Always having a number of smartphones to hand, usually of the Symbian powered persuasion, I'm used to stepping in with some mobile IT in one way or another in my extended family circle. But it's worth noting that you don't have to have the latest, all-singing all dancing touchscreen mega-phone to become a smartphone superhero, here are a number of brief anecdotes about my trusty 'backup smartphone', the Nokia N86, and how it has saved the day more than once. And, yes, I really do promise to shut up about this phone after this......!
I'm sure a lot of E71 and E72 owners are looking at the Nokia E6 as a possible upgrade, so it's worthwhile spending time highlighting the more important updates, as an addendum to our review series part 1 (hardware), part 2 (software), part 3 (enterprise) and part 4 (multimedia) on the device. What might you gain - and what might you lose - in upgrading to Nokia's latest qwerty slab smartphone?
A new version (7.3) of the Web application ships with Symbian Anna and is also available for selected older devices, via firmware updates. The UI updates are easy to see, but what about the performance improvements from the updated browser engine and other under-the-hood changes? In this feature article we look at how much faster Web 7.3 is compared to Web 7.2 by sharing the results of some comparative browsing tests between the Nokia C7 and the Nokia X7.
You've heard me rave in the past about the excellence of the camera in the Nokia N8 - the 12 megapixels, the Xenon flash, the huge sensor. And you've heard me reel off a long list of tech gadgets that are onboard the device. But here I wanted to highlight 10 design points that haven't got the credit they so far deserve. In a nutshell, the N8 is better than you already thought it was.
The AMOLED (used in all of the new Symbian^3 and Anna phones, apart from the E6) bottom line is that, because every pixel provides its own light, a bright/white display uses up to fifteen times as much power as a dark/black one. With battery life being a big issue with modern smartphones, you'd have thought that factors of fifteen would make OS and application designers sit up and pay attention. Alas, no. Here's a look around the Symbian world at what has and (usually) hasn't been done to take AMOLED's characteristics into account.
The Nokia N8 has ruled the roost for almost nine months of course - and I don't think anyone reading this is going to expect it to be toppled even by the best of the rest, tested here. But what I was interested in was how much other devices and systems have closed the gap, as at June 2011. Surely the current batch of 8 megapixel-toting smartphones have good enough cameras for most users these days? I wanted to gather some data points, looking right down at pixel level, at four photos in four different scenarios/light levels, for each device.
Reading Slashgear's thoughts on Good Companies and Bad Products this morning, I was struck by one of those moments of "ooh, we've seen this before." Right now, a lot of people are looking at the decision of Nokia to bring Windows Phone into their portfolio while continuing to push Symbian and S40 as a bad idea, and are drawing lots of comparisons to companies like Ratners and Osborne Computing as this being a silly thing to do - why not just polish Symbian and Meego a bit more and keep selling smartphones running those?
Have Facebook and Linked In reached a position where we don't need any more social networks? Probably not, because these sites are some of the most personal content sites you can have. Used correctly they can be one of the most effective Web 2.0 tools out there. Pair that up with a smartphone, and you have a potent recipe that can be used over and over again.
It's never easy finding an exact match across different smartphone platforms for these head to heads, but these two devices are certainly surprisingly close. Nokia's X7 is here now in retail form, while the older Nexus S has been available now for almost six months but retains its 'pure Google, latest OS' reputation. Appropriately, the X7 too has the latest Symbian OS, in the form of the Anna software. Matched at every level then, how do the two smartphones stack up?
