PocketNow seems to be the first major web site to get both a Nokia Lumia 920 and a HTC One (both with optical image stabilisation and imaging pretensions) in the same place at the same time and take some meaningful low light photo examples. We have our own HTC One (running Android, you may remember) arriving tomorrow, so do watch this space for more detailed comparisons in due course, including against the Nokia 808 PureView. In the meantime, here's my analysis of three of the example photos, chosen for the ease of comparing detail...
You'll remember the 'Scroll and Select' days of S60, hopefully. Smartphones driven by a navigational d-pad with central 'OK' button. Now look in your hand to see Symbian in Belle Refresh or Belle FP2 form and there's very little similarity. How did we get from one to the other and could things have happened differently? I say yes.
It has to be said that the very fact that you're reading this site means that you're a bit of a phone geek. But exactly how much? Is your life well balanced or are you a true blue mobile fanatic? Not that I could pass judgement, you understand, I already stand condemned(!) as an über-geek! However, with my light hearted and handy quiz below, you can establish your smartphone geek credentials once and for all...
You may have seen my recent stills shootout between the elderly Nokia N8 and the new Sony Xperia Z? What I hinted at in that text was that I took the same shots with the 2012 Nokia 808 PureView and Lumia 920 as well, i.e. the best and fastest of Symbian with the generally-considered Windows Phone flagship. This being a camera result comparison, I'm expecting the Nokia 808 to win, of course, it's far more camera-centric than the other two and has a relatively huge sensor (plus proper flash), but I'm interested in the margin of victory and also as to how the best camera phone on Windows Phone matches up to (more or less) the best on Android, given that the sensor sizes are the same. Read on!
Obviously I'm 'preaching to the choir here', but I noticed a label in a Windows dialog yesterday and it brought back some happy memories of ways in which the super-versatile, super-flexible Symbian OS has helped friends out in ways that I'm sure other mobile OS would baulk at... Your comments and testimony welcomed too!
It's fair to say that most people agree that Windows Phone 8 is a great, if not perfect, starting point for people who are new to smartphones - it's slick and everything the beginner needs is there from the start. What's more contentious is how well Windows Phone 8 works for anyone coming from a Symbian or Android handset - such people are used to a lot of flexibility in terms of interface, hardware and the interaction between applications. Can Windows Phone 8 currently satisfy, as at the end of February 2013 with the 'Portico' update now rolled out to all? How much is still to come? In this heavily updated article, here's my honest assessment, based on months of use of both the Symbian-powered Nokia 808 and the Windows Phone 8-powered Nokia Lumia 920...
Regular readers of AAS and AAWP will be used to periodic 'Xenon rants', in which I lambast the industry for producing phones that, over and over again, have cameras which frustrate normal end-users when trying to snap people indoors or after sunset. These devices test fine with static subjects, in the hands of reviewers, but then in the real world, results of LED-flash-shot photos are almost always disappointing. And now we have the announcement of the Nokia Lumia 720, with the specific angle of being a camera-centric smartphone pitched for 'young and design-savvy crowd with busy social lives'. If ever a handset deserved a Xenon flash....
For the first time in living memory - well, ok, since the dawn of smartphones, a decade or so ago, there will be no new Symbian-powered devices launched this year at Mobile World Congress (née 3GSM). 2012's show saw the launch of the last ever Symbian smartphone, the all-conquering Nokia 808 PureView. And, as I've mused before, what a way to go out. Looking at the smartphone world of 2013 though, Symbian-free for the first time in terms of announcements, I wonder how the products being launched now compare with the classic devices already in our pockets.
The trendy thing to talk about in the smartphone world is 'market share', of course. Thinking about the industry as 'business', its' all about current sales, how many units were shipped in the last few months, how much profit was made, and so on. Flip this on its head, looking at smartphone platforms from the user's point of view though, and a slightly different picture emerges. What I consider below is the 'active installed base' of each platform, i.e. the numbers of compatible handsets being used on a daily basis around the world.
Well, in contravention of my headline, actually these data technologies and speed aren't totally irrelevant. But they are most of the time, as I'll explain below. In fact, the whole concept of needing ultrafast mobile data all the time is horribly flawed, but it turns out that such data is, at least in part, a kludge solution to something our intelligent smartphones are supposed to be doing for us all the time, when we're not actively using them...
