My new toy........ Nokia E61i

Few months back I had started my search for a new mobile and bought the HTC TyTN I or HTC Hermes. Its a nice and powerful device but I had to give it up because :
a. I am so much used to the Treo form factor that the sliding QWERTY keyword did not work for me.
b. HTC Hermes is a battery guzzler. I was not using the device for voice but still I had to charge it atleast once everyday unlike my Treo 600 that runs for 2 days even with voice usage.
c. Though Hermes has a 400 MHz processor, the speed still sucks. Probably the 64MB RAM acts as a bottleneck.

Anyway, this time I had to buy a phone for my wife and I got her a Nokia e61i yesterday. Its got everything that I wanted (listed here). My initial reactions to the phone are:

POSITIVES
1. E61i runs S60 3rd edition which has a nice/ user friendly interface. Infact one of my biggest worries has always been that no phone offers an interface as convenient as Palm Treo but e61i seems to take care of this issue.
2. The screen size and clarity of e61i is very good. Allows for easy browsing of sites.
3. The built in browser has two very nice features :one- when you scroll on a page, it shows a thumbnail of the entire page and shows a small windows that indicates what part of the entire page you are on. two- when you press the back button it shows all previously visited sites/ pages and gives an effect similar to the switch applications effect in Windows Vista or Compiz.

NEGATIVES
1. Though its nicely/ neatly built, it is huge. Does not fit my palm comfortable.
2. Very less freewares are available for S60 3rd edition. e.g. I have been searching for a freeware messenger that support MSN, GTalk, Yahoo and Skype. So far, I could only find Agile Messenger but it seems that its not a feeware. For some reason some sites indicated that it is freeware.
I don't want to spend on buying basic softwares and normally use freewares on my Palm Treo which work very well.

Will write more once I get more time to play with it.

Can Ubuntu damage my hard drive.... NO WAY

Yesterday I read a story on Slashdot which claimed that the power management features of Ubuntu kill the laptop's hard drive faster if you run it on battery. I got worried and started searching for more info on the same.

Today, I read another story on Digg which clarified this issue and also lead me to this post. It clearly explains that :

1. this is not an ubuntu feature/ issue by default
2. yes, Ubuntu offers a setting which, if enabled,could lead to decreasing your hard disk's life span. This setting is however desabled by default.
3. usually, Ubuntu uses the same power management settings that are set in the BIOS. Thus one needs to check the BIOS settings first and then worry about Ubuntu settings.

Thanks to Matthew Garrett for the clear description.

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