Sharing content from a Symbian phone has never been a straightforward process. It was streamlined thanks to PixelPipe's Send and Share application, which integrated into Symbian's native Send menu. Pixelpipe can simultaneously post to a vast range of services. Unfortunately, that application is no longer available, even though the service is still available via email uploading. Therefore, here is a round up of the other options for Symbian sharing. Read on to see how the All About Symbian team push content from our phones.
An unusual head to head, this, in that the non-Symbian device is much the cheaper of the two and with distinctly budget pretensions. Still, the physical comparison is apt and it gives us another data point as to how Symbian powered smartphones compare to the competition mid 2011. Even if the data point is in this case well away from the flagship/superphone end of the spectrum.
I'm sure a lot of E71 and E72 owners are looking at the Nokia E6 as a possible upgrade, so it's worthwhile spending time highlighting the more important updates, as an addendum to our review series part 1 (hardware), part 2 (software), part 3 (enterprise) and part 4 (multimedia) on the device. What might you gain - and what might you lose - in upgrading to Nokia's latest qwerty slab smartphone?
A new version (7.3) of the Web application ships with Symbian Anna and is also available for selected older devices, via firmware updates. The UI updates are easy to see, but what about the performance improvements from the updated browser engine and other under-the-hood changes? In this feature article we look at how much faster Web 7.3 is compared to Web 7.2 by sharing the results of some comparative browsing tests between the Nokia C7 and the Nokia X7.
You've heard me rave in the past about the excellence of the camera in the Nokia N8 - the 12 megapixels, the Xenon flash, the huge sensor. And you've heard me reel off a long list of tech gadgets that are onboard the device. But here I wanted to highlight 10 design points that haven't got the credit they so far deserve. In a nutshell, the N8 is better than you already thought it was.
The AMOLED (used in all of the new Symbian^3 and Anna phones, apart from the E6) bottom line is that, because every pixel provides its own light, a bright/white display uses up to fifteen times as much power as a dark/black one. With battery life being a big issue with modern smartphones, you'd have thought that factors of fifteen would make OS and application designers sit up and pay attention. Alas, no. Here's a look around the Symbian world at what has and (usually) hasn't been done to take AMOLED's characteristics into account.
The Nokia N8 has ruled the roost for almost nine months of course - and I don't think anyone reading this is going to expect it to be toppled even by the best of the rest, tested here. But what I was interested in was how much other devices and systems have closed the gap, as at June 2011. Surely the current batch of 8 megapixel-toting smartphones have good enough cameras for most users these days? I wanted to gather some data points, looking right down at pixel level, at four photos in four different scenarios/light levels, for each device.
Reading Slashgear's thoughts on Good Companies and Bad Products this morning, I was struck by one of those moments of "ooh, we've seen this before." Right now, a lot of people are looking at the decision of Nokia to bring Windows Phone into their portfolio while continuing to push Symbian and S40 as a bad idea, and are drawing lots of comparisons to companies like Ratners and Osborne Computing as this being a silly thing to do - why not just polish Symbian and Meego a bit more and keep selling smartphones running those?
It's never easy finding an exact match across different smartphone platforms for these head to heads, but these two devices are certainly surprisingly close. Nokia's X7 is here now in retail form, while the older Nexus S has been available now for almost six months but retains its 'pure Google, latest OS' reputation. Appropriately, the X7 too has the latest Symbian OS, in the form of the Anna software. Matched at every level then, how do the two smartphones stack up?
Cloud Computing is, of course, the new big thing. At least if you listen to the Silicon Valley crowd. And, being an advocate of Google Mail, Google Documents and Dropbox, I seem to have moved much of my own workflow into The Cloud too. But that's mainly from the desktop, i.e. with access primarily from a big-screened, broadband-connected computer. To what extent is The Cloud relevant to smartphones, what are the pros and cons, and in what state is Symbian access to this new world of online data and services?
