With components like Weather stopping working recently from the Nokia Maps suite in our Symbian smartphones, a very good question to ask yourself is what would happen if Nokia took its map servers offline too? Hopefully they'll be in place until 2016, but you never know, especially with the Microsoft takeover. Which is why I've been investigating how to back up your downloaded offline country maps.
So you have a Nokia 808 - and you want to shoot a panorama? Yes, you could utterly cheat, as I did recently, but if you want the real thing then you'll be disappointed by the lack of an official Nokia/Symbian panorama application in the rapidly icing over Nokia Store. Actually there is, but you have to know how to get it - as I'll explain below, along with some examples of output on my 808...
The battle to preserve personal and secure data across mobile platforms goes on. You may remember that I went on an exploratory trip around every secure database system recently, with no satisfactory conclusion. Is it too much to expect to be able to take my PINs, my ID numbers, my software serial numbers, my secrets, from platform to platform? It may be too early to call off the search completely, but a solution is emerging that looks future proof and promising.
On the whole, the transition from Symbian Anna to 'Nokia Belle' went smoothly - at least for the nHD full touch devices (N8, C7, etc.) However, the Nokia E6 was included in the upgrade and, despite my reservations and allowances, most of us upgraded this VGA-screened, d-pad driven device to Belle... and then regretted it. You see, the E6 homescreen under Anna could be fully driven by the d-pad, whereas under Belle you had to keep reaching up to the touchscreen to get anything done. Step forward the number one E6 FAQ: is it possible to downgrade to Symbian Anna? Well, not officially. And certainly not easily. But step forward reader Matthew Kuhl, who proved it can be done - and pulled all the relevant steps together here for ready reference.
Having set out a camera-centric stall for transitioning from the Nokia N8 and 808 to the Lumia 1020, for those who simply must have the best camera and Xenon flash, I also wanted to write something more generic, for all Symbian users and concentrating less on camera functions and more on multitasking and other unique selling points, replicating each in a move to the mobile OS which most resembles Symbian under the hood - Android, featured here in its latest v4.4 variant, in the Google Nexus 5.
I wrote, a while ago, about possible showstoppers for people moving from Symbian to Android or Windows Phone, but a lot has happened in the intervening months, not least the arrival of the Nokia Lumia 1020, offering a more or less direct equivalent to the camera-centric flagships in Nokia's previous Symbian world. What I wanted to explore here was each aspect of smartphone functionality, from the point of view of matching what each generation did - and does. The overall picture may surprise you, though (as usual) there are a few caveats along the way.
When reviewing TrueSpeed and admiring its cool HUD mode ('Heads Up Display', reflecting a mirrored display from the inside of your car's windscreen), I was somewhat taken aback to see a whole raft of similar applications that also featured a 'HUD' mode. Here then is my guide to everything in the Nokia Store which offers an in-car HUD. See what you think....
If there's one area where Symbian looks immediately weak compared to the smartphone competition, it's in online video streaming. No Netflix, for example. And no official YouTube client. But there are a number of alternatives to help fill the latter gap and I explore them briefly below. How practical is YouTube on Symbian and which are the best tools for the job?
Sometimes one has to turn to the community for help - and this might end up being just such a case. It's not often that I get completely stumped, but I've been pulling my hair out in recent weeks and it's time to both report and ask for input from 'All About' readers. You see, it's a question of data. Secure data. Data that's, worryingly, somewhat siloed on Symbian, a platform that I like but which is nearing end of life... My goal was to migrate to Windows Phone, but I've hit a brick wall.
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?
