Review: Symbian Smartcards
Score:
70%
Version Reviewed: 1.00
Every year, on leaving the Smartphone Show, Rafe, Steve and I pick up the Symbian pamphlet of all the published phones, and joke that this is the year that we would sit down, write some Flash code, and create a Top Trumps game, where people could compare the properties of each phone on a programmed playing card – winner takes both cards, and another round is played. Keep playing until you have all the cards.
Well, this year, we didn’t have to do that. Whether someone in the Symbian Press/Wiley Publishing marketing department has been paying attention, or simply smoking something interesting, once we jumped on the DLR to get back home, we each had in our hands a box of ‘Symbian Smartcards’. Yes, 52 actual playing cards, with all the stats.
Who needs flash when you have cardboard?
So what we have here is the traditional Top Trumps game, given a new legally safe name, as a promotional tool to display 52 of the most notable Symbian phones. The game has stood the test of time - although you would need some alcoholic help or a stupidly long flight to Ronneby to make it as entertaining as Snap.
What is a little disappointing is the chosen statistics on the cards. In order these are:
- Start Memory, in MB.
- Top Screen Res[olution], in pixels.
- Power Potential, i.e. battery life in hours.
- First To Market, year of launch.
- Pocket or Bag, weight of the device in grams
- Key Factor, the number of physical keys the device has
- OS Version, the Symbian version, on UIQ or S60 version numbers included.
All of which are nicely factual, and unfortunately very predictable. I always expect a Top Trumps set of cards to have at least one wildcard statistic – at a minimum a ‘coolness’ factor – that gives each a chance of winning. Quite frankly if you pick up something like the R380, 7650 or N-Gage, you don’t have much chance of winning the round you are in. This really takes away what little skill there is in the game. You see, most Top Trumps sets were balanced, so in the Train set, the Shunting engine may have a really low top speed, but the bhp was massive. Symbian phones have evolved all areas pretty much equally, which doesn’t make for a great game of trumps.
It’s clear they’ve been made with marketing as the highest priority, then ‘don’t offend our partners’ second, and game play bringing up the rear. Which given the target market for the Symbian Smartcards makes political sense, but it’s not a patch on the design we have for the Flash version…
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at