is there a better phone for me?

You've got three phones already, one of them only five months old, so unless any of them are broken you won't need a new one.

If you just want navigation, why not just get a Tomtom or something?

< You've got three phones already, one of them only five months old, so unless any of them are broken you won't need a new one.

Thank you for your feedback. I am not considering a tomtom, that would be utterly useless to me.

If any other posters feel they can help, let me be more specific:

The high res screen on the 5800 is excellent for mapping, but it's awful in sunlight. Very poor contrast. Exceptionally poor battery life compared to n73. So which phones offer better contrast / and high res screens?

The n73's screen is bright, but the phone is quite slow, and has very limited memory. So it's not ideal.

The n95 I mostly use for research work, sure it's got more memory than the n73, but it eats battery power.

So the questions, is there a phone that has good battery life, good screen,a nd high memory?

johnt2202 wrote:The N95 and 5800 battery life is just poor, the 5800 certainly can't manage a whole day of navigating. The N73 certainly can.

I am very surprised you say battery life on the 5800 is poor, as the battery is 50% higher capacity than N95 etc.
I am finding my 5800 is lasting longer between charges than any other Nokia smartphone I have owned previously.

Not any of my business really, but I agree you have too many handsets already. Just decide which is best FOR YOU, sell the other 2 and wait a year or so before looking for something 'better'.

My last post was just a quick one but as dez_borders has brought to light, it did seem a bit brash, so my apologies.

It sounds like you'd rather use either the N95 or 5800 for navigation over the N73 and the only thing that's stopping you is battery life, so instead of a new phone maybe you could consider a way to boost the battery life of either one of these devices. Below are just a few examples:

• Keep the screen brightness at a minimum and have as few apps running at any given time
• If you don't need video calling or fast internet, switch off dual mode and stick to GSM
• Keep bluetooth and wifi off and only use them when necessary
• When you don't need navigation, close your Maps app
• Install Battery Extender on your N95 to boost its life by about 30%. You could just use the 14 day trial and not spend a penny
• Install the latest firmware you can on your N95 as recent firmwares (v30 and v31) have increased battery life by quite a bit... or at least so I've noticed anyway. Just be sure to back up everything on the phone to your PC before you do it
• If you are driving at any point (e.g. driving to the camp site), have your preferred device charging while in the car
• Buy a 2nd battery for either (or both?) of the phones
• Switch from one device to the other when the battery/batteries of the first one runs out

Hope this helps.

Hmm, this is really interesting, thanks for your tips guys.

Well, using ViewRanger on my n73 (with bluetooth GPS) I can get a full 12-14 hours of navigating.

On the 5800 I'll get about 6-7 hours before changing batts, and that's using the bluetooth GPS not the internal. I often find that my 5800 will run flat overnight, perhaps that's with wlan scanning or something. I don't need to switch off bluetooth on the n73, and it'll happily go into standby mode and last for days and days. The 5800 can't manage that, which I find annoying.

As for batteries I have loads of spares!

I wonder if there's a page documenting the battery life of different N series models, that would be interesting to see.

I will look into your N95 tips, that could be the answer for me. Thanks

zxon wrote: [*]Install the latest firmware you can on your N95 as recent firmwares (v30 and v31) have increased battery life by quite a bit... or at least so I've noticed anyway. Just be sure to back up everything on the phone to your PC before you do it.

My advice is not to use BACKUP/RESTORE in either the handset or via PC Suite when a firmware upgrade is planned.
Lots of issues can arrise when a backup from an older firmware is restored into a more recent firmware.
It is better to use PC Suite Synchronisation instead.

During a firmware upgrade, on the older 3rd edition handsets, only internal memory is overwritten - nothing is ever touched on your memory card
- so install (or re-install) as many as possible of your apps on the memory card before running NSU.

The more recent 3rd edition handsets - N95 8GB, N82 - and ALL 5th edition handsets - N96, 5800 - run in User Persistence mode during a firmware upgrade so internal memory is not erased.

johnt2202 wrote:Hmm, this is really interesting, thanks for your tips guys.

Well, using ViewRanger on my n73 (with bluetooth GPS) I can get a full 12-14 hours of navigating.

On the 5800 I'll get about 6-7 hours before changing batts, and that's using the bluetooth GPS not the internal. I often find that my 5800 will run flat overnight.

A couple of extra recommendations to save battery life...

1. Set Packet data mode to 'When Needed' and not to 'When Available'.
2. Try using the internal GPS unit instead of an external Bluethooth GPS - bluethooth uses an RF transmitter which is probably a higher current drain.
3. List which apps run in the background all the time, and kill any you don't REALLY need - e.g. a Call Recording app badly reduced my battery life.
4. Install an app like Best Profiles and set it to change to 'Offline' profile when you go to bed & back to an active profile when you get up in the morning.
5. Charge your handset EVERY night (then you can ignore point 4) - even if it shows 5 or 6 bars on the battery meter. L-ion batteries don't suffer 'memory effect' issues.
6. Only use genuine Nokia batteries, purchased from official Nokia Re-sellers. Dont buy spares from eBay as they are almost all inferior counterfeits - if it's cheap it's fake!