With Google withdrawing its Java-based Gmail client from general circulation and with no guarantees that it'll carry on working, many S60 3rd Edition phone owners will be looking at other ways of getting their Gmail fix. The most obvious solution is one that many of us have avoided for several years, with memories of the first few iterations of Nokia Email (née Messaging) still shrieking horrors in our minds. But, with a few caveats, Nokia Email now works surprisingly well - it's certainly worth giving it another chance. Here's a walkthrough and a few tips/pointers.
Holidays are a touchy subject in our household. But holiday plans got me thinking about smartphone platforms… Unlikely? Well, yes, but bear with me as I think I've hit upon a rather apt analogy. Do you prefer to cruise in a motorcaravan or to be pampered in a five star hotel - or something in between? And, having chosen, how would you cope living that way full-time? Your decision may affect your happiness with each platform!
The Nokia E7 and 700 - there couldn't be two Symbian devices that are more different. The E7 is the enterprise-focussed behemoth, and the 700 is the ultra slim device made to discreetly fit into any pocket. Surprisingly, there is very little that you can do with one device that you can't do with the other. Thanks to Belle's updated user interface, Symbian's best in class power management and its general functionality, there is plenty to lament about Nokia's decision to sunset the platform.
Yes, it's a Friday Face-off. Sat next to me on my desk are the Nokia C7 and my beloved N8. Yet despite that adjective, I do keep picking up the C7 and err.... fondling it. It's just so beautiful. Could this be a classic battle of the sexes? Smooth, silky beauty vs brute power? Despite the cosmetic differences, the C7 and N8 are surprisingly well matched under the hood. Here's my run-down: would you, too, be tempted by the C7?
For years Symbian users have suffered an irritating problem with their music collections. By that I don’t mean buying Eurovision entries in moments of madness! Rather, it’s been our missing MP3 album art. Nobody has found a definitive pattern or a universal solution - until now. After some tinkering, I found the solution was related to different versions of the MP3 ID3 tag standard. It isn’t that difficult to fix either, as I’ll explain in this guide.
Two years ago, I wrote about living with Linux and S60. Since then the world has moved further toward platform agnostic cloud services. This has made using Symbian Anna and Belle in a cross platform environment easier than ever. In this guide we’ll take a look at how to take advantage of the cloud and USB mass storage in conjunction with the Linux desktop.
Over on All About Windows Phone, I've been putting the new Nokia Lumia 800's camera through its paces in detail. Why am I mentioning this here? Because it's impossible to cover a device like that without at least some frame of reference - in this case, the venerable Nokia N8. And, with many N8 fans perhaps wondering if camera technology is now good enough over on the Windows Phone side of the fence, it seemed appropriate to show some of my N8 vs Lumia 800 camera comparison shots. See below for the snaps and some choice quotes.
Despite the torrent of device releases across the world this year, I was struck by a comment on one of my Phones Shows, pointing out that in some ways smartphone hardware has gone backwards in the last few years. This is something of an exageration, but I got the point. Moreover, I thought it well worth documenting the different aspects of yesterday's (and today's) smartphone technology - are there indeed tricks from the past that 2012 designs can learn from?
Has the world gone raving mad? Have we all lost our sense of perspective? It seems that the madness of the Apple iOS App Store, where half a million applications jostle in a massive 'race to the bottom', price-wise has caused the rest of us in the mobile world to completely lose track of what an application or game is 'worth'. I saw a comment recently which declared that a full Symbian app was "overpriced" at £1 and another that a genre-defining, spare-time-consuming Windows Phone game was "hard to swallow" at £2.29. Really? Really?
One of the unique selling points of the Nokia E6–00 is its high pixel density screen. However, its 2.46" VGA display offers a unique challenge to developers who are used to creating applications for the nHD resolution Symbian phones. This difference greatly affects gaming, where re-factoring the user interface can be far less trivial than it might be in other applications. We take a look at the various approaches of bringing games to the E6.
