Although some local 'sync' options are available for our Symbian smartphones (e.g. locally to Nokia Suite on a Windows PC), for most of us 'sync' now means synchronisation to an online service. In the good (bad?) old days, this meant messing around with SyncML, but things have moved on and new protocols have emerged as standards. So where do Symbian handsets stand and is there a solution that is future proof? Could it be that the changes at Google's end are unwittingly nudging many of the hundred million Symbian users into a Microsoft-centric solution, following Nokia into the brave new world of Windows Phone?
It's a fair cop, I'm firmly in camera geek territory again here. We see a lot of smartphone camera comparisons online (not least here on the All About sites), but all this talk of optical formats and pixel sizes rather gets in the way of the man in the street understanding the simple physics involved. To help out, I've summarised all available data on smartphone camera sizes and apertures and present the result graphically. So the Lumia 1020 has a 1/1.5" sensor - what does this mean? And how does it affect the ability of the device to gather light? This and much more below...
From a Symbian enthusiast's point of view, the scare stories over availability of spare parts for repair and the ever-dwindling stock of new hardware across the world are something of a wake up call. Yes, no doubt all of us are still keeping an eye on developments elsewhere in the smartphone world, but until someone else comes up with hardware as good as Nokia's Symbian flagships and with an OS that's as flexible and feature-packed, there's a very valid case for keeping a look out for a 'spare' for your 808 or E7 or E6, or whichever Symbian-powered device you're currently depending on.
Having done a number of real world photo comparisons between Nokia's new Lumia 1020 and various competitors, including its own 'predecessor', the Nokia 808 on Symbian, I wanted to break down the word 'oversampling' and try to demonstrate what is - and, particularly - what isn't going on inside each of these camera-toting smartphones and their applications. Where do the photo pixels come from and does it matter which application captures them?
I've handled a broad strokes comparison of the two 41 megapixel camera flagships of the smartphone world before, notably here (when I declared them roughly equal in merit though with very different processing pros/cons) and here (as part of a four way test, but with very similar conclusions), but what I wanted to do here was to push them both to the limits in real world low light situations. Would the benefits of Optical Image Stabilisation outweigh that of a larger sensor? Would a BSI sensor compensate for a smaller Xenon flash? Is the hardware oversampling engine from the Nokia 808 missed on the Lumia 1020?
It seems that Tuesday's news of Microsoft buying Nokia's devices arm, lock, stock and barrel, generated something of a storm of comment, mostly on conspiracy lines. But, this being All About Symbian, I wanted to address the question of whether the news will have an direct impact on the Symbian world. Read on for my thoughts.
You know, the more the world centres in on large touch-only smartphones, the more I continue to appreciate the genuinely different hardware we've had in the modern age in the Symbian world. Yes, the OS is effectively now frozen in stone (though, despite yesterday's buy-out news, Accenture will still hopefully be under contract to provide support/patches etc. for another two years at least), but there's really very little in the smartphone world that can compete with the 2011 Nokia E6, with its 'QWERTY candybar' form factor. Here then, for your consideration (and celebration) are five under-appreciated design features, over and above the highlights we've covered before. And perhaps extra reasons why you might like to buy up an E6, even if as a backup smartphone or for your 'collection'(!)
Burst photos are 'in' at the moment, and rightly so. While no use at all for traditional photography stars like coastlines and sunsets, when it comes to action shots of kids, pets and wildlife, it can be very helpful to take short sequences of photos so that you can pick the best one later - and hopefully be pleasantly surprised. Now, 'burst' mode is part of third party utilities, commonly, e.g. here, but I thought it worth highlighting that Belle FP2's Camera application includes a burst-like mode out of the box.
I've often proclaimed that the most natural way to use the Nokia 808 is in one of its 'PureView' modes, i.e. using the oversampling to produce the legendarily 'pure', noiseless pixels, rather than shooting in the somewhat artificial 'full' resolution modes, which expose the usual raw sensor pixels and their noise. However, when using the intuitive PureView zoom, you effectively end up down at the same 1:1 pixel use. Is this a problem? Exactly how far can you zoom in anyway? When should you use PureView zoom and when should you try to resist? Hopefully I answer these and other questions below.
Yes, yes, the headline sounds like an episode title from The Big Bang Theory, but I'm actually referring to something that occurred to me while writing up my feature on tweaking the Nokia 808's photo output to mimic 2013 user preferences. Buried in the changes there was switching the 'JPG quality' to 'Superfine', but the inclusion of this change was somewhat arbitrary, so I thought it worth investigating this one camera setting on its own. Is fiddling with JPG quality worth bothering with? What are the pros and cons?
