Never mind the current crop of misleading 'N8 vs ???' camera comparisons that have popped up on the web over the weekend - to do camera phone tests properly you need patience, a good eye and some knowledge of the art. While waiting for part 2 of our own review of the Nokia N8, which will indeed look in gory detail at its camera, check out Vaibhav Sharma's excellent look at a specific use case - taking the N8 out and leaving a DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) camera at home for general purpose daylight photography.
Here’s one reason why Nokia need to keep pushing the “story” of the Ovi store. A recent post on Game Theory by Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins critiqued the Android app store and highlighted three main issues… such as carrier billing, returns policy and competing download routes for applications. Issues that the Ovi Store specifically, and the Symbian platform globally, are already addressing. Some thoughts below...
OK, so Google's headline stretches the truth a little - the photos of Antarctica aren't actually from a StreetView car - for errr.... obvious reasons! And, of course, on some continents coverage is a lot more patchy than others. But, regardless, kudos to the Google team for their untiring work to bring the visuals of the world to the (mobile) masses. Some quotes and links below.
As Engadget puts it, "the other shoe just dropped" for anyone hoping that Samsung might yet be planning a Symbian^4 device or two in the future. In an email out to registered developers and on the Samsung Mobile Innovator web site, the company says that it "will discontinue its Symbian support service from December 31st 2010". Sad news from the company that brought us the i8910 HD, among other interesting and powerful designs.
If you’re looking to build up your badge collection in Foursquare (including the recently released official Symbian version) and are in London next week, you might want to pop along to The Jewel Bar on Glasshouse Street. London cultural website Londonist is hoping to get 250 people or more to check-in at the Bar, and those that do will earn the Super Swarm badge!
Hat tip to CJ, who spotted online this brand new 4 minute video run through of all that's tasty about the imminent N8, seemingly shot for the UK market specifically. It's pretty well-informed, despite the overt marketing tone, and well worth turning up your speakers and watching. The video is embedded below. As a bonus, I've also embedded the video mini-documentary about Nokia creating the world's largest cinema screen - for showing a film being played off the N8....
We don't often mention themes on AAS, but when we do we try to make them good ones. With the new generation of OLED (CBD) displays now imminent from Nokia, I thought I'd highlight a few themes designed to make the most of the vivid OLED colours without taking the overall brightness too far into excessive battery-draining territory. It goes without saying that they'll also work on the Samsung i8910 - and probably every other S60 5th Edition (and possibly 3rd Edition) smartphone too. Comments welcome - which is your favourite theme for OLED?
No, not that gravity. Gravity the much-praised social network client for Symbian. Here's an excellent 17 minute video interview (and written summary) with its creator, Jan Ole Suhr, taken at Nokia World 2010. Did you, for example, know that Gravity was originally intended to be a little freebie giveaway to attract visitors to Jan's other commercial products? The interview also answers whether Jan is worried about Nokia's new native Social application or about a future forced rewrite in Qt.
Both Gartner and IDC recently published predictions of where the smartphone world will go over the next four years, in part backing up each others conclusions, but with some divergence. Pulling out the trends and actual figures needed a little more digging, but I've averaged the two sets of predictions and filled in (and interpolated where necessary) to give you a chart that's a lot easier to take in. Are both Gartner and IDC infallible? Certainly not, but the combined chart should give a more balanced prediction than the current fashionable 'Symbian is toast' rhetoric...
The Ovi Blog has posted the news today that a large swathe of Nokia's self-published game titles in the Ovi Store are now available free of charge. Some of these titles were already free, but its a nice reminder and there are some fun titles in the mix, including one of my favourites, Big Roll in Paradise.
Coinciding with Nokia World and the current season are a number of promotional videos from Nokia that highlight aspects of Symbian^3 that we haven't seen before on All About Symbian. Ahead of review devices arriving that actually run the new version of the OS and interface, I thought it would be useful to embed some of these videos below, for viewing over your morning coffee. Take the marketing spin with a pinch of salt in each case, but there are useful demonstrations of how the relevant parts of Symbian^3 will work.
Sometimes journalists put two and 'x' together to make four, and when they're right, careers are made. This weekend, TechCrunch have tried to make a similar jump and announced that they reckon that "Facebook is Secretly Building A Phone," a claim that Facebook have denied (reported at Mashable and others). With a broader stroke of a brush, I hope the Symbian Foundation is paying attention, because Symbian OS in a short production run of handsets would have made a lot of sense.
Facebook Places has made the jump from 'US Only', to 'UK and US Only', and it’s given us a chance to have a look at the newest location-based game in town. And while it’s a nice first step, the ability to check in on devices and platforms other than the iPhone/iPad is going to be needed for a critical volume of users.
We've seen N8 photo samples before, but especially link worthy today is the guy who effectively created the N8 and its camera, Damian Dinning (also of this parish), putting up over 140 of his best N8 9 and 12 megapixel photos as a Flickr set. Some stunning examples in here, all un-retouched, though it's worth noting that Damian's also got pretty good at taking photos - the user element should always be borne in mind!
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