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?
If you have a touchscreen Symbian phone then there's a good chance that you've never even tried Nokia Internet Radio, since it was omitted from device firmwares for S60 5th Edition onwards. However, first for these phones and then for Symbian^3, it has appeared in the Ovi Store and is a highly recommended (and completely free) install. But the sheer number of genres and stations (tens of thousand) is overwhelming. I reckon you might need a little help finding your way round.
Adding the BBC's News feed to a Symbian^3 homescreen is nice and simple - it's preloaded on many devices, so you can pick it from a list. But what if you want to add BBC News or another news source to the homescreen of an older, S60 5th Edition smartphone such as the Nokia C6-00 or N97 or N97 mini? It's a tiny bit fiddly, but then that's what our 'How to's are for - to make the fiddly somewhat easier!
Yes, yes, it's a Friday feature, which can only mean that I'm allowed a certain leeway in terms of content. In this case, and I'm sure the designers of the Nokia E7 will be utterly horrified, I present a DIY way of improving the Nokia E7 using nothing more than a glue stick and a couple of scraps of grip matting, in true 'Blue Peter' style....
You may remember a piece from me almost a year ago in which I gave six reasons why the Nokia N97 sucked and nine reasons why it still 'ruled'? In this followup piece, I extend, for the first time, my popular 'Pimping' tutorial series to a touchscreen Symbian phone - and not just any old smartphone, but the one that everyone loves to hate, the flawed flagship that for many people epitomises some of the decisions that sealed Symbian's fate. However, I'm a geek, you're a geek, and the N97, now available second-hand for under £100, is about to get 'pimped'...
I have a new party trick and you won't be surprised it involves my smartphone. And a kitchen knife. All of which has got me musing about the nature (and role) of touchscreens on handheld devices through the years. Expectations and roles sure have changed. Though it's tempting to say that there's nowhere else for the touchscreen to go. The rest is surely up to the programmers behind the glass?
I just can't resist the challenge of taking something old and unloved and making it useful. And my latest target is the much misunderstood Nokia N96, from 2008, still one of the largest-screened non-touch Nokia smartphones and with more gadgets than you can count - yet a device that was panned on release, plagued with performance problems and never sold as well as it should have done. In the latest in my series of 'pimping' articles, I look back at the Nokia N96 and what's needed to keep it topped up and current.
One of the much-hyped additions to Symbian^3, over S60 5th Edition, was the ability to have multiple homescreens, Android-style. Surely more homescreens are good, surely more widgets are good - or so goes the theory. But I'm not so sure, having lived with the N8 for a month. Here's my Luddite and rather unfashionable perspective on the homescreen phenomenon.
Throughout 2008, I worked through a series of features, entitled 'Camera Nitty Gritty', looking at specific aspects of camera phone performance, with special focus on Symbian-powered hardware and on exploding (and expanding on, as appropriate) some mobile photography myths. Two full years on and with the new Symbian^3-powered generation of devices now available from Nokia, it's high time for an update, although I'm not going to make you work through another series of twelve articles - this time I'll keep it concise and keep everything in the one feature!
