E71 Part II: Ovi.com makes Getting Started a breeze!

Now that I have received my E71 from WOMworld, it's time to get down to business! If you read my first post, you know that the box included a creepy monster in it. I have found that he is one of the Mapsters, the elite group of characters who created Nokia Maps.

I have a bit of experience moving from my N75 to my N82, but am always looking to make this process a bit more streamlined. I looked at the Guru's ultimate guide to switching phones, which is helpful, and contains many great tricks but the bulk of the work can be accomplished with the sync features of Ovi out there. Of course, Ovi is just contacts, calendar, notes, and todo list, so I also pulled the memory card out of my N82 and put it in the E71. You may not do this, but I try to save all the applications I download to my memory card instead of installting them outright. This gives me the perfect way to have everything I want for autosisinstaller or to just pick and choose what I want installed.


Here's what I did:

• Started up the phone, answering its questions, though I hit 'cancel' for country, since the E71-1 did not give me an option for the US.
• The E71 is the first Nokia device I have used that has some on-device setup tutorial and guide. First, it asks you if you'd like to take the tutorial; you can browse through the topics to see if there is anything you do not already know. After the tutorial, the standby screen is filled with quick links to configure things such as Internet calling, e-mail and more. I skipped these and moved on to the following steps.
• A quick trip to Ovi.com and told it I had a new phone. Gave it my phone number, and the resulting SMS text message configured the Ovi sync services.
• Sync the phone by clicking the Home button -> Tools -> Sync.
  
• I like to sync twice when doing an initial sync.
  
• Contacts, calendar, todos, and notes are all on the new device. What is more, when I move back to the other device, I can update it with any changes just by syncing it with the service.
• Because I moved my memory card from the other phone to this one, I have access to all the maps, music, and other tidbits I had placed on my previous device. Sportstracker, for instance, just works once it is installed. It pulls all the login, workout, and configuration data for the card.
  
• Installed/configured Nokia E-mail. This is not supported yet on the N82, which I usually use the Mail by Google application. As using Google or another online service for mail is another aspect of cloud computing, using the Nokia mail service or the Google app are just two different ways of accomplishing the same task. Cloud computing is about portability as much as customizing for your personal needs.

In short, the more you take advantage of the cloud and using it for information storage as well as applications, the easier it is to move between multiple devices, be it different phones at once, or juggling a phone, laptop, and office desktop computer.
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