You'll remember that, exactly a year ago, I published a piece here, 'Three apps on my smartphone...', looking at what I reckoned was a common fallacy when looking at smartphone app stores and the numbers quoted? Presenting a 2010 take on the matter, with a slight upgrade from three to (ahem) five, with a semi-serious suggestion for a premium download store or area, and, yes, with an even sharper tone of ridicule at some of the stats and opinions being quoted in the popular press.
Rafe compares the key specifications of the Nokia 5250, Nokia 5230 and Nokia 5800 to see what Nokia has cut out to get the price down. When it comes to the lower half of the smartphone market, price becomes the single most important factor in a consumer's buying decisions.
Heading out into the wilds of Devon a week or so ago, for my annual vacation, I wanted to try the smartphone equivalent of going 'commando' - travelling light, one device only, one SIM only, one chance to get it right for all my phone, communication and entertainment needs. No laptop, no iPad, just the smartphone. I had the choice of over 40 devices - and I ended up going with the much-maligned Nokia N97. Here's why the N97 is still almost good enough in its twilight years/months - and here's how it performed when put to the extremes of outdoor use. I wasn't trying to destroy it, per se, but it certainly survived a lot of abuse.
"So what's the best Symbian touchscreen phone to get these days?" is a question I get asked quite a bit. The person asking is unlikely to be a fellow geek so I can't usually say the Samsung i8910 - and the Sony Ericsson phones are something of a mess in terms of usability. Which leaves good 'ol Nokia, famously plagued by problems producing a really high end S60 5th Edition smartphone (remember that the N8 is still - amazingly - still a month away), but who offer a pretty decent line up of add-ons, from Maps to Ovi Store to Music. After not a lot of thought, I'd whittled Nokia's current line-up down to two...
David Gilson has a theory. It concerns correlating the aspect ratio of a smartphone's virtual or physical qwerty keyboard with text entry speed, on the grounds that one's thumbs have more (or less) work to do, depending on form factor. Read on for his data and the theory in detail - and see if you can help produce more data points with your own device(s).
In this feature, I've been taking a long hard look at the top-end smartphones in the Symbian powered world over the last three years, pointing out their flaws and frailties, and - where appropriate - pointing out what should have been done to fix things up. Yes, Symbian has been cracking along at record momentum in the mid-tier, with Nokia trouncing the iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones in terms of raw unit sales, but as many others have pointed out, Symbian's partners have been scoring rather a lot of own goals in recent times. And what of the 2010 Symbian^3 crop - will these suffer a similar fate?
David Gilson turns blogger in this Day in the Life of the Nokia N82, bought by him for camera duties and becoming his tool of choice for an all day wedding event. Read on for his impressions of this three year old device and its Xenon flash, sample photos and even a battery report - it seems that rumours of the N82's demise have been greatly exagerated...
As mentioned in part one of my Defining the Smartphone feature from earlier in the week, the very word now encompasses a surprising range of hardware, with some claiming that the older phone-like devices are outdated when compared to the modern capacitive touch slabs and that the former shouldn't even be called smartphones. In this, part two, I attempt to quantify the various attributes of two of the extremes from the smartphone world, I take the latest evolution of Nokia's classic S60 slider form factor, the N86, and pitch it head to head with the current highest rated Android smartphone in the UK, the HTC Desire. Will my own smartphone definition hold water?
Spurred on by his reviews of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro and Samsung i8910 HD, David Gilson looks at the huge investment Nokia has made into providing an Ovi service layer - it seems that, whatever Ovi's detractors might say, the absence of this service layer on non-Nokia hardware is desperately noticeable. He also wonders whatever became of Symbian's Horizon project - as good a starting point as any for getting applications out to all Symbian smartphones.
David Gilson explores the relative benefits of native applications and cloud applications, both from a consumer point of view, and from the point of view of the developers who ultimately supply our applications. Will the cloud replace the traditional app?
