We've covered the Nokia 808 PureView in some depth here on All About Symbian this week, reporting on the announcement and answering the most common questions. But, on the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, I wanted to illustrate the single biggest aspect of Nokia's breakthrough in terms of how camera phones (and indeed cameras) can now work. Never mind the zooming, never mind being able to take 38 megapixel images, here's the real reason why PureView on the 808 is special.
The announcement of the Nokia 808 PureView certainly seemed to attract attention from all quarters. Along with a number of common questions. I tried to answer them with my ever-growing news story and in the comments, but I thought it might be useful to bring the questions together in one FAQ that you can enjoy and point others to?
If you like to spend your spare time with your mobile by plotting and managing your resources then you need strategy games before you become a Bond villain! Over the years, we've reviewed a lot of strategy games at All About Symbian, and here are the most notable strategiec game titles. Some require battlefield tactics while others demand you to relentlessly manage your resources. All of them should absorb your mind from the everyday problems of real life though.
The Nokia E6 was always going to be the odd one out of the Symbian^3/Anna stable - just as the E90 was back in the day, by virtue of having a different form factor and different screen resolution to all its sister devices. Moreover, the screen wasn't just different - it was physically much smaller, presenting Nokia/Symbian/Accenture with a unique challenge in how to implement the next big OS update - Belle. Here are some of the issues involved... for better or worse.
Nokia Belle brought with it a massive change in the look of Symbian, and introduced much less constrained widgets to fill even more homescreens than before. The built-in widgets are not the limit of its flexibility though. There are many applications that can greatly add to the functionality of the Nokia Belle homescreen. In this guide, I take a look at how you can extend the widget set to make the most of your brand new Nokia Belle homescreens.
Like most of you, I upgraded my Nokia N8 to Belle as soon as it was available. And hit a number of small (and not so small) issues. I realise that this won't cover the full scope of items that others may have run across, but hopefully some of the topics below may help somebody, from working out whether you've got new email to getting a more responsive UI.
How's that for a controversial title? What I examine below is that there's more than one way to arrange focussing when shooting video on your smartphone - the rightly popular system of having continuous auto-focus does a good job a lot of the time but also manages to infuriate occasionally too. How bad is the problem, what are the alternatives and can I offer any tips for Symbian or Windows Phone users?
It's somewhat amazing that the Nokia N8 remains in the top tier of smartphones a full 16 months after release - it's fair to say that this is almost entirely due to its camera, with perhaps build quality and gadget-complement contributing too. But no phone can go on forever. If you were Nokia and wanted to produce an "N8 mark II", what would you add/tweak? What's practical? What's worthwhile?
The coming of Symbian Belle, or as Nokia marketing would have you call it, 'Nokia Belle', has been much anticipated in the Symbian world, bringing a whole new scheme for working with RAM and associated performance benefits, plus more flexible homescreens, drop-down notifications pane, Android style, and a nominally 'flat' application menu, with every app in one big (and searchable) list (so you'll never again 'lose' Recorder, for example). Plus a myriad other improvements, mostly detailed below. It's a 'must' download, but what caveats are there? And what precautions should you take?
In this guest feature, the 'almost blind' Nickus de Vos tackles an area that's often ignored: accessibility, looking at Nokia Screen Reader (NSR), enabling anybody with visual impairment to still use the main functions of a Symbian smartphone. If you have the right model, that is - NSR is currently only supported on the Nokia C5-00, Nokia C5 5MP, Nokia 700 and Nokia 701. What can NSR do, how well does it work and are there any caveats?
