Nokia N80 Hints and Tips

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The Nokia N80 is a great phone, but here's a couple of things I've come across which just made it that bit more usable for me...

Contents

Battery Life

The battery life can be extended by making sure you only have an active data connection on when needed, by default (at least on my phone with the UK Orange service provider) it defaulted to being connected 24/7. I've noticed elsewhere people say you need to contact Orange to have this disabled, however I disabled it myself by doing the following:

Go into the Menu and choose: Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Packet Data

There will be two options, "When needed" and "When available", you want to have "When needed" selected for maximum battery life.

In addition you can also turn the dual mode (on vodafone and orange) off and just have the GSM network on.

Go into the Menu and choose: Tools -> Settings -> Phone -> Network mode -> Dual mode / GSM Please note that this will result in a reboot of the phone but it does make your battery last a lot longer.

Camera

By default there is a pop-up that happens every time you take a photograph asking if you want to "Upload to album" or "Send to a friend", I found this highly irritating when trying to take pictures and I couldn't find anywhere in the Camera settings to turn it off. This additional "functionality" is specific to the Orange photo album service, which you may or may not want to use, personally I use Flickr already so it was of no use to me.

To disable the prompt go into the Menu and choose "My Own" and then select the "Photography" icon, Click for "Options" and choose the "Settings" menu item. There should be an item called "Camera Prompt", turn this to off and you'll not get that irritating pop-up anymore! You can also choose to disable the service completely from within this application.

Clock

After the S700i I found the Alarm function on the N80 to be poor. The lack of ability to set alarms on a per-day basis was very frustrating, on the S700i I set an alarm to just go off on weekdays and it worked great, the N80 hasn't got this basic feature!

Thankfully Handy Clock by Epocware came to the rescue! The other option is to set up your alarms in the phones diary and pick the alarm tone in the diary notification.

Key Lock

On some other Nokia phones there is an auto-keylock function which automatically locks the keypad after a timeout period, this is quite handy for me and I missed it on the N80, luckily you can have this implemented by 3rd party software - the one I particularily like is Handy Weather as it locks the keypad and shows a weather forecast on the screen as a screen saver, including a nice big readable clock and various other status information. A free third-party auto-keylock application, AutoLock, is available for Symbian phones and has just been updated for the N80 and other Symbian S60 version 3 phones.

Software

Why isn't there more Shareware/Freeware for this version of Symbian? It's frustrating to have to pay for software when I'm used to it all being free...

There's 2 pieces of software I've bought for this phone, Handy Clock and Handy Weather and you can download trials of both here Epocware

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