In All About Symbian Podcast 96 (Insight #43) Steve, after an E90 firmware update, asks why he can have a better experience than Nokia Software Updater. We also talk about about recent content on All About Symbian before moving on to some thoughts and reflections on S60 5th Edition with some special attention for backwards compatibility.
The EEE PC portable computer range has received a lot of coverage over the past year partly due to its low price but also partly due to its small size. How does Asus' minilaptop compare to Nokia's microlaptop, the E90 Communicator? All About Symbian's Tzer2 is about to find out, in an article with somewhat predictable outcome but plenty of interesting insights along the way, including Download! being held up as a relatively good example of how to do things - for a change.
Some interesting noises from the music industry over the weekend, and this morning's Guardian ties it in with Nokia's Comes With Music (Discord Over The Phone). In short, musical artists are worried that the labels will not pass on enough of the proceeds from online music back to them. To that end, they have launched the Featured Artists Coalition. But what does this mean to the digital music landscape? Read on for my thoughts...
In an extended edition of the All About Symbian Podcast (Insight #42) we reflect on the announcements out of last week's Nokia Remix Event in London. There's some a general discussion of the tone of the event, but the meat of the podcast focuses on Nokia's first S60 touch handset, the Nokia 5800 MusicXpress, before moving on to Nokia's new Comes with Music service.
You can't help thinking that some people are going to be disappointed by the Nokia N96. First they hear it's got built-in digital TV. "Oh, no, that's not available in most countries yet". Then they latch onto the prominent marketing blurb about it 'coming with BBC iPlayer'. "Oh, no, that doesn't work with 'normal' data, you have to use 'Wi-Fi'. And so on. If I may say so, a bit of a product pitching mess all round...
All you can listen to, including Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell! Comes With Music is here and it's time to bring out the Cassandras and explain why it's such a bad idea. We don't have any Cassandra's to hand though, so Ewan will have to suffice.
I have been playing with the Nokia N85 (prototype) and present some more thoughts on the new OLED screen technology used. How does it perform outdoors, specifically in sunlight? Could this be the Achilles Heel of the technology and how big a problem is it? Your thoughts welcomed if you've used a device with an OLED display.
More 'normob' encounters in the last few days have left me speechless. If some of what I've encountered is typical then arguments about how to introduce smartphones to the average person in the High Street are, quite simply wasted. Or maybe I'm just a technology snob. Either way, I'm a geek and proud of it. You probably are too. Read on and comments welcome...
In the latest AAS Insight podcast, Rafe, Ewan and I cover a range of issues, from the latest hardware (N96, and lots on the T-Mobile G1 running Android and how it fits into the current Symbian (and to some extent iPhone)-dominated landscape) and upcoming N-Gage titles.
With your smartphone having more and more storage, filling it with music online needs either a large investment in digital music stores, or a walk on the wild side of the internet. Or does it? Ewan has a look at free alternatives to loading up tunes to your phone without having to bother with those tiresome silver CD thingies...
Nokia announced today that it is 'renewing its business mobility solutions and strategy'. Nokia will cease developing or marketing its own behind-the-firewall solutions. Rather than offering its own complete end-to-end solutions, Nokia will strengthen strategic partnerships and will form its enterprise offering by combining Nokia devices and applications with software solutions from companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Cisco.
In the fourth part of my Camera Nitty Gritty series, I examine how much (if any) difference a branded lens makes to the camera in a phone. With example photos from the Nokia N93, E90, N82 and N95, and from the Samsung G810 and i8510 and HTC Touch Pro, I try to demonstrate the variations in photo quality for a given megapixel count. What other factors play a part here and is it worth making branded optics a 'must have' item on your phone shopping list?
Ewan's title, by the way(!), with a musical slant as usual... He's back from a blogging conference in Las Vegas and musing on all the different ways to get information up onto your blog(s) from a smartphone. Some useful generic pointers in here, whether you want to blog text, images, video or audio.
Even before Apple's iPhone App Store and Google's Android Marketplace Nokia's Download! service was mediocre. Now it looks decidedly sub-standard. In this feature article Tzer2 takes a detailed look at what's wrong with Download, asks whether a third party could step in and gives some pointers about the right way to do things.
In an appropriately 'over the air' day (ref the HTC G1 announcement), Tzer2 looks closely at how divorced S60 is from a desktop computer. In other words, do you need to be tied to a PC or Mac at all these days? The answer is largely 'No'. Tzer2's article will make you think and challenge the way you've viewed Symbian OS and S60 phones up until now.
