When you take a 2D block game into the third dimension, do you still have a winning game? Ewan finds out in his review of Blockfest by Arctica. "You’re in a 3D world, looking into the grid. Laid out flat before you, all you can see are the tops of the stacks, and the tile you are about to throw down."
The online service element of Sports Tracker, the application that lets you track exercise activities (workouts) and turns your Nokia smartphone into a GPS sports computer, is now available. The online service allows you to see at a glance information about each activity, easily visualise your workouts, make comparisons and share activities with others via the Sports Tracker website, Facebook or Twitter. Read on for more information and screenshots.
In the second part of his review of Nokia's new C6 (here's part 1), David Gilson looks at its camera and multimedia software bundle. Although there's little here that's actually new, what's surprising is the C6's speed - it seems that S60 5th Edition is now pretty well optimised in this regard.
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?
The N8 is now available for pre-order from Nokia's own web stores in France, Spain and Germany. The French store quotes a price of €459 (£380) and availability at the 'end of August', the Spanish store quotes a price of €469 (£389) and availability at the 'end of September', while the German store quotes a price €479 (£397) and availability in the 'third quarter'. The N8 is already available for pre-order in Italy at a cost of €469.
"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 uber-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...
Nokia’s London Developer day has come under the microscope of Marek Pawlowski and he finds not only Nokia’s organisation of the day to be lacking, but also questions the whole idea of App Stores as a sustainable model for all. It's a constructive article, which I hope is taken seriously.
Built into Symbian^3's new Podcatcher software is a link into an online podcast discovery system, which I wanted to showcase - it's a step up from Nokia's clunky old manually-compiled directory, but how good (or bad) is it? With examples and screenshots, I try to point out that even if podcast discovery still isn't perfect, then it's easier than it used to be.
In All About Symbian Insight 130, we start with an update on the ongoing Conspiracy for Good transmedia project. David Gilson then talks us through his first impressions of the Nokia C6. Rafe reports back from Nokia's N8 Developer Day in London, including details of the new Ovi Store client, which is expected to debut on the N8. Finally Steve leads a discussion on Q2's mobile device shipment numbers. You can listen to AAS Insight 130 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Both the Nokia 5800 and 5530 just got over the air firmware updates, to v51.0.066 and v31.0.005 respectively. Both phones have full User Data Preservation, of course (as have almost all other Symbian-powered phones since the end of 2008), but the usual backups 'just in case' wouldn't go amiss. Check for the updates for your phone using *#0000# on the homescreen and then 'check for updates'. Improvements include browser and music player updates, plus the usual minor bug fixes.
David Gilson takes on Nokia's latest touchscreen hybrid smartphone, the C6-00, looking in this first review part at the raw hardware - how does the C6 stack up against the hardware in the 5800 and N97 mini, between which it seems to represent a middle ground? From overall styling and shape to keyboard ergonomics, David leaves no stone unturned... Future review parts will look at the C6's camera, multimedia and general applications and performance.
For all the talk of N8's, iPhone 4 and Galaxy S smartphones, there's another much more important battle happening. At the low end of the market, cheap footsoldiers such as the Symbian-powered Nokia 5230 are gearing up for a fight with Android devices like the ZTE Racer. Can Android provide as much of a success as S60 5th Edition in the £100-and-under market? And why could it be regarded as the key battleground for market share? Read on for my thoughts...
The saga of continually improving user firmware for the Samsung i8910 HD continues with the release a few minutes ago of the impressive HX8, rolling in, among other things, intelligent virtual keyboard/keypad rotation, portrait qwerty added, Music player now has full kinetic scrolling and is skinnable, plus more dynamic 'on the fly' interface customisation options, including changing camera codecs and browser user agents. And those are just the changes since HX7... 8-) Links, changelogs, videos and screens below.
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!
With the Nokia C6 starting to hit the shops around the world, we kick off our C6 coverage with the usual comprehensive picture gallery. It is a hybrid device, with both a touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard, in a horizontal slider form factor. It is the third device in Nokia's new Cseries range, following on from the C5 and C3. With a price point of around £250 is sits firmly in the mid tier, effectively offering a cheaper version of the Nokia N97 mini. David will be sharing his first impressions on the C6 next week and an in depth review will follow in due course.
