The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic will be available in Australia on the 20th of March, and the Comes With Music all-you-can-eat subscription service will launch there simultaneously. The Nokia 5800 will have a recommended retail price of 979 AUD (£440) for a device with a 12 month Comes with Music subscription.
In contravention of the prevailing spirit of the age, I find myself unconvinced by a touch interface on a phone, having tried using both Apple iPhone and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, both of which I've rejected as my main device for different reasons. And, for a change, there's survey data (see the postscript) to back up my crazed(!) opinions - it seems that the majority of the great unwashed also prefer physical buttons to touch...
You'll forgive me appearing to be sucking up to the 'boss', but Rafe has done an exemplary job with his photography at this year's Mobile World Congress. Witness the first of his in depth photo galleries, this time featuring the highest specification phone any of us is likely to hold in 2009, the Samsung Omnia HD, running S60 5th Edition. Rafe takes us over the device in gory detail, so enjoy!
Rafe's back from the Mobile Word Congress, so this is Steve and Ewan's first chance to quiz him on what he found out. In an extended Insight, we look at the hardware and services from the phone manufacturers that were on show in Barcelona.
Ewan, proud owner of the Nokia N85, has decided to do a direct comparison of his phone with the new N86 8MP, widely leaked as originally intended on being the N85 8MP. What are the essential differences between the two devices, how significant are they, and were Nokia right to go with the new model number? Ewan says 'Yes', and Rafe agrees, in a special editorial postscript, although their reasons for agreeing are somewhat different - as you'll see.
Over the last six months on All About Symbian in my 'Camera Nitty Gritty' series, I've tackled a number of phone camera-related issues head on and tried to draw conclusions, even though they sometimes fly in face of phone marketing. In this article, I provide an index to all the Camera Nitty Gritty articles and also summarise some of the individual article conclusions. Xenon flash, resolution, apertures, branded optics, it's all here and neatly broken down.
More tutorials for Nokia's first S60 touch device: an introduction to the basics of using the 5800's camera, and after you've read that you'll want to move onto Steve's earlier article on how to get better photos from the 5800 (despite its rather small camera sensor!). As always, previous tutorials can be found on their index page.
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic may not be a S60 flagship, but it's selling well wherever it launches, apparently. S60 celeb Sittiphol (the Mobitubia guy) reports here in an illustrated post on the 5800's launch and sell-out in Thailand.
Continuing our series for beginners, we've done a guide to the Nokia 5800's S60 5th Edition interface, and to complement it there's also a brief look at the 5800's various methods of text entry including on-screen keyboards, keypads and handwriting recognition. You can find a complete listing of all the articles in this series on the 5800 tutorial index page.
Well, this is very late news, but better late than never: There's been an update to the Mobipad application, which allows you to wirelessly control S60 devices through a standard Nintendo Wii controller (particularly useful if you've got your phone connected to a television through TV Out). The new Mobipad 1.2 beta lets you customise all the buttons to your own liking, which should solve the control problems that were experienced by previous Mobipad users. The catch is that you have to make a 5 euro donation to the developers to get the new version (previous donors get the new version free). The old version 1.0 is still free though.
Now that the excitement of MWC is over, we present another in our series of tutorials for people who are new to the Symbian world: How to update the firmware on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. As always, if you spot a mistake or have a suggestion please do let us know in the comments thread. Our previous articles in the series can be found in the Nokia 5800 Tutorials Index.
Rafe's still pounding the floor at MWC 2009, of course, but he took time with MIR's Ben Smith yesterday to give his opinions of Nokia's latest camera flagship, the N86 8MP, in great detail. Below the break is the full six minute video interview, enjoy.
With so much news flowing through this front page over the last 72 hours, I thought a brief link summary might be in order. Sony Ericsson went first, with their display of their early prototype 12mp, S60 5th Edition Idou. Then we had Nokia's main keynote, introducing the S60 3rd Edition Nokia E55 and side-sliding E75, plus the Ovi Store. They also quietly dropped the 6710 Navigator and 6720 Classic. Samsung chipped in next with their launch of the Omnia HD, running S60 5th Edition and with 3.7" OLED screen and 8mp camera. Nokia then showed off the new N86 8MP at a breakfast launch, an N85 with significantly reworked camera. LG brought up the rear with their latest, the KT770, an otherwise unremarkable 3rd Edition slider.
Continuing to round up Mobile World Congress 2009, a few links of interest for Wednesday morning. Nokia Messaging just got itself an upgrade, with the return of Access point selection and a better experience for Yahoo! Mail users; well spotted Symbian's William, showing a veritable wall of Samsung Omnia HD phones all waiting to be carted off to AAS for review(!); plus our own Rafe has been busy overnight, see the live link above for his own photos and thoughts on the new phones announced; finally, Rafe was cornered by the chatty MIR team at the show and asked for his thoughts so far.
The GSMA has announced a plan for major phone manufacturers to produce one standard charger that would work with all handset brands, using a microUSB plug as the connection point (not miniUSB, as some sites have reported). The plan has the backing of almost every major phone maker, and if it succeeds presumably the rest of the phone industry will fall into line too. There are already some phones which do charge from microUSB, and the aim is to make most new models use standard chargers by 2012.
