Throughout 2008, I worked through a series of features, entitled 'Camera Nitty Gritty', looking at specific aspects of camera phone performance, with special focus on Symbian-powered hardware and on exploding (and expanding on, as appropriate) some mobile photography myths. Two full years on and with the new Symbian^3-powered generation of devices now available from Nokia, it's high time for an update, although I'm not going to make you work through another series of twelve articles - this time I'll keep it concise and keep everything in the one feature!
Talk about the clash of the titans. But not really as equals - you'll remember my musings last week on smartphone (converged devices, where, by my definition, Nokia and Symbian are strongest) vs superphone (large-screened Internet-centric devices)? I've picked arguably the best of each breed here, the Nokia N8 and the massive HTC Desire HD, and stuck them in a room to fight it out. Thankfully, my theories are borne out in the head to head below, their different strengths and weaknesses hopefully evident to all. Whatever your own theories and favoured platform though, I'm sure you'll find the blow by blow comparison interesting.
It has become something of a cliche in the reviewing world that the web browser currently in S60 3rd, 5th Edition and Symbian^3 handsets isn't coping well with some of the big real world web sites that reviewers hit it with. To be fair, and I comment more on this below, some of this is a case of moving goalposts - 2009 and 2010 has seen some horrifically inefficient web sites appear - so a browser which worked well on 2008 sites is now struggling when hit by multi-megabyte monstrosities from 2010. In this feature I compare the three leading browsers for Symbian against Safari in the iPhone 4 and a cutting edge Android 2.2 browser installation - is the current Symbian browser as bad as it's made out and is Opera Mobile a better bet?
A smartphone with a dead battery isn't very smart, I think we'd all agree. Constantly overlooked by many of the world's smartphone manufacturers, battery capacity and the efficiency with which it is used is often shoved to the back of the priority pile, behind exciting bullet points like 1GHz processors and 4.3" screens. In this feature, I quote an old rant and embellish the point, before launching into a passionate plea to the guys behind Nokia Social Networking - and then, for fun, I list my top 5 battery champions of the Symbian smartphone world in the last 10 years.
While “global” apps, such as Foursquare app and games such as Hero of Sparta HD, grab the headlines, local apps and services play a significant role in Nokia’s future. The new local app focus was revealed at Nokia World in September. Last week I got the opportunity to see how it’s starting to play out at the grass roots, in the form of the inaugural Forum Nokia developer breakfast in Auckland, New Zealand.
Nokia World 2010 played host to a number of mini exhibitions, including the inspiring and fun hacking competition, Nokia Push, which now includes the N8 alongside the N900. As well as ingenious and geeky N900 hacks, kite and skateboard mountings for both the N900 and N8 were on display. The latter were built to be given out to film makers so that they could use these Nokia handsets to obtain otherwise unobtainable camera angles. Read on for photos and more information.
I've written before about most people only needing a handful of really good applications on their smartphone, but I've also cheerfully acknowledged that it's good to have a reasonable choice as well. Having watched Nokia's Download! get neglected and then Apple's iPhone App Store grow, with Nokia's new Ovi Store also now reasonable mature, it occurs to me that the latter is now at something of an optimal size and growth rate. Which is all the more reason why Nokia need to pay attention to some of the other expectations and gripes from their Ovi Store users...
Last week Nokia announced a focus on Qt as its sole developer framework across both MeeGo and Symbian and that Symbian would move to a continuous improvement model, with Nokia building future applications and user interface in Qt. Developers were promised that there would be no binary compatibility break and consumers were told that many future improvements would be compatible with, and available for, existing Symbian^3 devices. In this feature article we look at some of the technical details, which explain how some of this will work.
You'll remember from three months ago that I explored, in some depth, peoples' various definitions of what makes a phone a 'smartphone'. I also tested some of these with a concrete example. Musing on the apparent huge divide between the excellent and dismissive reviews of the Nokia N8, it hit me that one of the original tenets of smartphone-ness is utterly personified in the N8 and yet almost totally ignored by tech-mainstream reviewers. They are indeed working to a totally different definition of the word - and this split in meaning for this now oh-so-common word threatens to not only confuse the casual reader but also split the smartphone world apart. Can't we bring the best of each world together and give peace a chance?
