The pendulum swings regularly in the software world, with different ways of making money from software being in 'vogue'. The latest fashion, somewhat predictably, with most applications and games needing a price of 'free' in order to get serious numbers of downloads, is to put adverts inside the app or game and rely on income from these to bring in a similar amount of money to that which you'd have expected if you'd tried to sell the item by more conventional means. The concept is indeed sound - but I'm finding the implementation often lacking. What's needed is more imagination.
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?
In fact, not so much '2011' as 'within the next 3 months', to be honest. Written as a companion piece to the hardware-focussed article 'Five things Nokia is doing wrong in their smartphones - and could put right in 2011' (by popular demand), and at the risk of stating the obvious, here's the software equivalent, my somewhat impatient to-do list for Nokia's Symbian teams....
Yes, yes, a year ago, I'd simply have been able to say 'Stick some more RAM and flash memory in your phones!' and that would have been it. Thankfully, this has finally been addressed in the current crop of Symbian^3 phones from Nokia, only to be replaced by a few other hardware design issues and concerns. Think of this as an open letter to Nokia, ahead of its 2011 campaigns...
It's no secret that, in comparison to Android and iOS smartphones, some of the 'connected' features on the Nokia N8, running Symbian^3, lack a certain flair. And, though Nokia will improve things, it's still entirely possible the N8 won't offer quite such 'joined up' functionality as the competition. But - one day you'll look back on your ownership of your phone in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and, especially at Christmas and over New Years events, you'll be extremely glad that the N8 was the device that went everywhere with you. Here's why.
This is going to sound a little trite, but, as mentioned in Pimping the N96, I'm a big fan of an accessory which comes in the box of many Nokia smartphones, the not-so-humble multimedia headset, giving easy and complete control over playback of podcasts and music. With photos of the usual suspects, here's why the multimedia headset rocks (literally) and why, if your Nokia smartphone didn't come with one, you might like to snap one up on the accessories market.
You know what it’s like, when there’s a problem that you’ve already solved, but you can't quite bring yourself to use the solution? I think that’s the situation that Nokia find themselves in now. With a wave of new games arriving, those offering multiplayer over the internet are hitting the same problems. Nokia could solve this with some legacy code, but will they?
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!
One of the applications which arrived very late in the day for S60 5th Edition (i.e. Symbian^1) was Nokia Internet Radio - it seems that haste isn't the order of the day for Symbian^3 either, with no obvious multi-station Internet radio clients in the Ovi Store for the Nokia N8, C7 and C6 - yet. However, all is not lost, as I found out when embarking on a little end-November quest for working Internet radio for my N8...
