Having delivered sterling service over Christmas and New Year for my own family, I was interested to see Daniel Wexler's similar account of his holiday adventures with the Nokia N8. As for me, the pre-loaded Ovi Maps Navigation and camera and camcorder were the stars. Embedded below is one of his edited video mashups from the N8's output, see Daniel's blog for more videos and some sample photos. Also below is a typical photo from a sunset walk I did on Christmas day in the UK snow - again, it had to be N8 for me.
Just in time to meet 'released in 2010', Nokia's all-singing, all-dancing Ovi Suite has moved out of beta and into production code, becoming available as a 73MB download via 'Check for updates' in your existing PC or Ovi Suite installations (screenshot below). The main improvements for v3.0(.0.284) are to the Music and Maps modules, but there are also facelifts for most aspects and the inevitable bug fixes.
An interesting few thoughts from Pat Phelan (Head of Innovation at Cubic Telecom) based around SMS. The starting point is the impending tidal wave of text messages of “congratulations and all the best” and the realisation that while he personally can’t stand them, for network operators this time of year is a license to print money. Is SMS usage going down? Yes, but not in a significant number. The simple reason is that there’s nothing easy to replace it.
Tomi Ahonen is widely respected for his macroscopic analyses of the mobile world, so it's worth noting this latest publication, exclusively in PDF/ebook form for 10 Euros. A "companion volume" to his Almanac, the new "Phone Book 2010 gives you 171 pages all about the handsets part of the industry, with over 90 charts, diagrams and tables".
Enough of me wittering on about how good the Nokia N8's camera is - have a look at the first set of Nokia Creative N8 Photo Awards, hosted by James Burland. Culled from almost 500 of the top camera phone photographers in the world, the top entries (one of which is linked/demoed below) in the December 2010 awards really show what the N8's Carl Zeiss-lensed, 12mp, large sensored camera can do.
It’s nice when a post with such a grandiose title like "The Unbearable Inevitability of Being Android, 1995" actually delivers. It takes a look at the number of “Android will crush everyone in 2011” articles and ponders what that actually means. Not directly for the industry as a whole, but what it means for Google as a business, and the hardware partners who have tied themselves to the Mountain View company?
Mashable has pointed out the latest AT&T campaign about the dangers of texting while driving. With the busiest day for text messaging almost upon us (Hogmanay), it’s a reminder that texting whist driving is dangerous, and if it is that urgent to reply or even read a text message, you should pull over and stop the car first.
As part of the Symbian Foundation's transition to a licensing only organisation the majority of the Symbian Foundation websites closed today. Together with the departure of the majority of the remaining staff, today marks the end of major operations by the Symbian Foundation. Of course, the Symbian platform will continue under the guidance of Nokia, who have committed to make the future development of the platform available via an alternative 'direct and open model'. Some comments below.
It’s the first of many articles for the end of the year, but Tech Radar’s look forward into 2011 covers both familiar ground (more Android devices, iPhone 5, Windows Mobile 7 getting a bit of stability) but the comments on Nokia and Symbian at the close of the article are interesting. “Whether Nokia will come up with a true competitor to the iPhone or a high-end Android handset remains to be seen, but deep down, we kind of hope it does.” How many more end of year posts will crack open the media door for a Symbian success in 2011?
Over on A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch is taking a closer look at one of the current key elements of the modern smartphone, the web browser. Pulling numbers from the Stat-Counter Service, he not only points out that the leading browser is Opera, but that Nokia’s web-kit effort is sitting nicely on 17% of the global market, compared to Opera and Safari on 22% and Blackberry on 19%. Android, by comparison, is on 11%. What does that mean for website designers?
[sarcasm alert] I had to chuckle when I saw this blog post on one of my favourite sites about a third party extension to Android, enabling - shock, horror, amazement - folders, to organise one's applications. Maybe the developers are copying Apple, who famously added folders for applications earlier this year in their fourth iteration of the iPhone OS? That must be it. They couldn't possibly be copying what Nokia and Symbian has had since (ahem) 2002, eight years ago, could they? See below for the appropriate Android 'Folder Organizer' screenshots...
Nokia’s Beta Labs have updated their “bots” to be compatible with the full range of Symbian^3 devices, alongside some bug fixes and changes to the existing version for the N97, N97 mini and C6-00. The Bots, which are widgets that sit on your homescreen, will firstly record your behaviour, and then present options which should be suitable for you at that moment in time – the Contacts bot will now show you your four most used contacts, not just on overall usage, but on how often you contact people from a certain location.
Tomi Ahonen has been an industry commentator on the smartphone for a long time (and we’ve linked to a fair number of his pieces) but his recent article about "Some Symbian Sanity" (and a fair bit about MeeGo) is not only a long and in-depth look at Nokia’s strategy, but goes over many reasons why Nokia are far from out of the smartphone game.
File this clearly under 'link of interest', as it's an article about iPhone software and patents, but this piece on Patently Apple looks at recent patents taken out for software solutions to fix common camera phone quality issues, including blurry shots, vignetting and over-exposure. It's particularly interesting for me, as you might imagine, especially in light of looking at a number of Nokia camera phones which simply have superior cameras in the first place - maybe the ideal solution is a combination of hardware and software? Some more comments from me below.
Marko Ahtisaari, SVP of industrial design at Nokia, was one of the guest speakers at this year's LeWeb Conference. He covered topics from dominant designs of smartphone user interface and collective intelligence with mobile devices. He outlined why he sees that there's plenty of work to be done in the world of mobile user experience, particularly in having mobile devices actually demand less of our attention. In his view, iOS is "beautifully elegant and fantastically constrained", while Symbian and Android actually share the same design pattern but differ greatly in their business models. Read on for a in-depth account of the speech and Q&A session.
