In this, part 12 of my long running series on smartphone cameras, I look at whether any or all of Nokia's fancy scene modes and adjustments make any significant difference and I work out which ones you should ignore and which ones you should remember.... Can you just leave everything on 'Automatic'?
Nokia's 'Tube' already has great battery life. But Tzer2 wants to go to the max and has penned an excellent 'how to' on maximising the battery life on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic... and on just about any other comparable phone, for that matter. Some great (if sometimes extreme) suggestions here.
In All About Symbian Insight 58 (AAS Podcast 111) we talk about the recent release of Quickoffice version 6, Rafe reports back from Betavine's birthday bash, and Steve talks about T9Nav. The team then moves on to discuss Samsung S60 application compatibility, followed by a few thoughts on the capacitive versus resistive touch debate.
Nokia's Podcasting application for S60 phones has some default podcast directories included, but these aren't very comprehensive and only include a tiny number of BBC feeds. However, if you add the BBC's online podcast directory to the app you can browse all current podcasts and subscribe to any of them with a single click. Adding the directory is very VERY easy to do, almost the same as adding a bookmark in a browser. See below for more details on how to do it (this should work on all current Nokia S60 phones including the 5800 and N95) ...
The CEO of Research in Motion, Jim Balsillie, has admitted to the Washington Post that the recent release of the Blackberry Storm was buggy, and they knew it. Pushed out to make sure it was in the shops for Black Friday – one of America's biggest day for consumer electronics sales – after the planned shipping date in October was missed. And he ominously warned that shipping with imperfect software was the future of electronics. He's right – and let me explain why.
In All About Symbian Insight 57 (AAS Podcast 110) Rafe reports back from the UK launch of the Nokia 5800 launch at Nokia's flagship store on Regents Street, London. The team discuss Q4 finanical results from Nokia and other consumer electronics company before Ewan updates us on two recently announced N-Gage games and Steve highlights Jomtris.
Did you see Nokia's recent press release on the shipping of one million 5800 handsets? Does anything strike you as unusual about this? Me too. Why are Nokia deciding to shout about this now, when other devices rarely get the look at me treatment? Could it be that the Finns are starting to do some psychosocial marketing? Read on while I explain.
[Heavily updated] Pop into the Nokia store in Central London today and you'll find the Nokia 5800 has launched. Rafe got himself up at silly o'clock to get to Oxford Street in time for the opening, and he's been updating us over Twitter and uploading pictures as he goes. With close to 100 people queueing, the consensus is that the 5800 (the first touch based S60 phone, running 5th edition) is one of the most highly anticipated devices from Finland in the last few years. Read on for Rafe's thoughts and pictures throughout the morning, including unboxing the 5800 retail...
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (CEO) and Rick Simonson (CFO), discussed Nokia's smartphone strategy during today's Q4 earnings call. Nokia intend to further expand S60 on Symbian OS to new categories and market segments as well as continuing to push it on to lower cost devices. As a result they are expanding the S60 investment when compared to Series 40. Furthermore they believe the combination of Nokia's five services (Ovi) with a larger portfolio of such devices will see a change in the definition of smartphone. Read on for more details.
Much has been written about Monday's inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, and how it will be represented in political history. It's also going to be looked on as a key moment of the digital age. With millions of people descending on the Capitol in Washington all carrying a smartphone, there is a huge repository of imagery, video and both public and private messages, texts and emails for historians to pour over. Read on for my thoughts.
The sad state of Download! has been a topic of discussion in Symbian S60 circles for quite some time. Other consumer device platforms from Nintendo's Wii to Apple's iPhone have managed to show how successful software and content download shops can be if they're easy to use, so why can't this happen on Nokia's Symbian devices? Tzer2 has taken a look at the latest version of Download! on S60 5th Edition, on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, to see if it's any improvement...
If you've been wowed by the 'find things as you type' technology shown off in the forthcoming Palm Pre, note that you've been able to do this for ages on S60 with a third party utility, SkyeQuiKey. But now there's a new challenger, T9Nav, claiming more functions and more speed. Matching contacts, bookmarks, applications, web services and more all by typing in T9-style on the standby screen, and currently free, it sounds too good to be true. I investigate in my review of T9Nav.
In All About Symbian Insight 56 (AAS Podcast 109) Steve, Ewan and Rafe discuss the news of the two N79 variants (Eco and Active), touch on the LGPL license option for Qt before discussing hands-on experience of the Nokia E63. In the second half of the show we talk about the issues around music DRM and consider the perfect mobile user experience.
Our smartphones have a lot of features in them, yet this is causing a divide. When we as power users look at a new device, we're expecting our favourite features to be there, yet this depth of power can be daunting to new users. A survey from Mformation (see here on the BBC), linked to earlier by Tzer2, reports high numbers of users having problems with setting up a new phone and accessing the available services. Read on for my take on the issue...
In Part 1 of my Nokia E63 review, I covered the hardware, the UI and Email. In this, part 2, I look at the E63's multimedia capabilities, I look in detail at how the bundled Files on Ovi subscription works in practice and I sum up the device - never has the term 'workhorse' been so accurately applied to a smartphone. The E63 is terrific value though, at the end of the day, with the cost considerations dominating our opinion of it.
