing this, there's the indication of an N900 (the one sitting next to me on the arm of my sofa) in Bolton when in actual fact I am in Horwich, which is a few miles West of Bolton.


I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of this is but hey, it's fun, right? It certainly seems to fit in with the current craze for location-based services such as OVI location sharing, geotagging on twitter, Google Buzz etc.

Speaking of the N900 I have here, I still have just over a week to evaluate it. I'll digest my findings and report back shortly thereafter.

Popular posts from this blog

HP Prime benchmark

-
Image
Err, right. The HP Prime is hardly a vintage calculator given that it was first released in 2015. Better still, HP released the so-called Prime "G2" in August 2018 with faster hardware, much more RAM to work with and double the storage space in flash memory. When that happened, there was no excuse, I had to get one. At the time of writing, the Prime G2 would appear to be available only in Europe. The Americas have been left by the wayside this time around. I bought mine from derekenwinkel.nl with whom I have no affiliation other than being a happy customer of theirs. As it became known that there was an updated version of the Prime, people in the Museum of HP Calculators Forum were interested in hard data showing the improvements in performance, so I went and wrote a benchmark. The benchmark in itself is probably of limited value in absolute terms but gives a good idea of the differences between different machines. A benchmark run can comprise up to th
Read more

Is it really a Hewlett Packard?

-
Image
There are two scientific calculators recently produced that, I'm afraid, fall into the cheap, plasticky category. They are the HP300s+ and the HP10s+. The question is, are they really Hewlett Packard machines at all? They are not. They are in fact Casios that have been rebadged to look like HP machines. Want proof? Watch this video with the HP10s+ showing its real colours. If you press the MODE key four times you get to the menu where you can alter display settings. There is an undocumented function in this menu where, if you press '2', you get to the contrast setting. This is not mentioned in the manual and, indeed, it has no effect, but look at what you get on screen when you press '2'. One good thing about this little machine is that I didn't even have to put a battery in it. The solar panel above the screen provides enough power to run the calculator as long as there's enough light around.
Read more

Egg timer in a 41CX

-
Image
Now this is something unusual. Who would want to use a 30-year-old machine worth something as a mere egg timer, or use it at all in a kitchen, where it could easily get damaged? It just so happens that one of the machines in my collection is a SwissMicros DM41. It's built really solid and it's basically the same thing as a Hewlett Packard HP-41CX in a case the size of a credit card, so that means that it incorporates, among other things, a Time Module, which gives it a stopwatch, countdown timer and alarm capabilities. The DM41 is a great little piece of technology. However, the operative word here is "little". While its LCD is the same size as it's Voyager-sized big brother, the DM41L, its keys are just a bit too small for the device to be fully practical, but for some things its form factor makes it just right. Okay, it's more than an egg timer. This said, my DM41 gets used most of the time in the kitchen as a timer while I'm cooking. I keep i
Read more