So there I was in a largish UK town on December 27th, visiting relatives. Naughty, I know, but I was staying in touch with email and Twitter through the day, because... well, this is me. And I totally killed two smartphones in five hours. And was on the way to killing a third. To find out why, read on, there's an issue here that I've moaned about before, that not many technologists acknowledge and which could do with addressing intelligently in each mobile OS.
There's a very famous adage that addresses the question posed in the title ("Why not a standalone camera?") very adeptly and quickly: "Because it's the only camera that's with you". However, true though this is, the question and answer have provoked Tim Salmon and I to indulge in some friendly Christmas debate - comments welcome if you come down on one side of the argument or the other!
Holidays are a touchy subject in our household. But holiday plans got me thinking about smartphone platforms… Unlikely? Well, yes, but bear with me as I think I've hit upon a rather apt analogy. Do you prefer to cruise in a motorcaravan or to be pampered in a five star hotel - or something in between? And, having chosen, how would you cope living that way full-time? Your decision may affect your happiness with each platform!
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.
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?
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.
If you’ve ever worked on video editing, you’ll understand how stitching together clips of the same event from multiple devices can be a tedious and labour intensive task. Nokia's researchers are working on a way to automate this, and were showing off their work at Nokia World 2011. The result of their work “Director’s Cut” is a system that can intelligently cut clips together. Read on to find out more.
Nokia’s Cambridge Research Lab is investigating several uses for Carbon nanotube technology. Built from a single layer of Graphene, a new type of Hydrophobic coating could make phones much more resilient to wet environments, while providing a cheaper alternative to current touch screen technology, which is based on rare earth metals. Since Graphene is a form of Carbon, one of the most abundant elements on the planet, the raw materials are much easier to obtain. We spoke to researchers at Nokia World’s Future Technology tent to find out more.
The Nokia Kinetic was the bendy concept phone that garnered the most column inches from Nokia World’s Future Tent, at this year’s event in London. While several sites have written about the design and usage scenarios, few have commented on Nokia’s Carbon nanotube research that made it possible. It certainly looks like it’s a long way off, as the reliability of flexible components are still questionable, as hinted at by the Kinetic’s umbilical cable. Read on for the full story.
