Nokia Messaging (/'Email') as a server-side push system works very well when it works. But what happens when, as for me, it's completely and utterly broken? On recent devices, you can simply 'decline' the terms of service at set-up time and IMAP access to your mailbox is used instead - problem solved. On the S60 3rd Edition phones, there's no such question screen and things are less trivial. But there is a way forward. Read on...
Following on from comments in this week's Insight podcast, I thought it might be useful to work through some of the most common 'mistakes' beginners make when snapping away with a camera phone. These apply specifically here to Nokia's devices, which tend to have cameras of reasonable (and sometimes excellent) quality, but also more generically to those from other manufacturers to greater or lesser degrees. If you're a beginner with camera phones then read on to see what you can do to improve your casual snaps.
OK, I promise this will be my last piece on EDoF (Extended Depth of Field). Following on from my treatise on why Nokia has gone with EDoF for most phones in 2011, I had the idea of giving the technology an ultimate 'real world' challenge. I took an average standalone camera owner, armed in this case with a Olympus FE-5035 (14 megapixels, 5x optical zoom, cost just under £100) and shot some typical 'normob' scenes with him. Me on the EDoF-equipped E7, he with his dedicated camera (with which he was very familiar). Could Nokia's EDoF hardware get remotely close, in terms of results, to the Olympus?
You'll recall that last year I wrote about 'pimping' the Nokia E55 (and E52), in terms of the software needed to bring them up to 2011 standards? Quite a bit of this feature is also relevant to their qwerty candbar cousin, the E72, but I thought that, in the light of my recent hardware pimping of the editorial E72, it would be handy to bring the feature right up to date and to explicitly talk about what works and what doesn't work on the landscape screen and different form factor.
The sun is shining (here in the UK at least), spring is in the air and I thought I'd give the trusty Nokia E72 a little makeover. And you're invited to watch. Maybe it'll inspire you to deliver some TLC (Tender Loving Care) to your own Symbian smartphone(s)? Comments welcome on makeovers that you've attempted.
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?
If you have a touchscreen Symbian phone then there's a good chance that you've never even tried Nokia Internet Radio, since it was omitted from device firmwares for S60 5th Edition onwards. However, first for these phones and then for Symbian^3, it has appeared in the Ovi Store and is a highly recommended (and completely free) install. But the sheer number of genres and stations (tens of thousand) is overwhelming. I reckon you might need a little help finding your way round.
I have a new party trick and you won't be surprised it involves my smartphone. And a kitchen knife. All of which has got me musing about the nature (and role) of touchscreens on handheld devices through the years. Expectations and roles sure have changed. Though it's tempting to say that there's nowhere else for the touchscreen to go. The rest is surely up to the programmers behind the glass?
I just can't resist the challenge of taking something old and unloved and making it useful. And my latest target is the much misunderstood Nokia N96, from 2008, still one of the largest-screened non-touch Nokia smartphones and with more gadgets than you can count - yet a device that was panned on release, plagued with performance problems and never sold as well as it should have done. In the latest in my series of 'pimping' articles, I look back at the Nokia N96 and what's needed to keep it topped up and current.
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!
