Mobile Poker

Lately, online poker and poker in general have become very popular. There are satellite-online qualifier tournaments where you can win a ticket to a major poker tournament such as World Poker Tour or World Series of Poker. Major tournaments are televised making poker into a spectator sport.

My own experience of poker is limited to occasional online poker during the last year or so. I can't say that I'm an experienced poker player. I just play for fun and many times I play "play money" instead of "real money" games. One day when I was playing for fun I thought if it would be possible to play online poker using a mobile phone. You'd need a reliable network connection but other than that it should be possible.

After spending some time on the internet I found out that you can play mobile poker. PokerRoom.com has a mobile poker client that you can download for free after signing up. Great - so I immediately signed up, downloaded and installed the client and was ready to go. Using my home wireless network to connect to internet, I started testing.

After the startup screen you enter the main menu (see the images below). There you can choose to play online poker, change settings, read help and view statistics of your previous games. You can also play offline poker against computerized opponents.


After clicking online poker you get another menu where you can select what type of game you want to play. You can choose "play money" if you want to play for fun or you can select "real money" games. You can also select what kind of table limit you prefer. After making your selections you press "GET TABLES" and you get a list of tables that match your selection. Now all you have to do is join one table, select an empty seat and start playing. The small screen of a mobile phone limits the view slightly. You can only see two thirds of the table at a time. You can manually scroll to view the rest of the table but during the game the poker client automatically scrolls to where the action is. The automatic scrolling works very well. The image below is from a play money table (player names and their stack has been blacked out).


After playing for some time, I can say that mobile poker works great on N95. Due to a relatively small screen it's not the same as playing on a PC but they've done a great job to considering the limitations of a small handheld device. During the testing I didn't experience any problems. As I said, I was using my home WLAN to connect and it seemed to work great - no problems with network latency.

I didn't really expect much from my mobile poker experience but I have to say that I was positively surprised. Although the auto-scroll feature works very well, it would be great to be able to see the whole table. PokerRoom.com is one of the largest poker rooms on the internet and it's great that they have made mobile poker available for us who like to use our mobile phones for more than just talking.

Note to U.S. citizens:
This information is for educational and entertainment purposes only and any use of this information in violation of any federal, state, or local laws is prohibited. Many poker sites no longer accept players from the US.

New firmware - good or bad

It seems like the new v 12.0.013 firmware works great for most of the N95 users while some users are experiencing problems. After upgrading to the latest firmware some phones seem to suffer from strange LCD behavior, unresponsive buttons and occasional lock-ups. See the two YouTube videos here and here. There's also a thread at Nokia Support Discussions.

According to the discussion at least phones with product code 0548763 seem to be in danger after upgrading to new firmware. Whether it's a hardware or firmware problem is not yet certain. If you have a phone with product code 0548763 you might want to wait for the next firmware version before upgrading. You'll find the product code of your phone printed on a sticker under the battery.

Top 5 free applications for N95

There's no lack of choice when it comes to applications for N95 and other Series 60 phones. And many of them are completely free. After downloading and testing a lot of these free applications, I came up with this list of TOP 5 free applications for N95.

TOP 5 FREE APPLICATIONS FOR N95

1. MobiGenie - a great call management utility fully packed with features such as answering machine, SMS auto reply, caller blocking, automatic activation with selected profiles and much more
   
2. Sports Tracker - nice tool for tracking all your sports activites (well, it's not always possible to carry a phone while exercising), it uses GPS to log your speed and route, logged activities can be exported to Google Earth
   
3. Mobile GMaps - almost like Google Mobile Maps but with GPS support, you can view maps and satellite images
4. Opera Mini - nice web browser if you don't have an unlimited data plan - Opera Mini helps you save money by reducing the amount of data transferred (you can also download the latest beta)
   
5. Google Mobile Maps - use this application to view Google Maps and satellite images, Google Mobile Maps would have been even higher on my list if it had GPS support; hopefully Google will add GPS support in the future versions
   

There are many applications that almost made it to my list. For example Fring almost made it to the list but the sound quality is not yet acceptable. Applications that have a price tag, even ones with free trial, were not considered when making this list.

New firmware and GPS

I've now tested the new firmware (12.0.0.013) for a couple of days. I've always said that having a phone with integrated GPS is great but I've also criticized how slow the GPS acquired satelite lock. The new firmware with Assisted GPS support is a huge improvement.
I have been testing the GPS quite a lot during the last two days. Lock to satelites is acquired very quickly, even inside a car. When starting the Maps while driving a car, it takes on average less than 30 seconds to lock to satellites. In similar conditions with the previous firmware version it usually took more than 10 minutes. What an improvement! No more critisism about long waiting times before the GPS is operational.
Before the firmware was officialy released there were rumors that it would also include a new version of Maps application. The version of new Maps is not included in this FW update. I guess we'll have to wait a bit longer for the new Maps.

New firmware for N95

New firmware, version 12.0.013 is available for download using Nokia Software Updater.

I just installed the new firmware. Downloading the update may take a while as it's 113.6 MB. After a very quick testing, the GPS seems to find a fix a lot quicker than before. Now there's also support for Assisted GPS, which you can switch on from Tools -> Settings -> General -> Positioning Methods. In addition to Positioning Methods, there's also a new setting for Positioning Server.

New version of PC Suite

Version 6.84 of Nokia PC Suite has just been released (July 4, 2007).

According to Nokia the new version:

Offers enhancements to performance and stability

Enables the synchronization of files and folders between PC and phone

Notifies when new add-on applications are available

N95 camera - scene settings

I've been playing with the camera settings during the last couple of days. There's something very strange in the way some of the scenes work.
N95 allows you to choose between eight different scenes:

• Auto
• User defined
• Close-up
• Portrait
• Landscape
• Sports
• Night
• Night portrait

I took a photo using landscape scene. When I opened the photo in PhotoShop it was not what I expected. Most of the image was out of focus and it seemed to have a very small depth of field (DOF). Landscape scene setting is normally used to give you a large depth of field. The area within the depth of field appears sharp while the areas in front of and beyond the depth of field appear blurry. Small depth of field is certainly not something that you would expect when using landscape scene.
I thought I'd experiment a bit with the scene settings and took photos using Auto, Portrait and Landscape scene. I then compared them in Photoshop to see if there really was something strange. Below is a set of three images with different scene settings: Auto, Portrait and Landscape (from top to bottom).




Most of the time I've been using Auto scene when taking photos with N95 and haven't noticed anything strange. The first image, taken with Auto setting, seems to be as expected.
The second image is taken using Portrait setting. What I'd expect from a Portrait setting is a small depth of field. It usually used when taking photos of a person and you want the person to appear in focus while anything in front or behind the person are blurred. The Portrait photo taken using N95 is completely opposite. It seems sharp all the way from near to far. A closer look tells that a lot of post-processing has been done to sharpen the image.
The third photo was taken using landscape scene. First thing I noticed when taking a photo in landscape scene was that the lens didn't try to focus at all. As you can see from the photo, it has very small depth of field while objects near and far are blurred. Not really what you'd expect in a Landscape mode.
Landscape and Portrait scenes seem to produce unexpected results. It almost seems like the Portrait and Landscape modes should be switched. I thought I had accidentally changed the scene modes in wrong order but when I repeated the experiment (several times) I always got the same result.