Is your mobile phone losing signal? Auckland, New Zealand, Mobile, Phone, Repair

If you have trouble receiving calls at home or in the office, there is now technology that gives you a mobile signal in places without one.

Femtocells are mini phone masts which can piggy back on your broadband connection to send the call to a mobile operator.

Steve Lightley from NEC Europe reckons they are coming to your home soon.

"They've been deployed in Japan and trials are ongoing in UK and Europe," he said.

To use them a mobile does not need to have wi-fi and it is expected that some home routers will have the technology built in later this year.

Mobile phone Backupa and Rescue (Auckland, New Zealand)

What makes smashing or losing a mobile phone such a pain is the fact that few phone owners sync or back up their contacts, images and songs stored on the gadget.

Some mobile stores now use transfer devices that allow customers to walk away with their contacts and media on a USB stick, or to transfer everything when upgrading.

But increasingly, mobile apps are able to do "over the air" back ups of contacts, diaries, and data to remote storage servers.

"That means that when you leave the store, all of your mobile content is automatically backed up," said Dianne Canham from mobile synchronization firm CelleBrite.

"The user doesn't actually have to instigate anything like going on the internet, or download anything, as this happens automatically," she said.

How Tough is your phone?

Putting your life in your handset is risky, especially if you kill it. But at the 2009 MWC, i-mate showed off a handset that can take much more punishment than most.

Named after a US military spec, the 810-F can be dropped from three metres (10 feet), works in temperatures ranging from sub-zero to 60 degrees Celsius, is dustproof, and water resistant.

Dan put its toughness to the test by driving over it in a car. It stayed in one piece and even its touchscreen was still working.

If you prepared to splash out £600 on this handset when it comes out in April, then you too could impress your friends. One of its useful features is that your data can be protected if you lose it.

"If this device is lost or stolen, you can log in at any place and set a lock, an alarm, and even wipe the data located on the phone at any time," said Michael Cavey, sales director at i-mate. "And if it is damaged we'll replace it."

Nokia E-71 PDA Phone: Power Tips and Shortcuts, David Lim, Auckland, New Zealand, GDI

It had been almost a month now since I switched from my good old Nokia N95 to the Nokia E71; I am still very excited about this little cool machine. I have search on New Zealand's Vodafone site and cannot find much power tool or shortcuts.

Well, these tips are well known, but for people who doesn’t know yet, here some keyboard shortcut for Nokia E71:

- Quick double press on the bottom left ‘number shift’ key locks it. Most useful when particularly navigating around the GMail app to invoke actions instead of keep pressing the button before every keystroke.

- Copy and paste can, in some situations be done with Ctrl+C (but you need to hold down Func+Chr+C to get this on the keyboard). You can highlight text (in edit situations) by holidng the shift key and moving the direction pad. Copy will appear as on of the softkey labels.

- Page up and page down are Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down. Again you access control by pressing the function key first (so Fn+Chr+Up on the keyboard). Doing this directly is awkward. You can press Fn then Ctrl+Up. If you doble tap the function key it becomes sticky (i.e. like cap locks and as describes above) and you can then do multiple page up and page downs easily.

- From the idle screen hold down # to switch between silent and general profiles. Press and hold down * to switch bluetooth on and off.

- Press Fn Key + Return Key for quick Mark/Unmark of items like Msg. emails etc. for deletion or moving.

- On keys that show a symbol or number, hold down the key to get it.

- When in locked mode you can hold the large center ’select’ key to get a large back lit time and date display w/o unlocking or needing to re lock.

- Pressing Shift + Backspace = delete letters after cursor

- In Notes and Messaging, press Fn (most left bottom button) + Spacebar = gives input option such as turn on/off predictive text, settings, writing language, input method.

- Hold down left soft key to read out new text messages.

Worldwide Mobile Phone Market Share for 2008 (David Lim, Auckland, New Zealand)

Nokia 40.9%

Samsung 16.4%

Motorola 9.7%

LG Electronics 8.6%

Sony Ericsson 7.9%

Others 16.4%

Source: Strategy Analytics

Posterous.com: Micro Blogging on the Fly! David Lim, Auckland, New Zealand

I went to work early today and was having a breakfast at Burger King. When having coffee, I flicked out my Nokia E71 phone and started to browse the web. I searched google.co.nz for information on "Blogging with your Nokia E71" and found the cool website called Posterous.com Posterous.com offer normal people like you and me to blog on the fly. It is very simple to do. You need to be able to send email and attach the photo you take to blog! I managed to registered for two blog sites, one of them is http://auckland.posterous.com/ It cannot be easy enough to use this free service to blog. It could be a good tool for you to leave your digital trial on a day out or even record "one day in your life" event on the internet. You can go online and edit your log postings, add tag, organise and customise your Posterous.com blog

Top Ten Mobile Phones in the World (David Lim, Auckland, New Zealand)

The following is the ranking of the Top Rated Mobile Phones by CNET's Editor. I personally use and own two of the Nokia's and Sony Ericsson.

Apple iPhone 3G
Apple's long-awaited upgrade with GPS and 3G

Samsung i8510
Smart phone with 8-megapixel camera

Nokia E71
Feature-packed smart phone with a Qwerty keypad

HTC Touch HD

Publish Post

Attractive smart phone with a large touchscreen

Sony Ericsson C905
8-megapixel camera phone with GPS and Wi-Fi

Sony Ericsson K800i
3G handset with 3.2 megapixel camera

Nokia N95 8GB
Smart phone with built-in sat-nav, MP3 player, Wi-Fi, 5-megapixel camera and 8GB memory

BlackBerry Bold 9000
Feature-packed smartphone with a very sharp screen


Sony Ericsson K750i
Mobile phone with almost 100MB of storage, 2-megapixel camera, radio and MP3 player

Nokia N95
All-in-one handset with built-in sat-nav, MP3 player, Wi-Fi and 5-megapixel camera

Sony Ericsson W760i
Feature-packed slider music phone