If there's one comparison I keep getting asked for, it's putting the cameras of the Nokia N8 and Lumia 920 up against each other. And for good reason - the N8 is now two years old and those on contracts, in particular, are wondering if now is the time to jump from the End Of Life Symbian to the latest Windows Phone 8, buoyed up by the hope of 'PureView' photos from the 920's camera. Here, then, is a blow by blow real world photo shootout between the two phones, aided by a rough and ready scoring system, just to try and keep things objective.
Never let it be said that I let good article ideas wither on the vine. Drawing on a piece I did for the N8 and E7 a year or so ago (running Symbian Anna at the time), here's my top 10 battery saving measures that can be employed by anyone with a Nokia 808 PureView (or indeed a 701 or even a Belle-Refreshed N8/E7!) In extreme cases (or using my 'No. 10' tip), you can easily double battery life, easily getting two full days, perhaps even three days, of use on a single charge.
Hopefully Nokia 808 PureView owners will already have seen and digested my generic Top 12 tips for taking better photos on your Nokia N8 (and similar camera phones) - all good pointers and I do summarise these below. But I also wanted to pass on ten tips for getting better photos that are specific to the 808. In truth, it's actually hard to take a bad photo with the Nokia 808 PureView, but the advice below will still prove useful.
Almost certainly sneaking in with Symbian Nokia Belle Feature Pack 2 was direct uploading of captured videos to YouTube - it works brilliantly, but there's a huge caveat about the whole concept. Below, I show what to do and what to worry about....
Nokia has been consistently at the top of the camera phone tree for a decade now, but many people were curious about Nokia's choice of using 5 megapixels as the default capture resolution for the 2012 Nokia 808 PureView. The claim is that the pixels themselves are 'pure' and that most people don't need more than 5mp, but I wanted to quantify the 808's claims in the best way I know possible - by comparing directly with Nokia's own 5mp Xenon-equipped imaging flagship from five years ago, the N82. Let the shoot out commence!
Although games continue to appear for Symbian, as of late 2012, it's safe to say that most of the best ones have already now appeared - begging the question of which are/were the best, at least for the touchscreen generation? If you've just picked up a Nokia 808 then where should you start in your search for gaming? We're not talking thousands of top games, as on iOS, but there are still plenty of decent leisure titles that are well worth investigating. Here's a crowd-sourced top 20!
In part 1 of this feature, I introduced the concept of ISO adjustment and showed some rather extreme examples to illustrate how the apparent sensitivity of the sensor is increased. In this, part 2, I take a couple of real world use cases and look closely at the difference ISO adjustment makes. Although demonstrated on the 808 here, the feature is applicable to any good camera phone that allows you to manually override the ISO setting.
With light levels going down every day, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it's perhaps only natural to start experimenting with some of the Nokia 808's and Lumia 920's 'Creative' controls for getting better photos despite the absence of strong light. But what effect does fiddling with 'ISO' have? In part 1 of a two part feature, I look at how ISO adjustment works, with the aid of some extreme low light photos from Siraj Hassan Mohideen....
We've all thought it at one time or another. Faced with a Symbian smartphone which is coping, but not quite as lightning fast as when we first had it, faced with a system disk (C:) which is edging the wrong side of 50MB free, and feeling guilty for the dozens of freeware and trial applications you installed to try out (and then removed again), the temptation is to think "What would I gain in performance and resources if I were to factory reset and then sync my data back on?". Other valid questions are "Is it more efficient to completely re-lay the firmware rather than simply resetting?". And, most drastically, "if I were to perform (gulp) the emergency hard reset sequence to wipe C: completely, would I lose important modules and be up the proverbial creek without a paddle?" All of which I, hopefully, answer below, along with a healthy caveat or three!
Of course, the very title is somewhat contradictory - if you're a fan of something then why would you switch? But there's a question that's been on all our minds for a year or two now: "Given what we currently do with our Symbian-powered smartphones, if we had to jump mobile platform then which one would suit us best?" Now, there may well be hardware-focussed reasons for buying a phone on another platform (Nokia's cameras spring to mind), but - purely on the strength of the software itself - which of iOS 6, Android 4.1 and Windows Phone 8 is the best fit? In other words, which provides the most improvements and least number of omissions? I focus on ten key areas below.
