Battery performance is a recurrent theme in blog posts and discussions about the N80 - see for instance discussions at Nokia and HowardForums. A common experience among users appears to be about one day's usage on a battery charge. This is consistent with my own experience - before I started tweaking settings to improve battery life, I would get about a day or 1.5 days on a charge.

Some users complain about the default BL-5B 820 mAh battery being simply to weak for a capable device like the N80. This may be the case or not - I personally do not think it odd that the N80 battery drains quickly. Running radios like the N80's GSM, 3G, Bluetooth and WiFi simply suck batteries dry whether it is on a PDA, laptop or phone. I am sure the N80's brilliant QVGA screen also takes it toll.

However, there are a few things that can be done to improve the battery life of the N80. Below, I have put together a list of the tweaks I currently use;

• Turn screen brightness down a notch or two (Menu, Tools, Settings, Phone, Display, Light sensor).
• Lower the standby timeout - mine's set to 1 minute (Menu, Tools, Settings, Phone, Display, Power saver time-out).
• Turn WLAN scanning off (Menu, Tools, Settings, Connection, Wireless LAN).
• Turn off 3G (Menu, Tools, Settings, Network).

With these settings, I now get between 3 and 4 days of usage on a battery charge!

Of the above tweaks, turning off 3G contributed most to longer battery life. At the university campus where I work, 3G coverage is pretty sporadic and so my phone keeps searching all day for a network to hook up to. Apparently this really drains the battery.

Maybe it seems a bit odd to turn off 3G on a 3G-phone? The fact is, I currently do not use 3G much - my calls and text messages go through the GSM network and I usually make sure to hook up to a WLAN for data transfer. The ridiculous high cost of 3G (currently $1.75 per Mb!) encourages this type of behavior.

Another tweak - which I have not tried - is to turn down the WLAN transmit power (Menu, Tools, Settings, Connection, Wireless LAN, Options, Advanced settings - say YES to the prompt - scrol down to TX power level choose options/change/ and select 4 mW). In this post at the symbian-freak.com forum, a user reports how turning down the WLAN transmit power seriously improved battery life.

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I came across Steve Garfield's Video Blog today, where I found a couple of really interesting videos.

In this first video, Steve unpacks a N95 and goes over the contents of the product package.

The next video shows how YouTube videos can be accessed through the Nseries Video Center. It also seems you can upload videos to services like YouTube directly from the N95 - in the same way images can be uploaded to flickr on the N80 IE. Symbianfreak.com has a Symbianfreak.com has a similar video.

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I have been using fring - chat and VoIP telephony - on my N80 for a few weeks now and I really think this application rocks. Note: I have only used fring for chat - no calls yet.

This week, fring announced support of MSN (Skype and GoogleTalk are already supported). I tried it today and it works really nice. Apparently, fring is able to add services dynamically because I did not update to a new version - the MSN service was just added when I opened the application today. That is really clever!

Fring used to have some problems running on N80 (see fring forums) - the first version I tried (2.71) would freeze when loading, but a recent update to v.2.74 has fixed that.

Here is a nice review of fring with some screenshots (made before the MSN service was added).

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I just picked up the external DVD-/CD-RW drive for my new laptop and damn, it's tiny - just look at the picture below!

The drive is a Plextor PX-608CU

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I am very new at using a S60 phone (my Nokia N80) - my last Nokia phone was a 3210 and quite a lot has happened since. Actually the 3210 was also my first mobile phone.

So, being quite illiterate I have for instance not been able to figure out how to copy-paste text. A bit embarrassing, really…

Until today when I came across the S60 Hints and Tips site at s60.com. The site's list of hints and tips is not very exhaustive but it is a start and hopefully stuff will be added to the list gradually.

It is possible to subscribe to the list through a news feed.

BTW. s60.com also host a number of interesting blogs, written by Nokia employees. I particularly recommend Tommi Vilkamo's S60 Application Blog. If you are looking for applications for your S60 phone - or just want to keep an eye on recent developments - Tommi's blog is a good place to start.

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Min lillebror Magnus og hans kone Camilla har købt et hus.

I går gav jeg dem en lille hånd med at ordne loftet i den ene stue. Samtidig havde jeg lejlighed til at optage en "virtuel tur" i huset. Video optaget d. 3. februar, 2007.

NB! Videoen fylder 18 Mb, så det kan godt tage lidt tid før den afspilles i browseren.

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