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.
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.
There's a great tutorial feature just published over on the Nseries blog by Ari Partinen, looking at ways of getting more effective low light photos from the Nokia N8 (i.e. without using the Xenon flash). How can you maximise contrast and style while minimising low light noise? Well worth a read if you own an N8.
Extended Depth of Field (EDoF) cameras, also known as Full Focus, have enabled Nokia to make ever thinner smartphones. Rather than relying on the larger actuating auto-focus lens system to produce a sharp image, EDoF exploits image processing algorithms to create an image that is universally sharp. The trade off here is that capturing fine details (like text) is often not possible, and there is a minimum focal distance of 50cm. Well, Jade Bryan over at SymbianWorld.org has come up with a method to get around this limitation, and like all the best ideas, it is remarkably simple. Read on to find out more.
Sorry, I couldn't resist another link of interest to a couple of stunning Nokia N8 camera projects: in this case PiX, the (South) African Photo Journal documenting in detail how they got on using the N8 to shoot the cover of their publication, replacing a dedicated DSLR. The video report is embedded below, and you can see their cover here on the PiX web site. And LMVisual, which used the N8 exclusively to produce a very professional video showing the art of BMX stunts, also embedded below.
One aspect of the performance of modern devices that is rather taken for granted, especially in the Symbian world, is audio rendering, i.e. how good a music player is each device? Devin, over at the Nokia Guide, has been putting the N8 to the sword here with the aid of his seemingly super-human hearing. Result? The N8 comes through with flying colours. Devin, how about some comparative tests now: don't suppose you can get hold of a few competing phones?
Mobbler, Symbian's Last.fm client, has a new beta version for Symbian^3 users. The new beta supports the new Scrobbling API and menu items for the radio stations recently discontinued by Last.fm have been removed. There is a long list of new features too, like Twitter sharing, artist biography pages, and improved lyrics pages. Also added is support for the new mix radio station created by Last.fm to replace discontinued stations. The Mobbler project is also asking people to install an error reporting agent (ErrRd.SIS) which will help the developers capture bugs in the new beta version.
I couldn't resist embedding the interview below for aspiring Nokia N8 film-makers (like me?!), shot by Nokia with the McHenry brothers - the guys who did the short film 'The Commuter', which aired last month, every frame of which was shot on the N8 (though they cheated with the sound, which I'm a little disappointed with!). With some nicely techy tips and questions thrown in, it's worth 17 minutes of your time to sit down and watch.
Asri Al Baker from i-symbian.com and friend of All About Symbian has been at it again with his Web Run-Time Widgets! This time, he has broken away from the Google world and treated us to a launcher for Facebook Touch. For those who don't know, http://touch.facebook.com offers a variant of Facebook optmised for finger-driven mobile browsers. As said previously, there's nothing stopping users from just adding a bookmark to their browser, but these WRT Widgets offer the benefit of an identifiable icon in both the application menu and home screen shortcuts.
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?
