Nokia's seemingly massive push behind EDoF ("Full focus") cameras has been a mystery to many onlookers. Though to be fair, the reviewers and users doing the complaining are the very 1% of users who need more than EDoF in a smartphone. And there still seems to be huge confusion over what EDoF is whether it's a showstopping limitation or not. In this feature, I want to summarise the technology and its use cases. Why has Nokia gone all out for EDoF in the face of auto-focus from every other manufacturer?
Is it time for Nokia to iterate on their hardware designs and release a Media Player? The idea is something that’s been in the back of my mind since the formation of Symbian and the evisceration of the Psion team (yes, here’s my donation into the “back in my day” bucket), but if you look closely, it’s not needed, because economies of scale and production costs have rendered the idea as being little more than a romantic windmill-tilting project.
For the second time, I find myself comparing a flagship device from Nokia's current smartphone OS line up to one (from HTC) that runs an early version of Nokia's 'new' smartphone OS. In this case, it's more than about the OS though, since we have evenly matched form factors with identical aims - and each sports a high spec camera and - wait for it - Xenon flash. Read on for my blow by blow verdict.
My trip to SXSW earlier this month illustrates another hard truth that’s important not just for Symbian, but for any mobile platform and application developers looking to make any headway in the socially networked online world. People need to be able to work with their online friends as quickly as possible.
Way back in time, around 2007(!), after he first tried the Apple iPhone, long time Nokia camera-fan James Burland confidently stated that he'd seen the future and that physical keypads and keyboards were a thing of the past. And in the main he was right, as demonstrated by many recent phone designs, as I'll explain below. But there's a holistic aspect to a particular QWERTY form factor that's missing from this analysis, and it helps explain why all of us on the All About Symbian have a bit of a soft spot for the E7 and its predecessors, despite logic, specifications and prevailing popular opinion.
[Updated to just a two device head to head, by popular request, with a new summary] Whether the QWERTY-equipped top end models on each mobile platform are indeed 'flagships' in the true sense of the word is debatable, but it's interesting that we now have two such devices, on Android and Symbian, duking it out for essentially the same professional market. After several requests to put the Nokia E7 and HTC Desire Z head to head, both of which I've used quite a bit, I thought I'd do just that.
Take a look at the slab of high tech in your hand. Are you struck by a sense of wonder that it's so compact and that it can do so much? I am. But then I'm old-school, coming from a generation for which things could do a whole lot less. For someone under (say) 20 years of age, there's a completely different attitude to technology in general and to mobile technology in particular. Is losing one's sense of wonder at how things work necessarily a problem? Or could a new attitude to technology promote higher standards of expected quality and reliability from manufacturers?
You'll remember that I listed the HTC 7 Pro in a previous Nokia E7 comparison? That was based on specs alone and here I present a direct head to head: the Symbian QWERTY flagship against its equivalent from the Windows Phone world, made more poignant by the ultimate demise of one OS in favour of the other. No prizes for guessing the outcome of this 'face off', though the sheer scale of the slaughter has to be seen to be believed.
Yes, yes, it's a Friday feature, which can only mean that I'm allowed a certain leeway in terms of content. In this case, and I'm sure the designers of the Nokia E7 will be utterly horrified, I present a DIY way of improving the Nokia E7 using nothing more than a glue stick and a couple of scraps of grip matting, in true 'Blue Peter' style....
It's a commonly held 'fact' that the apps in the iPhone (iOS) App Store blow away the competition, especially the young upstart that is the Ovi Store, with the latter having something like 10 times less bona fide applications. In the light of my recent editorials (e.g. here), I was curious as to how true (or false) this 'fact' is. Looking at the top selling and top freeware applications (and the best games) in the Apple iPhone App Store, how many are also available for Symbian, either directly or via an equivalent? More than you might think...
