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!
The current wave of all-singing, all dancing capacitive touchscreen Symbian phones have their attractions, surely. But we shouldn't write off some of the classic S60 3rd Edition FP2 phones, some of which still have world beating characteristics and, with a little tweaking here and there, make a smartphone to be reckoned with. As evidence of this, here's the latest in my 'Pimping' series of tutorials: Pimping the Nokia E55. As you might expect, virtually all of this also applies to its sister device, the E52.
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.
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?
Let me introduce you to guest writer Tony Butler, a long time AAS reader and, as it turns out, a first class wordsmith too. Like me, he has been fighting to balance the innate gadget lust that all of us secretly harbor with common sense - admitting that the current smartphone we own actually works pretty well. Grab a coffee and read on - I guarantee that some of his musings will strike a chord with many reading this - and may well help save you a few pennies by staving off the dreaded 'lust'....
With the Nokia N8 finally here, there are a lot of people thinking “finally, it’s been shipped!” And a lot more now wondering how long till the E7 makes its way into the stores. Is there any rhyme or reason to the gap between announcing and shipping a phone for Nokia? And how do they compare to other manufacturers? I decided to have a look around.
And so the E7 has been announced and shown off, at Nokia World 2010. And you've already had your say, in our big launch news article and the hundreds of comments. Anssi Vanjoki made a big deal about how the E7 is being pitched as the new 'Communicator', the replacement for the venerable E90. With that in mind, I thought it might be helpful to produce a blow by blow comparison of the two. Can the E7 really replace the E90?
David Gilson has a theory. It concerns correlating the aspect ratio of a smartphone's virtual or physical qwerty keyboard with text entry speed, on the grounds that one's thumbs have more (or less) work to do, depending on form factor. Read on for his data and the theory in detail - and see if you can help produce more data points with your own device(s).
In this feature, I've been taking a long hard look at the top-end smartphones in the Symbian powered world over the last three years, pointing out their flaws and frailties, and - where appropriate - pointing out what should have been done to fix things up. Yes, Symbian has been cracking along at record momentum in the mid-tier, with Nokia trouncing the iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones in terms of raw unit sales, but as many others have pointed out, Symbian's partners have been scoring rather a lot of own goals in recent times. And what of the 2010 Symbian^3 crop - will these suffer a similar fate?
