Under Development

Posted on 30 Nov 2007 at 16:45

 

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Finally, I had to decide which phone to take. I recently replaced my old Nokia 6310 with a Nokia N73, as the contract allows for upgrades every 12 to 18 months. This phone has a stack of features (most of which I don't use), including two cameras. Why two? Dunno.

The main problem with the N73 is battery life. The old phone would go for six days without a recharge; this one lasts for three at best. Mrs R also recently upgraded from a 6310 to a Nokia N95 (which has even more features and an even shorter battery life), so I opted to charge both batteries from the old phones and move my SIM card back to the 6310. After all, I only wanted it for making phone calls. What else is a phone for?

Power trip

So how did it work out in practice? Kathmandu should have been easy, as there was a mains socket in the hotel room. Getting at it was another matter, though, as Lee had acquired a fully featured BlackBerry for the trip and spent so much time messing with it that it needed constant recharging. And when Lee wasn't using the socket, the chances were there'd be no electricity as the supply was extremely unreliable.

Beyond Lukla - the starting point for Everest treks - my decision to choose equipment that used normal batteries was totally vindicated. After that point, I didn't see a single thing with a wheel on it - not even a bike or a cart, let alone a car or truck. The camera worked wonderfully, taking more than 600 pictures and eight movies on a total of eight AA cells. The only problem of note occurred one very cold morning when a relatively fresh set of batteries simply wouldn't keep the camera powered up. The low temperature was preventing the cells delivering a current; the solution was to warm them up to body temperature.

Call waiting

The Nokia used one battery on the way up and the second one on the way back down. This may seem a lot given that the only place you could actually get a signal was Namche. However, Lee's BlackBerry wouldn't work there (or anywhere else), and neither would the phones of several other members of the party, so mine took a bit of stick with people phoning home to say they were OK.

The Tungsten PDA never got used as I couldn't find a WiFi point. Instead, I paid 10 rupees a minute (about nine pence) for a connection at an 'internet caf? This was something of a misnomer as (a) there was no food or drink and (b) the connection was so slow as to be almost unusable. A single email sent via Yahoo! Mail took over 10 minutes to send and cost a quid.

How much?!?

When the rest of the group worked out that I came from Yorkshire this became a well-used catchphrase whenever payment for anything was required.

Now it's nose to the keyboard to clear the truly horrendous backlog of work.

Author: David Robinson