Awhile back I got converted. Not to a religious group (although, at times I wonder…) but I reached a point where my email and task management habits would no longer scale, and I was drowning in my inbox. I read a book and a couple of articles, made a few changes to my behaviour and since then have been very good at keeping my inbox down to zero at the end of each day. Travelling has been a test, but I’ve stuck at it and seen the benefit.
Also awhile back, my phone started playing up. I have a Nokia E71, and the feelings I have for this phone verge on the unnatural. It’s easily the best, most useful phone I’ve ever owned. Suddenly, it started rebooting itself every few minutes. This would happen for 5minutes or so every few hours, and then would go away. I uninstalled apps that I’d recently installed, searched for other people with the same issue, all to no avail.
Eventually I realised the two things were connected. Seems there is a bug in Mail for Exchange on Symbian. Whenever my inbox gets down to zero, this issue starts occurring. The fix is to send myself an email. As soon as that email hits my inbox, the phone goes back to being rock solid.
I guess there has to be some upside to bad email management.
4 Comments
What’s so good about the E71 that you would have unnatural feelings for it? Is it the keyboard?
Hey Sean. Partly the keyboard. The battery is pretty good for a smartphone (well, put another way, it doesn’t suck as much as most smartphone batteries). Pretty good camera. I get all my email accounts, web access, tethering via bluetooth, GPS, etc all in a slim, fairly small form factor. I guess it’s the first phone I’ve had that does pretty much everything I want, and I go days at a time without cursing. Once you replace the built in browser with Opera Mini (free) and the built in GPS app with Google Maps (also free), it’s pretty close to perfect for me.
Also, the background illumination dims and brightens as it feels like. – And if you type the first letters of a name in your phonebook, it shows names with those letters ANYWHERE in the name, forcing you to practically spell out the name entirely. – And when you set an alarm, it sometimes decides you meant the NEXT day (missed a flight that way). – I went back to my 6822
Ken, I’ve never had these issues. The screen dims based on the timeout I set and I use the alarms very frequently and it’s never messed up for me. Regarding the search in the address book, I tend to search based on last name anyway, so maybe there are less clashes that way. I can understand why you’d go back if you’ve had such issues, but for me, this email one is the first time I’ve had any reason to complain about it.