The Nokia E7 and 700 - there couldn't be two Symbian devices that are more different. The E7 is the enterprise-focussed behemoth, and the 700 is the ultra slim device made to discreetly fit into any pocket. Surprisingly, there is very little that you can do with one device that you can't do with the other. Thanks to Belle's updated user interface, Symbian's best in class power management and its general functionality, there is plenty to lament about Nokia's decision to sunset the platform.
Yes, it's a Friday Face-off. Sat next to me on my desk are the Nokia C7 and my beloved N8. Yet despite that adjective, I do keep picking up the C7 and err.... fondling it. It's just so beautiful. Could this be a classic battle of the sexes? Smooth, silky beauty vs brute power? Despite the cosmetic differences, the C7 and N8 are surprisingly well matched under the hood. Here's my run-down: would you, too, be tempted by the C7?
For years Symbian users have suffered an irritating problem with their music collections. By that I don’t mean buying Eurovision entries in moments of madness! Rather, it’s been our missing MP3 album art. Nobody has found a definitive pattern or a universal solution - until now. After some tinkering, I found the solution was related to different versions of the MP3 ID3 tag standard. It isn’t that difficult to fix either, as I’ll explain in this guide.
Two years ago, I wrote about living with Linux and S60. Since then the world has moved further toward platform agnostic cloud services. This has made using Symbian Anna and Belle in a cross platform environment easier than ever. In this guide we’ll take a look at how to take advantage of the cloud and USB mass storage in conjunction with the Linux desktop.
Over on All About Windows Phone, I've been putting the new Nokia Lumia 800's camera through its paces in detail. Why am I mentioning this here? Because it's impossible to cover a device like that without at least some frame of reference - in this case, the venerable Nokia N8. And, with many N8 fans perhaps wondering if camera technology is now good enough over on the Windows Phone side of the fence, it seemed appropriate to show some of my N8 vs Lumia 800 camera comparison shots. See below for the snaps and some choice quotes.
Despite the torrent of device releases across the world this year, I was struck by a comment on one of my Phones Shows, pointing out that in some ways smartphone hardware has gone backwards in the last few years. This is something of an exageration, but I got the point. Moreover, I thought it well worth documenting the different aspects of yesterday's (and today's) smartphone technology - are there indeed tricks from the past that 2012 designs can learn from?
Has the world gone raving mad? Have we all lost our sense of perspective? It seems that the madness of the Apple iOS App Store, where half a million applications jostle in a massive 'race to the bottom', price-wise has caused the rest of us in the mobile world to completely lose track of what an application or game is 'worth'. I saw a comment recently which declared that a full Symbian app was "overpriced" at £1 and another that a genre-defining, spare-time-consuming Windows Phone game was "hard to swallow" at £2.29. Really? Really?
One of the unique selling points of the Nokia E6–00 is its high pixel density screen. However, its 2.46" VGA display offers a unique challenge to developers who are used to creating applications for the nHD resolution Symbian phones. This difference greatly affects gaming, where re-factoring the user interface can be far less trivial than it might be in other applications. We take a look at the various approaches of bringing games to the E6.
Another in my little series of tech highlights (previously: BL-5K differences and EDoF gen2), ahead of my full review of the Nokia 701. This time looking at the display change for the 701, compared to the C7. The latter used the same AMOLED display as the N8, albeit hidden a little behind a slightly mirrored oleophobic coating, whereas the new 701 uses an IPS (In Plane Switching) LCD, similar to that introduced by Apple for the iPad and iPhone 4, plus Nokia's CBD system. How do the two displays compare in differing light conditions?
Much criticism has been levelled at Nokia's ever-growing pantheon of EDoF-equipped smartphones. From the C6-01 to the E7 and E6, each device's camera has been criticised for not allowing close-up ('macro') photos, despite all the other advantages of Extended Depth of Field processing. Has Nokia listened? Yes. Can you now shoot macro photos? Not quite, though you can get closer to your subjects. You'll also see significantly better photos in all conditions - the EDoF camera (and associated electronics) in the new Nokia 701 effectively represents EDoF generation two.
