Monday, January 31, 2011

Put the C3 on Silent Mode.

You can turn off the phone to be safe, but the Nokia C3 can be put into silent mode.
Just go to Menu > Settings > Profile and activate Silent Mode.

April 19, 2012: A quicker and more convenient way is simply to depress the bottom rightmost button, the one with a note icon and a forward slash sympbol for more than a second. This will toggle your general and silent mode profiles! This will only work however if you are into the main desktop opening screen, not in the applications screen menu!

Snaptu - why you should use it.

The C3 already has a facebook interface, so why use SNAPTU?

For the simple reason that SNAPTU is a better alternative. From my first use, it takes advantage of the small screen, and it is easier on the eyes. Try it out your self.

You should have the maximum of 8Gbytes SD card in your phone.
Snaptu is available for free from the Nokia OVI store.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Set image resolution of camera

The C3 camera is good for obtaining casual photos. It has a two megapixels CCD sensor (better than a VGA camera) , but if you are in the right place at the right time, your camera images might be stunning to look at.

You can adjust the resolution of your camera. In camera mode, goto Options > Settings > Photo Quality. Here are possible choices:

2.0MP 1600x1200
1.2MP 1280x960
0.5MP 800x600
0.3MP 640x480
0.1MP 320x240


Be sure to have an 8 Gbytes microSD card. The high recolutions can easily fill up small capacity micro-sd cards!

Dear reader,
We are trying to make this blog useful and relevant.Are there any unclear parts of the instructions above?

Drop a comment or email the blogger at ernesto.adorio@gmail.com with the proper subject: Nokia C3 camera.


Why is my C3 waiting too long to detect wifi?

There may be more than one factor which may affect the speed of detecting existing wifi hotspots.

One possiblity is that the battery is too drained! Charge it up first and you may soon detect your wifi fast!

Another factor is that the C3 might be in flight mode. As a quick check
Press Menu > Settings> Profiles> General> Activate.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

The FM radio on the C3-00

The Nokia C3 has an FM radio, which you can access via Menu > Music > Radio. But it requires you to plugin the headset provided, since it needs the long wire connector to function as an antenna. You know that the headset is working if you can see the headset icon from the Desktop screen. If you cannot see the icon, press the headphone connector with a rotating motion. it should go in without much restraint. Otherwise you are in the market for a new headphone. These can be fragile.

My headphone provided by NOkia is already broken, so I have to buy a cheap headphone at CDRKing. The nice thing about the Nokia headphone is that you can change stations by clicking on a central button in the bulbous junction which connect the earbuds and the headphone. Alas, the connecting ends to the central junction are now frayed.

the Options menu offers the following selections.

  1. Switch Off
  2. Save station - save station, on restarting radio, this will be automatically selected.
  3. Stations - lists all stations reachable.
  4. Search all stations - renews stations list.
  5. Set frequency - allows you to enter the desired station frequency.
  6. Settings
    • RDS - on or off
    • Allows phone to display information on station
    • Auto-frequency
    • Play via (headset or speaker)
    • Output -Mono or Stereo output
    • Radio theme
    • The standard setting has a more pleasing darker background.
  7. Station Directory

You cannot record fm radio broadcasts in the C3. I was wondering why Nokia did NOT provide this feature since some of their other phones can do record FM broadcasts!

A faster way of turning the radio off when in Radio screen, is simply to press the central selector button.

The navigation ring when the menu screen is in radio mode allows you to quickly perform the following:

To adjust the volume to the headphone, just press the top or lower portion of the navigation ring for volume control.

To quickly switch stations in a linear manner, just press the left and right portions of the navigation ring.

I noticed that along NLEX far from Metro Manila, the school's van CD Player/FM radio is quite sensitive to FM radio signals due to its strong external antenna reception, whereas the small C3 cannot detect stations at all! This is expected. Feb. 28: I changed my headphones, and I was able to detect more stations! So try various headphones to get the best reception.




Feb. 13, 2011 revised volume control and radio station selection


Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Our topblogs statistics

Here is a graph of the the number of unique visitors to our Nokia C3 blog.


It is heartwarming that our blog is gaining a lot of visitors each day! We hope that this trend continue until Nokia decides to stop making the C3-00 phone. It is a very popular, affordable entry phone with wifi! Even local branded ones are nearly the price of the C3. You cannot save much money with buying local and even cheap China phones.

We check also our feedjit realtime visitor information. We get a few ideas for our articles from time to time.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Set movie clip or video recording length of Nokia C3-00 camera

1.Either by Set Menu > Photos > Camera or selecting camera icon, highlight the video icon by pressing right side of selector ring.


2. Select Options > Video Clip Lenth. Select "MMS message", "Maximum Available" by pressing the selector ring left or right side.

3. Press main button for Ok.

4. Dont forget to change the Photo/Video storage to "Memory Card" since the phone memory is limited to 55 MBytes!

Monday, January 24, 2011

Set phone or memory card or other folder as storage of C3 photos or videos.

Avoid using the phone memory as storage for camera photos.

Either select phone icon or Menu>Photos>Camera. Click on Options>Settings>Photo/video storage
You will be presented with the following: Memory card, Phone memory, Other folder.
Press the left or right select ring. If you chose folder, you have the oppurtunity to even create a new one! But most of the time, you will have to choose between phone and card memory.

Transfer a photo from phone memory to memory card.

Your photo image browser shows all photos in your memory card and phone memory. To know where your photo is stored, select the photo in the image browser, and click on Details from Options. The following information will be shown:

Name:
Photo1751.jpg
Size:
401 kB
Created:
01-25-2011 11:00am
Format:
JPEG
Captured:
01-25-2011 11:00am
Resolution:
1600 x 1200
Copyright:
None
Memory location:
Phone memory

The last information shows that it is in phone memory!

Now open the Gallery/Images. The photo should be there. Select options > Move. Select NO NAME as destination. Your photo is now in the memory card!

I dont have windows but I think the fastest way is to use PC Suite or stable OVI suite software.
Alas I am on Linux, therefore, I cannot really say anything about this.

Activate or deactivate flight mode in Nokia C3

Your Nokia has a set of profiles with various configuration settings. Select Menu > Profiles.
You will be presented with the following choices:

General, Silent, Meeting, Outdoor, My style 1, My style 2, Flight. The last two are out of view since only 5 at a time are displayed.

Press the top part of the navigation ring to go immediately to the last choice, which is Flight.


To activate, press the center select button on flight and choose Activate (the other is Personalise)
In this profile mode, the phone will not accept or send any communications! A plane icon should appear in the Menu screen, but this is not guaranteed to be the case always as we learned in a previous posting.

To deactivate, select any profile except Flight, say General and press center select button to activate.

WARNING: Sometimes the phone is in flight mode even though no plane icon is showing! Activate any of the modes (except FLIGHT!), say, via Menu > Profiles > General.

Waiting ..... forever for social networking application to start

One nice thing about the wifi'ed C3 phone is the social networking application which allows you to connect free to facebook or twitter or the browser.

Just this morning, I noticed that the social networking application has been waiting (for what don't know interminable minutes. In fact it is still waiting this afternoon!


Notes: I just have it restored by turning off the phone and turning it ON again.
Check whether the flight mode is active! As we see in the figure, there is no plane icon
but your phone may be in FLIGHT mode!

a thundering gathering herd of disappointed users of OVI suite- Nokia is WARNED!

I was surprised when googling for Ovi suite for Linux that at
blog.ovi.com, I have read
so many negative comments about the reliability, speed, and installation problems of the
newest OVI suite for Windows.

This is the watershed mark of Nokia. The management at Nokia should not be surprised, droves of former loyal users will flock either to Android or iPHone mobile communication phones.

No, I am not going to present the more than a hundred? (I stopped counting), but Nokia is sure to that I will not buy a future model upgrade to the c3 but instead go for the Samsung Galaxy tablet phone. As if this threat will move Nokia, ha ha.

We will continue blogging on the C3 since we aim to maximize our usage of this basic phone with wifi.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Ovi Store app upgraded from 1.641 to 2.40 today!

I turned on software update on the Nokia C3, but there was no new software to download. But when I picked Nokia OVI store, the phone asked me whether to upgrade from 1.641 to 2.40. That's a big jump in version numbers. I wonder why it is only now that the OVI asked me to upggrade,.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Small C3 has capabilities to edit photos.

Your Nokia C3 has a capable photo editor! Take a look at the following images from my Facebook album. (I have to download the images from Facebook and upload them to blogger).


Original photo.




Black and White photo.



Oil painting.

Old photo(sepia).

Solarized.

Negative.




there are more effects, and there are also additional warping, rgb color control, rotation and flippping! Try it.

Might have swapped the solarized and negative. Will recheck later!

Fastest way of saving a photo to Gallery/Images

Jan 21.

I just discovered that you can quickly save a copy of a photo from your Nokia C3 My Photos album to the Gallery/Images where Facebook application expects to find the photo.

Pick a photo by browsing after pressing Menu > Photos > My Photos.

Next select Edit Photo.
Click on Options.
Press on Save.

That's it! You may elect to delete the photo in you My Photos album afterwards.
Now you can easily upload or post your photo to Facebook.

I am always reviewing my posts for accuracy, but today, I discover this does NOT work anymore. Use the old method.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Quickly copy image files to your computer using a usb data cable.

My computer(a laptop) has no bluetooth device built-in. Although I have a cheap(150 peso) external bluetooth device from CDRKing, I prefer to use a micro USB data cable to transfer quickly photos from the Nokia C3. Here are the steps:

The Nokia C3 has a micro usb port. If you have a compatible usb-phone cable, your computer can quickly transfer files. Much faster than using a bluetooth. Here I illustrate using Linux Ubuntu 10.04.

Attach the data cable to your phone and computer usb port. NEVER force connect a wrong data cable to your phone.

Got to Main Menu >Settings>USB data cable. There are some choices offered:


Media transfer
Mass storage
Ask on connection
Nokia Ovi suite


I picked Mass storage and opened a console. The computer automatically detected the connection! It labelled the connection as 7.9 GB Filesystem.


and your phone should display

Access memory card from 
connected device. Press done 
when finished.

Next create a temporary directory, nokia-c3 and cd to it.
Type df. The output should look like

toto@toto-laptop:~$ df
Filesystem   1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1    113179556  63588632  43841664  60% /
none           1408176       272   1407904   1% /dev
none           1415032      1872   1413160   1% /dev/shm
none           1415032       236   1414796   1% /var/run
none           1415032         0   1415032   0% /var/lock
/dev/sdb1      7753728   1198272   6555456  16% /media/0003-2ADA
toto@toto-laptop:~$ 

Next, issue
cp /media/0003-2ADA/Images/* .  -uv

The phone now transfer all files. With an 8 Gbytes card you can have many images!
When done, click Done on the phone and remove the cable.

The files are now stored in your computer! With an 8 Gbytes card, the phone can store more than a thousand photos.

This is preferrable to taking out the fragile Micro SD card, putting it inside an SD card adaptor and inserting in the SD card slot of the computer, and taking it out again from the adaptor and inserting back the card back to your phone! So many steps to go awry.

Go to your friendly Nokia phone seller and ask for a data cable. It should not be that expensive. I did not have to buy mine as there are plenty of Nokia phones in the house.

You can of course use the Ubuntu GUI to do all the steps above, but I prefer using the console.






Monday, January 10, 2011

Two free concert songs from Maria Carey on Nokia Ovi store

There are two free songs, "Hero" and "I want to know what love is", performed by Maria Careyand available under Audio & Video of the Ovi Store.

My problem is that I can not play them back without a WIFI or internet connection! and unless I choose the Ovi store in the main screen menu. Oh well....

Turning to the Ovi for the PC by visiting http://ovi.com, you cannot download it as a separate file, instead you can only send it to YOUR of your Friends' phone!

We really can't complain about something that is free!