And so we come to what we suspect will be the most contentious piece in Ewan's quest in comparing a £100 Android smartphone (the ZTE Racer) with an £80 Symbian smartphone (the Nokia 5230). Third party applications and the final decision, rounding up conclusions from the previous comparison parts. Which will triumph? Read on for the final instalment, plus links to the other parts.
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.
Following on from the previous articles in his series looking at the sub £100 smartphone (namely the Symbian powered Nokia 5230 and the Android fuelled ZTE Racer), Ewan here turns his eye to the other major parts of the built in software - namely, PIM apps, music and media. How do the two budget smartphones fare against each other?
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.
After the hardware, how does the £80 Nokia 5230 (Symbian) and £100 ZTE Racer (Android) compare with basic Internet functionality? Ewan examines them both in the latest Smartphone "Budget Battle!"
In a followup to his previous introduction to this review mini-series, looking at the £100 ZTE Racer (powered by Android) when compared to Nokia's similarly priced 5230, Ewan looks at the base specifications of each. Which comes out on top and do specs even matter in this target market?
"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...
Stuart Clark and Steve Litchfield detail a couple of possible workflows for minimising the downtime when upgrading HX firmwares on the Samsung i8910 HD - nearly everything gets wiped, so it's best to be well prepared. We show you how we do it... Our record is 38 minutes, from spotting an update to finishing re-installing the last core application. No pain, no gain, I know, but at least this way you can be methodical about it!
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?
