OK, I promise this will be my last piece on EDoF (Extended Depth of Field). Following on from my treatise on why Nokia has gone with EDoF for most phones in 2011, I had the idea of giving the technology an ultimate 'real world' challenge. I took an average standalone camera owner, armed in this case with a Olympus FE-5035 (14 megapixels, 5x optical zoom, cost just under £100) and shot some typical 'normob' scenes with him. Me on the EDoF-equipped E7, he with his dedicated camera (with which he was very familiar). Could Nokia's EDoF hardware get remotely close, in terms of results, to the Olympus?
Spanning a massive twelve years of mobile development, and largely for fun, I wanted to pitch an old favourite of mine, the Psion Series 5mx, against the current Nokia E7. With surprisingly similar form factor and use case, the comparison is pretty apt, even if the march of technology is very evident in some areas. And the regress of technology in others...?
The sun is shining (here in the UK at least), spring is in the air and I thought I'd give the trusty Nokia E72 a little makeover. And you're invited to watch. Maybe it'll inspire you to deliver some TLC (Tender Loving Care) to your own Symbian smartphone(s)? Comments welcome on makeovers that you've attempted.
Nokia's seemingly massive push behind EDoF ("Full focus") cameras has been a mystery to many onlookers. Though to be fair, the reviewers and users doing the complaining are the very 1% of users who need more than EDoF in a smartphone. And there still seems to be huge confusion over what EDoF is whether it's a showstopping limitation or not. In this feature, I want to summarise the technology and its use cases. Why has Nokia gone all out for EDoF in the face of auto-focus from every other manufacturer?
For the second time, I find myself comparing a flagship device from Nokia's current smartphone OS line up to one (from HTC) that runs an early version of Nokia's 'new' smartphone OS. In this case, it's more than about the OS though, since we have evenly matched form factors with identical aims - and each sports a high spec camera and - wait for it - Xenon flash. Read on for my blow by blow verdict.
Way back in time, around 2007(!), after he first tried the Apple iPhone, long time Nokia camera-fan James Burland confidently stated that he'd seen the future and that physical keypads and keyboards were a thing of the past. And in the main he was right, as demonstrated by many recent phone designs, as I'll explain below. But there's a holistic aspect to a particular QWERTY form factor that's missing from this analysis, and it helps explain why all of us on the All About Symbian have a bit of a soft spot for the E7 and its predecessors, despite logic, specifications and prevailing popular opinion.
You'll have read my review parts here for the Nokia E7 and here for the N8, of course. But, reading those standalone and viewing the separate sample clips, it's hard to get a feeling for how the two devices capture video relative to each other. What's needed here is one of those fancy split-screen 'live' comparisons - I've had my first go, embedded below, and will be interested in your comments.
[Updated to just a two device head to head, by popular request, with a new summary] Whether the QWERTY-equipped top end models on each mobile platform are indeed 'flagships' in the true sense of the word is debatable, but it's interesting that we now have two such devices, on Android and Symbian, duking it out for essentially the same professional market. After several requests to put the Nokia E7 and HTC Desire Z head to head, both of which I've used quite a bit, I thought I'd do just that.
Take a look at the slab of high tech in your hand. Are you struck by a sense of wonder that it's so compact and that it can do so much? I am. But then I'm old-school, coming from a generation for which things could do a whole lot less. For someone under (say) 20 years of age, there's a completely different attitude to technology in general and to mobile technology in particular. Is losing one's sense of wonder at how things work necessarily a problem? Or could a new attitude to technology promote higher standards of expected quality and reliability from manufacturers?
You'll remember that I listed the HTC 7 Pro in a previous Nokia E7 comparison? That was based on specs alone and here I present a direct head to head: the Symbian QWERTY flagship against its equivalent from the Windows Phone world, made more poignant by the ultimate demise of one OS in favour of the other. No prizes for guessing the outcome of this 'face off', though the sheer scale of the slaughter has to be seen to be believed.
