Category Archives: Product Reviews

GEEK! Product Reviews

Is Nokia’s new Comes With Music worth it?

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If you want a straight answer, then no. I doubt Nokia will have this deal last very long, because frankly Nokia is making quite a gamble.

So this is how it works. You pay £129.95 and you will get a Nokia 5310 XpressMusic and a 1 year subscription to Comes With Music. Well first of all, the 5310 is a phone that’s over a year old now. You can have N95 8GB if you would rather have that, but still the N95 is beginning to show it’s age now and more modern technology is already beginning to replace it. Besides, if you’ve only got two phones to choose from a  lot of people will just move onto something else.

The N95 Comes With Music edition will knock you back £400 and with that you’ll get an 8GB model, all the “bells and whistles” of the N95 and the year of “free” music.

Oh and by the way don’t forget this “free” music doesn’t cover data costs so you still have to pay for some plan to get a fair rate for downloading music or you are going to end up with a massive phone bill.

Nokia is in my opinion taking a huge gamble here. Lets say someone downloads 1500 songs over the course of the year and each song was to cost £0.79. Well that totals to £1185 so how Nokia is making a profit here I would love to know.

So overall I think Nokia is not only risking a huge loss, but the poor choice of phones and the risks of data costs make it pretty much useless to most people.

Freecom Network Drive – Can I recommend it or not?

Well, I recently purchased a Freecom Network Drive from Freecom themselves and so far I’m having no end of problems. 

When it got here, looked fine – no damage physically or anything noticable. Opened the box, checked all the components had come in one piece, and hooked it up to my router. Then went to the computer, checked the network had recognised it and it had. Click its logo and hang on… very slow…

So I tried going to the config page and seeing if I needed to set anything up. Still very slow but I got in – hard drive recognised, all seemed to be OK.

Several hours later I still couldn’t work it out. It was taking 30 seconds or so to load a page and adding a new folder resulted in an error and the a crash. I didn’t even bother trying to put a file on it.

As a last resort, I did a hard reset and tried again, and now its not even detecting a hard drive.

I will be sending back to Freecom and if they wont fix it I’ll be requesting my money back and I will look elsewhere. It seemed like a really good deal because I’d heard how good the Network Drive Pro’s were and the prive for a standard 500gb drive seemed almost too good to be true compared to many other companies.

So, if you want my advise, if you need a simple network drive for your home, don’t look at Freecom.

There are updates to this post at:

(21st Oct 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/10/21/update-on-the-faulty-freecom-drive/

(4th Dec 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/04/update-on-the-freecom-network-drive/

(13th Dec 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/13/the-working-freecom-network-drive-review/

What do you think about Google Chrome?

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As I mentioned in the post Is Internet Explorer 8 worth it?, I love Google Chrome. It’s such a fast browser, only crashes in rare occasions (despite the fact it’s in BETA) and I love the new tab management.

There are things Google could do to improve it, of course. But that’s the same with most software. I rarely find any program that is absolutely perfect for me.

What are your thoughts on it, could it be improved?