Nokia has been consistently at the top of the camera phone tree for a decade now, but many people were curious about Nokia's choice of using 5 megapixels as the default capture resolution for the 2012 Nokia 808 PureView. The claim is that the pixels themselves are 'pure' and that most people don't need more than 5mp, but I wanted to quantify the 808's claims in the best way I know possible - by comparing directly with Nokia's own 5mp Xenon-equipped imaging flagship from five years ago, the N82. Let the shoot out commence!
Although games continue to appear for Symbian, as of late 2012, it's safe to say that most of the best ones have already now appeared - begging the question of which are/were the best, at least for the touchscreen generation? If you've just picked up a Nokia 808 then where should you start in your search for gaming? We're not talking thousands of top games, as on iOS, but there are still plenty of decent leisure titles that are well worth investigating. Here's a crowd-sourced top 20!
In part 1 of this feature, I introduced the concept of ISO adjustment and showed some rather extreme examples to illustrate how the apparent sensitivity of the sensor is increased. In this, part 2, I take a couple of real world use cases and look closely at the difference ISO adjustment makes. Although demonstrated on the 808 here, the feature is applicable to any good camera phone that allows you to manually override the ISO setting.
With light levels going down every day, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it's perhaps only natural to start experimenting with some of the Nokia 808's and Lumia 920's 'Creative' controls for getting better photos despite the absence of strong light. But what effect does fiddling with 'ISO' have? In part 1 of a two part feature, I look at how ISO adjustment works, with the aid of some extreme low light photos from Siraj Hassan Mohideen....
We've all thought it at one time or another. Faced with a Symbian smartphone which is coping, but not quite as lightning fast as when we first had it, faced with a system disk (C:) which is edging the wrong side of 50MB free, and feeling guilty for the dozens of freeware and trial applications you installed to try out (and then removed again), the temptation is to think "What would I gain in performance and resources if I were to factory reset and then sync my data back on?". Other valid questions are "Is it more efficient to completely re-lay the firmware rather than simply resetting?". And, most drastically, "if I were to perform (gulp) the emergency hard reset sequence to wipe C: completely, would I lose important modules and be up the proverbial creek without a paddle?" All of which I, hopefully, answer below, along with a healthy caveat or three!
Of course, the very title is somewhat contradictory - if you're a fan of something then why would you switch? But there's a question that's been on all our minds for a year or two now: "Given what we currently do with our Symbian-powered smartphones, if we had to jump mobile platform then which one would suit us best?" Now, there may well be hardware-focussed reasons for buying a phone on another platform (Nokia's cameras spring to mind), but - purely on the strength of the software itself - which of iOS 6, Android 4.1 and Windows Phone 8 is the best fit? In other words, which provides the most improvements and least number of omissions? I focus on ten key areas below.
Ah yes, 'Play via Radio', or 'FM transmitter' as it used to be called. Getting your phone's audio onto your car radio wirelessly. A fabulous utility in a smartphone, as I've waxed lyrical before, albeit a bit troublesome in an urban environment. Which is a slinky link to the mini-tutorial below, in which I share a discovery that sees me happily skipping about between FM frequencies in 'crowded' airwaves, making it much quicker to find a band that's not too congested.
The big question, the thing everyone (around here) wants to know. How does the Nokia PureView 'phase 2' camera in the Windows Phone 8-powered Lumia 920 compare to that in the 'phase 1' camera unit in the Symbian-powered Nokia 808? In the seven comparisons below, Rafe and I try to answer the question, and throw in comparisons with the Lumia 900 and HTC One X camera at the same time, where appropriate. This feature represents our 'first look' at the 920 hardware - there will be formal review parts coming your way very shortly, including a broader look at its camera in all modes and settings.
File this under 'middle of the night musings', but it's a question I often ask myself. 'How far could I go back in Symbian history and still have a device which filled all my needs today in 2012?' After all, there are some functions which (e.g.) the 2007 Nokia N82 does a heck of a lot better than 90% of today's oh-so-droppable, oh-so-expensive touch-slab smartphones, albeit with a less obviously pleasing UI. But how far could I go back? At what point does the antiquity of the hardware and software get in the way?
You'll already have seen how I'd been experimenting with battery swapping by putting the N8's BL-4D cell into the Nokia 808 as a spare for the BV-4D that the 808 comes with? I suggested at the time that the reverse might be a good idea, i.e. putting the higher capacity, higher (nominal) voltage BV-4D into the N8, as an ultimate battery upgrade, perhaps replacing an ailing, 2 year old cell with one that has more juice than the original did when new. Here, I show how to do exactly that and report on any stats and caveats I notice along the way.
