You may remember the guy who did the umpteen page 'report' on all the things that are wrong with the Samsung i8910 HD? This was, I have it on good authority, forwarded around rather widely at Samsung HQ and, it transpires, that the author 'Anphase' was invited to a meeting with the appropriate Samsung product manager. Here's Anphase's report of the meeting, along with Samsung's responses, for your interest.
A snow-bound look around the phone world at what's popular and what's hot - and my annoyance that yet again Form is leading Function (e.g. "I just want something that's pretty and with a touchscreen"). Mind you, I'm a self-confessed geek and I don't have any clothes sense, so what do I know? Read on for a Steve rant...
The first part of Ewan's real world review of the Nokia X6 Comes With Music.... Yes, there's a capacitive screen and decent speakers, but Ewan manages to find several points to complain about, not least the style-over-substance keylock key. More on the X6 from him later this week.
Coming out of the Symbian Foundation's developer wiki system is a handy Wikipedia widget that installs on any Symbian-powered smartphone with Web runtime (so that's most of them). Search results are all optimised for the small screen and it seems a quick and efficient way to access Wikipedia's content. I've included some screenshots from the widget below.
No, not that hell. Michael Hell, previously of Symbian Freak and a geek after my own heart for the last 5 years, and someone whose opinion I respect. And he's just produced an interesting Top 10 phones of 2009, split into numbers 10 to 6 and then numbers 5 to 1. And the top pick will surprise you, but it's entirely defensible.
Two totally unrelated stories for your interest over a nice hot cup of tea... 1) A look back at Palm's 2009 on Royal Pingdom and how they failed to make the most of their early advantage with WebOS and the Palm Pre; 2) Nokia's Rick Simonson doing a non-denial denial that the Finnish company would be interested in buying Palm. We're certainly living in interesting times, and I wonder what the mobile landscape will look like in a year's time.
The company behind popular social media application Shozu, which allows you to upload images, videos and content to your network of social media sites (such as Flickr and Facebook), has been purchased by Critical Path. Existing users have been reassured the service will continue to run, and the service appears to be a good fit with Critical Path's white labelling of message solutions to clients.
GPS, like many modern technologies, is often taken for granted. Yet it's quite a bit more fragile, in terms of operation, than you might think. Here are some facts and tips that may help your own smartphone GPS experience.
If you have ever found your LED-illuminated camera phone photos to have a strange colour tint, David Gilson has a video tutorial to show you how to get your friends and family looking more like themselves, using a generic desktop computer with the multi-platform open source editor, The GIMP.
Published on Christmas Eve by Symbian Foundation Executive Director Lee Williams, there's an interesting article here detailing his thoughts on Symbian's role in the industry in 2010 and beyond. I've also quoted a few paragraphs below, with comment.
Following on from the first two Sony Ericsson Satio review parts: One: Form, Design, Build Quality and Two: The Camera, here's my third look at the new Sony Ericsson flagship, rounding up its general applications and interface. Part 4 will address its new media suite and will assess this smartphone's overall worth, with me hoping that Sony Ericsson squeeze in another firmware update before then...
Whenever Ewan mentions that he's 'unboxing' something, we trust him to produce something that's "different". In this case it's the new capacitive-screened, music-focussed Nokia X6 smartphone which gets the treatment in a special video, embedded below. And it seems that a few mm of plastic on the X6's side has really gotten Ewan's goat. More from him on the X6 in due course.
Over on our Ovi Gaming site, Ewan's burnt off a few Christmas mince pies in Microrace, which takes a traditional, top down view of the arcade karting genre - he thinks that's just enough for a great game, but is Microrace a touch too small? Here's the review - can the game break free from being a 'proof of concept'?
Just in case you're huddling at home, in front of AAS or your RSS feed rather than being out at some party this New Year's Eve, you might like to see in the New Year with this crafted '2010' theme from master designer PiZero. Get it installed before the big moment for maximum effect!
The prolific Guru, Ricky Cadden, has done an interesting piece here, part rant, part tutorial, documenting his frustrations with Nokia Messaging and his switch to Email/Contacts/Calendar syncing direct to Google services. It's a little bit geeky, to be sure, but you just know you're interested in how it all works...
