Every phone has the ‘p’ or pause key (On Nokia Phones, you can get it by 3 presses of the ‘*’ key) .

As most of my family lives overseas, I use calling cards a lot. One of the major pain points of using calling cards is that you have to enter a pin code to validate your account and then you have to enter the phone number.� A lengthy process indeed, and made even longer if you don’t remember the international phone number you’re calling.

This is where the pause key comes into play. Each instance of ‘p’ in the phone number accounts for once second of pause. Instead of just saving the phone number, save the pin code along with it by adding a pause in between!

The common way to save it is: <phone number>ppp<pin code>

The number of p’s depends on the number of seconds needed in between.

To take it a step further, pre-load the calling card information on a contact’s number.

For example, my parents’ phone number would be: <calling card number>ppp<pin code>ppp<parents’ phone number>

There’s a ton of ways to extend this concept even further: save numbers with extensions, save keypress prompts to call centers – the list goes on.

How to extend it even further? I leave that to your imagination.

Although mostly useless for me, it’s nevertheless an interesting feature for people who are very active on Flickr. Adding more accounts aggregates them on the same line, very handy as the screen real estate is limited.

Unfortunately though, it looks like this won’t be happening anytime soon (or maybe never). From this thread over at Europe Nokia Discussion Boards, it looks like Nokia and Blackberry haven’t reached an agreement (and maybe never will!). So Blackberry Connect for the E71 is a no-go.

Quite a shocker, ain’t it! The new iPhone 3G will have exchange support and will support features such as remote device wipe (which Mail for Exchange does not support as it uses Exchange over ActiveSync – correct me if I’m wrong here). The new Blackberry Bold will obviously bring along some enhancements to the Blackberry OS. I wonder how Nokia plans to extend its reach into the enterprise market by leaving out a key component like Blackberry Connect?

I want to get the E71, but I can’t, since it doesn’t support BES. I guess I’ll wait for the next E-Series line-up and hope that it has Blackberry Connect.

This was the first time I tried out the N95’s camera with the new firmware. I’ve always had the complaint that the N95’s camera was slow and unusable for quick shots. After the firmware update however, it’s a completely different beast! The camera is fast to load and quicker with the auto-focus. The image processing time has gone down as well. To put it simply, I did not miss my Casio Exilim 5 mp camera.

This was also the first time I tried out Flickr’s video service and Share on Ovi’s video service!� Share Online was able to upload the images, but I could not upload videos from the N95. I didn’t find a way to embed a slideshow of videos on my blog with Flickr videos, so I’m left with little choice but to load them manually.

Flickr has the better desktop experience for uploading videos, particularly via the browser. Uploads with Share on Ovi are simple too, but the browser uploader starts up a clunky java uploader that hung FF3 a couple of times. I switched to the windows explorer based uploader and it worked flawlessly, but I’m a little wary of anything that uses Windows Explorer to upload stuff.

The fireworks videos:

Museum of National History (Share on Ovi):

A couple of photos showing how the N95 works in low lighting conditions:

A few photos showing how well the N95 can capture text, thanks to the auto-focus. My N91 could never do it this well.

All photos can be seen on the flickr gallery.

The N95 is by far, the best camera phone I have owned to date! I enjoyed using the N95 as a digital camera. On the downside, however, I do think that the camera should be faster between pictures. The camera application does not remember the flash setting, which was irritating at times. I had to manually turn off the flash every time I wanted to take photos.

FYI, The iPhone works without a SIM card as well (another suprise!).

I came across an interesting advertisement on cable the other day, an LG advertisement that talked about how LG is taking its commitment to music seriously and has donated money to reinstate music classes in schools where music classes have been discontinued. Intrigued as I was about Nokia’s involvement in initiatives such as these, a quick search on Nokia’s website revealed the Corporate Responsibility section. It lists some really cool initiatives that Nokia has founded and participated in. I believe this is not something that Nokia advertises a lot nor have I come across anyone who has participated in or benefited from any of these programs.

Nothing more to add on here, although it’d be really cool to hear about real-life experiences from people who have volunteered in these programs.