What's the worst bug in the Nokia E63?

I have had the Nokia E63 for quite a long time now and in that time I seem to have heard more bugs with the Nokia E71 than I have about the E63. For example, people have complained that the vibration on the E71 sometimes works intermittently. Also, some people have said the battery would not charge. Some calls would drop out completely with the E71 without warning. So have you had any strange behaviour coming from your Nokia E63?

ACMA cracks down on Vodafone Optus and Telstra

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has had enough being called a toothless tiger and has taken a big bite into the Australian telecommunications industry. After completing a rather lengthy review of the industry, they concluded that there were major problems with how often consumers were being fleeced by the telcos. Issues such as overcharging unsuspecting customers with data or call charges also known as bill shock have been addressed in a number of recommendations. These recommendations include: 

• Better complaints management—all providers must have a standard complaintshandling process that meets good practice standards and includes timeframes for dealing with a complaint.
• Tools to monitor usage and expenditure—all providers must offer a way to help customers track how many calls they make and how much data they download during a billing period, to help reduce the risk of bill shock. 
• Comparisons between providers—industry will be asked to provide more information on how good their customer care is, particularly how quickly they resolve their customers’ enquiries.
• Clearer pricing information in advertisements—all providers must clearly disclose pricing information in their advertisements in a way that will make it easier for consumers to compare plans.
• Better information about plans—all providers must give customers a simple, standard explanation of what is included in a plan, how bills are calculated and what other essential information they need to know about the plan (similar to a ‘product disclosure statement’)

The industry will be given the next 12 months to voluntarily introduce these measures before the remaining intransigent telcos will be dragged into the reforms by the ACMA next year. Should be interesting to see how the industry changes from this. 

Thoughts on the Nokia C7 (Astound in the US)

People sometimes ask why we like Nokia so much and the Nokia C7, Nokia's slimmest ever phone, is typical of the answer that we often give. The phone is an unpretentious device with a characteristic reliability that we expect from the Finnish giant. The gorilla glass screen is tough as you can get, with a recent demonstration showing how the phone copes after being driven over by a four tonne bus.



Back to the features that would make this phone a pleasant device to have by your side: The FM transmitter enables you to share your music or your phone call over a FM frequency so that you can utilise your car stereo in your conversations or listen to music. The camera boasts 8MP full focus with HD video recording. The C7 continues Nokia's march into the touch screen market but is priced at the lower end of the smartphone spectrum. The operating system is responsive and the on-screen keyboard works well, even better with Swype installed.

As always, Navigation is free with the C7 and with Vodafone Australia, you can get free apps included in your plan as well. The phone comes with 8GB disk space with the MicroSD port allowing up to 32GB more space. Bluetooth is now at the new 3.0 standard and the headphones jack is also the standard 3.5mm, allowing to use your favourite headphones with the device.

The built in Email application performed reasonably well, but I found that downloading only headers was quite frustratrating as the network took quite a while to download the emails, however this may be more of 3's problem than Nokia's. As the device uses the new Symbian^3 OS, we await the update to the new updates which will amongst other things, include a better web browser.

The battery lasted just over a day which is quite standard with many other phones, but this is with emails being checked every 5 minutes and about an hour of talk time in total.

How the C7 can be better than the Nokia N8 and E7
One final feature which you don't often hear mentioned is the active noise cancellation which utilises a microphone on the other side of the phone to pick up sounds that should be cancelled out of the conversation whilst you are talking to someone. That's pretty cool because I don't think the N8 or E7 has this.

Also I should mention that the C7 has its own dedicated call buttons which means that when using Google Search and Google Maps, you will be able to hold the call button and make VOICE searches! Now that's something you can't do with a N8 or E7 either!

So for those that prefer the above features, the Nokia C7 looks like your kind of phone. Be warned QWERTY users such as our loyal E63 users, the C7 will take some getting used to. Otherwise you may have to wait for the upcoming Nokia E6.

Top 10 Countries Nokia E63 users

You may be interested in where the readers of MyE63 are mostly coming from. Here are some latest statistics in the past week of where you are all from. Leave a comment and tell us about yourself, what you do and where you come from. 

India 787

Australia 614

United Kingdom 265

United States 253

Philippines 162

Indonesia 90

Canada 70

South Africa 70

Brazil 68

New Zealand 63