Attending the launch of the 4.8"-screened Samsung Galaxy S III in London last Thursday, I was struck that the borders of the smartphone world have changed yet again. At some point though, surely, enough is enough? Yes, we get it that smartphones are now personal computers in our pockets, as opposed to simply being 'converged devices', but have we already passed the point where the mass populace will start to revolt against the 'march to large' and vote with their wallets?
I'm struggling. I really am. To understand the whole concept of 'homescreens'. Symbian Nokia Belle allows up to six of the things and it seems that when I parade my one or two homescreens to the world I'm subjected to 'call yourself a power user?' taunts. But hang on, which of us have six 'homes' in the real world? Surely a homescreen is not a 'home' screen if there are six of them? And where the heck did the idea of a homescreen come from in the first place? With the help of the Nokia 9210 and Apple iPhone, I investigate....
The smartphone world has been full of challenges recently, not least various campaigns from the Windows Phone community, trying to 'smoke' other user interfaces, pointing out how fast some things can be done with the new OS. However, I have a challenge of my own - being something of a fan of hardware shortcut keys and multitasking, I thought I'd invite anybody who fancied themselves (and their devices of choice) to try and beat my time for a common enough set of actions, set below.
Here we are again. A few years on from the N97 system disk fiasco, we find many Nokia N8 owners running into similar disk space problems on disk C:, i.e. the internal system disk. Admittedly, the problems are nowhere near as severe as on the N97, but it's still worth a few words and suggestions on how to remedy a gradually filling disk C...
It was tempting to put 'in the last decade' in the title, but in fact we've only had cameras in our phone for ten years, amazingly enough, starting with the Nokia 7650 back in 2002... Nokia features heavily in the top 20, as you might expect, the company has been somewhat trail blazing in imaging, as acknowledged even by Nokia haters, but watch out for the iPhone, plus a Samsung and several Sony (Ericsson) models, too. Enjoy this camera tech-heavy trip down memory lane....
There's a certain class of mobile game that's often ignored. One that gets overlooked in favour of all-singing, all-dancing 3D-rendered RPG slash-em-ups and orgies of feathered destruction. It's not - quite - casual games. It's not - quite - sports games. It's not - quite - board games. Though many of those titles qualify. I'm talking about infinite games. By which I mean mobile games that you can happily play every day - forever - literally.
A mark of a true geek's smartphone platform is the ability to get down into the device's file system. This is what sets Symbian and Android apart from iOS and Windows Phone. While Android lets you access the file system, it doesn't ship with a file manager; which is where Symbian takes the geek crown by even shipping with a file manager that lets you explore and access almost everything on your device. As such, here's our round up applications that you get to your files and transfer them to your heart's content.
One fairly unique feature of the Symbian scene over the last decade has been the willingness of manufacturers to experiment with different form factors. And, usually, this means the introduction of physical QWERTY keyboards, perennially loved by geeks and messaging-centric users across the world.
Whether you call it fragmentation or choice, having multiple versions of an operating system across a product line probably does more harm than good. While the issue rarely affects the average user, power users/developers/reviewers are all well aware of how fatiguing it can be to track a platform in parallel. Symbian is no stranger to this type of multiplicity either, and here we review the history of all its various guises over the years.
These days, social networking apps are the hub of our online life. They entertain us, bring us together, let us communicate, and explore. Therefore it's imperative that any mobile platform provides a great experience for working with networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Symbian has long enjoyed the powerhouse of Gravity for Twitter, Facebook, and others; but in the last 12 months it has been joined by a set of impressive Qt-based applications. Here we gather together the reviews of our favourite applications to cover all of your needs.
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