It's 7.00am, the X7 is fully charged, and the daily alarm that's smart enough to only ring Mondays to Fridays wakes up not just me, but also a look at the X7 in day to day use. We could sit and examine specs on the device and do pixel perfect comparisons of the new and old web browser. But today is going to be a normal day. No horrible stress testing, no loading the Engadget website in five different browser windows to see what happens. It's going to be the X7 vs the world. Who's going to win Ramona at the end of the day?
Have you ever looked over at third party camera applications on other mobile platforms and got just a little bit jealous of all their filters and transformative templates to make your photos just a little bit more fun before uploading them to the likes of Facebook or Twitter? Then perhaps CameraBag is for you?
One of my wife's favourite games ever was Frozen Bubble, the infamous bubble shooter that worked so well on the S60 phones of yesteryear. Which made Maya Bubbles Touch an interesting review subject - how would it measure up to the rightly famous previous classic of the genre? Pretty well, with the caveat that there's a definite twist in the gameplay. Read on...
Last week Steve introduced the Nokia X7, the first Symbian Anna retail device, and as promised he's passed it over to me to take it into the real world and see what it can deliver away from his technically detailed eye. To be honest, being handed to Mr Spence in the height of a Scottish summer is probably going to leave the X7 wondering what it did wrong. First up for me is the multimedia angle.
It's not often you find the perfect game. Great concept, great implementation, great price. But Monster Pinball delivers on every level and is truly impressive. iPhone owners got to play this almost two years ago, but the Symbian version, working on the new Symbian^3 phones with the graphics acceleration, is here at last and it's almost a must-buy for just about everyone.
Run and jump and run and run. There's been a little bit of an explosion in the "always running" game on Symbian in the last few months, and what I've found wonderful is that each game is subtly different and requires a different way of playing. While each of them are simple "one key" games, each of them has their own flavour. "Dalton - The Awesome!" comes over as a delightful B-movie Zombie film.
Coming from the Trainline website - which acts as a central ticket agent for all the UK train companies - this utility application is aimed at the frequent traveller, allowing you to check train times and fares from the handset, and then buy your tickets from your phone without having to worry about call centres, complicated websites, or a very long queue to the one ticket sales counter open in the station.
Professional cases for the Nokia E7 Communicator continue to trickle in - here's OtterBox's 'Commuter' accessory. Fresh from the triumph of the N8 design, how on earth did OtterBox cope with the sliding, hinged E7? And how bulky and/or useable is the end result? Is the form factor a bad 'fit' (pun intended) with the idea of an all encompassing, totally protected phone?
Some people say that old games never die, they're just remade. It certainly seems to be the case with FidoDido Tower Blitz. You play the familiar hand drawn character, tasked with painting an arena of coloured blocks, by jumping on them! Sounds simple? Not when you factor in the hazards and enemies. Sounds familiar? Quite possibly, read on to find out why!
More than perhaps any other smartphone manufacturer, Nokia spreads its OS around a number of subtly different form factors - along with specific claimed strengths (photography, music, and so on). In terms of pure form, the new X7 is perhaps the closest of the Symbian^3 generation to the current range of large screened Android touch-slabs - which means that it needs to bring something new to the table. This it does, in the form of decent loudspeakers, pentaband 3G and premium materials, not to mention Symbian Anna from day one, but there are compromises as well. We now have a retail Nokia X7 and here's my take on it, part 1 of the AAS multi-part review.
