With the explosion of smartphones in the last few years, I’ve been pondering the effects that the technology has on good manners, what habits have sprung up, and if there’s a right and wrong way to go about your mobile connections. There’s only one real place to start on an adventure into politeness, so let’s start at Debretts.
Ahead of part 2 of our detailed review of the Nokia E7, covering its camera functions and multimedia generally, you'll recall EDoF's inability to shoot anything closer than about 40cm crisply? This limitation is a far more serious one for the potential E7 owner than it is for (say) someone with the C7 or C6-01, whose main 'macro' subjects might be cats, flowers and bowls of fruit(!) A mobile professional is going to want to use the E7 camera as a scanning/recording device, to snap white boards, back-of-envelope sketches, logos, documents and business cards, in some cases with recognition software to process what's been captured. Can it be done?
Putting aside the initial commentary of doom, the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft has got a lot of people thinking of what could happen next. It would be fair to say that it’s caused pretty much everyone to stop, think, and try and make an educated guess as to the next move of Espoo and Seattle. So let’s have a little look around and see what some of the names in the mobile technology space think of it.
One of my loyal Twitter following asked me an interesting question last week: if I had the choice between a Nokia N8 and an identical N8 (hardware-wise) running Android 2.3, which would I go for? It's a testament to Nokia's hardware prowess that I had to think about my answer (of which more below). And, in the same week, I observed exactly the same thing when reviewing the HTC Desire Z, which (despite its obvious attractions) had me immediately pining for Nokia's build quality and component choice. It's (nearly) all about the hardware - for me, at least.
Guest writer Tony Butler - you'll remember his 'Overcoming Gadget Lust (or How I learned to stop worrying and love my phone)' from last year? - brings us another slightly light hearted look at life in the mobile world and in the All About Symbian readership in particular, taking in piano music and caravans along the way....
This is going to sound strange, radical, blasphemous and counter-intuitive, but I've a sneaking suspicion that the recent reported (whether it is actually true yet or not) overtaking of Symbian OS by Android on the world stage does, in one fell swoop, more for Symbian's credibility than all the technical slides, sales numbers and glowing reviews from the last few years put together.
After my extended musings on what makes a smartphone and on the varying definitions around the world (see below for a summary), something else hit me yesterday as I pondered more pronouncements from around the world. Apologies if this seems like me rehashing an old argument, but it seems that there's more to the very word 'smartphone' than meets the eye too! Read on....
Twenty four hours later and the discussion around Nokia’s Q4 2010 results is still going on. Taking some time to go over what was announced, filed and talked about, there are a number of points that I think need to be considered in between all the hype, fluff and distractions.
You'll remember my somewhat scathing appraisal of the current state of in-app advertising in Symbian applications last week? I focussed on both the aesthetics and overall user experience and found the implementation somewhat lack-lustre, to say the least. inneractive is the company behind the examples given and I was pleased to get a direct response from Hillel, inneractive's marketing manager, asking for right of reply, to explain the company's approach and plan. The full interview between myself and Hillel is below, for your interest.
I realise that some may mistake this short piece as an attempt at humour. And I'm already bracing myself for the flurry of N97-hating comments. And this in no way lets Nokia off the hook for underspecifying the N97's memory or putting in a completely hopeless GPS antenna. But I wanted to give credit where credit is due. Some aspects of the N97's design were absolutely right, some even outright genius. Here are seven things that Nokia got RIGHT with the N97...
