I already praised my Nokia E71 smartphone, that marvel of miniaturized power. Well, today I tried to update Nokia PC Suite, the software that runs on my notebook to allow it to sync with the smartphone.
And as I was clicking through the installation process, something caught my eye in the dialog below:
It was the number in parentheses: 290MB. That’s 290 million eights of binary digits.
And in case anyone thought this tool can calculate the answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything, or something equally formidable that might justify a size that not long ago would have sufficed for an entire operating system, the dialog explains: with this tool, you can connect your phone to a PC and access mobile content. I remember a tool I had long ago that did the same sort of thing; it was called LapLink and had fit on a floppy disk.
To be fair to Nokia, they aren’t the only ones pushing bloatware with their hardware; but the irony of a cool, tiny phone coming with a huge piece of support code is hard to ignore.
July 18, 2009 — 10:20 am
Spot on. I’m not sure if I’m to laugh or cry!
I really hope I can brows my mobile content by VR – or at lest 3D!
Meanwhile I’ll be searching for a more efficient tool, both in usage and size!