All About Symbian - S60 Content

Whither Symbian RSS options after Google Reader disappears?

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:07:00 GMT

Whether used explicitly, or bundled into another application such as gNewsReader or Gravity, there's been a heavy reliance in the Symbian world on Google Reader, the industry standard way of consuming RSS feeds from web pages across the Internet. With Google announcing that this service will be stopping in just over a month's time, it's time to look at other ways of gathering news via RSS. Here I look at a number of options.

AndroMenu Extra Buttons boggles the mind

Fri, 24 May 2013 07:03:00 GMT

I'm stunned. I really am. In an over-the-top way. AndroMenu Extra Buttons is just about the most powerful and customisable utility I've ever seen - on any platform. With dozens of actions and settings assigned to any of a myriad swipes or taps from all corners and edges of your phone's screen, you can take the relatively staid Symbian interface and essentially do what you want with it, at least in terms of homescreen, lock screen and app menu toolbars. And many of its functions leap into action from within applications too. Screenshots and more below...

Dictate for Symbian gets extra languages

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:03:33 GMT

The little voice recognition utility (that could) for Symbian, Dictate, has carried on getting updates, with this latest, v2.5.5 offering new recognition languages, in Polish and various variants of Spanish, plus Russian, French and Dutch are also now integrated. Well, I say 'integrated' - more like piggybacking on 'undocumented' APIs provided by Google, but I'd be churlish to complain.

Masks and combat gear on. Anyone for Softair?

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:20:44 GMT

Now, bear with me here, since I know nothing whatsoever about Softair, but I gather it's a replica weapon paintball-like sport that's mostly legal across the world? SoftairRealFight is a free smartphone aid that's available now for Symbian and Meego but 'coming soon' to other mobile platforms. The idea, as far as I can tell is that you set up a map for your particular Softair game and then the participants (again, who will also need to have Symbian or Meego-powered handsets) use the SoftairRealRight system to keep track of objectives and where everyone is within the game area on a 'radar' view.

Homescreens: not wishing to leave the Nokia E6 out...

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:55:53 GMT

The huge homescreen gallery for general Symbian smartphones was a great success yesterday, but there was one device that was largely overlooked, with different shaped screen and very different needs. Specifically, the Nokia E6, with 4:3 hi-res (VGA resolution) screen and plenty of hardware button assignments that might otherwise sit on homescreens. So, here's my call for E6 owners - how do you lay out your little Communicator homescreens?

Making jaws drop with the Nokia 808: Anatomy of a smartphone photo (take 3)

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:07:31 GMT

Following on from previous 'anatomy' pieces from myself, I couldn't help but feature the image below from a third party, Martin Jeppesen, who was experimenting with his Nokia 808 PureView and some seagulls(!) See the results below and be prepared for your jaw to drop...

Inspiration: Homescreen galleries across the AAS community!

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:29:00 GMT

I asked a few days ago for screen grabs of your Symbian homescreens, so that we can all learn and take inspiration from the set-up efforts of the wider AAS community - and here I present the results, thanks to everyone for your submissions, from all across the world. And if I didn't get round to including your homescreens, please don't be offended - I had way more submissions than could be reasonably included here. Do note that this article is quite big, in terms of bytes, because of the number of screenshots - please be patient while it all loads in your web browser!

Flickr ups free photo storage to 1TB each

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:51:02 GMT

Flickr is the oldest photo sharing service on the Internet and remains a favourite of many tech-literate people, not least because there's more emphasis placed on quality, resolution and general re-usability. Yahoo!, which has owned Flickr for a while now, has announced that free personal accounts can now store up to 1 Terabyte of images - quite astonishing. That's 1000GB, just to be clear.

You can still pay Flickr for a premium account ("Ad free" at $49.99 per year), which removes ads from the desktop browsing experience, and there's also an option to double storage space to 2TB ("Doublr" at $499 per year). With decent clients for both Symbian and Windows Phones, it might be time to take another look at Flickr as your photo storage service of choice?

"Nice weather for the time of year" - WeatherTalk on Symbian

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:19:03 GMT

Maybe it's just us Brits, but most of us do like to chat about the weather - which is where WeatherTalk Qt arguably comes in, providing a basic (Foreca-powered) weather forecasting utility, with built-in Facebook sharing. There's not that much more to the app, but hey, it's free, it's fast, it's pretty and, for Facebook users at least, might jusy get the day's social sharing off to a flying start? Screens and link below.

What's your homescreen layout? Dazzle us!

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:41:27 GMT

Your site needs YOU! Preparing for a feature on homescreen philosophies here on All About Symbian, I show below my own homescreen arrangement, but I suspect that there are some far more ambitious layouts on reader phones. See below for how you can get involved and share your Symbian homescreens with the world... [update: please stop sending these in now, the full article has been published! - thanks]

Ow Kah Leong's Nokia 808 PureView: One year on

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:00:31 GMT

In this feature, guest writer Ow Kah Leong rounds up a year of the Nokia 808 PureView as his principal phone, smartphone, camera and travel companion. While acknowledging areas in which Symbian may have slipped behind, it seems as if the 808's build quality, camera and yes, even, the applications available, have kept it as the top of Ow Kah Leong's tree. Here's his report from Singapore...

How much CO2 is a typical Nokia phone responsible for in its life time?

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:57:18 GMT

Ever wondered how much energy a Nokia phone consumes during its lifetime? What about the amount of CO₂ emissions? Nokia's recently released sustainability report provides an answer for "a typical mobile device". The answer? 210 megajoules (MJs) of energy and 12kg of CO₂ emissions. Given the components and energy profile of a typical smartphone, and the proportion of mobile phones in Nokia's shipment breakdowns, we would expect the company's smartphone products to be a little above that typical average.

Nokia says that the CO₂ emissions are equivalent to driving 71km in an average family car. To put this further in context the average plane passenger, flying from London to New York, is reponsible for around 580kg CO₂ emissions. Do note that these figures are estimates and the results depend on the calculation method, scope and assumptions used.

Nokia publishes corporate social responsibility and sustainability report for 2012

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:17:42 GMT

This week Nokia published its annual corporate social responsibility and sustainability report ("Nokia People & Planet Report 2012"). Covering a wide range of issues it offers an insight into the broad range of initiatives that makes Nokia a leader in the technology sector for ethical and environmental issues. The report also discusses the impact of Nokia's 2011 and 2012 strategy changes on its employees and the communities in which it operates.

MeeBible adds new translations, plus social and direct sharing options

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:45:58 GMT

Updated in the Nokia Store is the open source (free) MeeBible front end to numerous Bible translations, along with the facility to download any for offline reading. You may remember my original review of MeeBible? This new version 3.0 (3.05[4], to be precise) adds new translations (The Message, New King James, Basic English, Amplified), plus social sharing functions and hooks.

RubiBox (Box.com client) gets a major v2.0 update, multiple account support

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:50:00 GMT

Box.com (née Box.net) rarely gets the same press that DropBox or Google Drive get, but it's arguably just as useful. And you may not have remembered that there's a fairly fully featured Symbian client for this cloud storage service in the free (well, donation-ware) client RubiBox. There's now a big v2.0 update available in the Nokia Store, bringing multiple account support and more advanced file uploading and downloading.

Shooting for the stars with the Nokia 808

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:16:51 GMT

Fresh from my (and others) attempts to capture the moon with the Nokia 808 PureView, I was interested to see that 808 photographer extraordinaire Richard Dorman has been going one step further and trying to capture the stars. See below for the proof. Essentially the trick is to take lots of photos (with the 808 on a tripod, of course) and stack them together for a final render. Yes, this can be done more easily on a standalone camera perhaps, but isn't it still cool that it's being done on a Symbian-powered phone?

PhotProc brings professional image processing, but patience needed

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:26:14 GMT

Jaw-droppingly impressive. And jaw-droppingly impractical at the same time. But that's what you get for doing some incredibly maths-intensive work on a smartphone, even the 1.3GHz Nokia 808 PureView. The somewhat unimaginatively named PhotProc (I imagine the developer would jump at a decent alternative, if suggested) is brand new and brings de-noising, sharpening and many other operations to your 5 and 8 megapixel images, all handled on the phone. But, as the headline suggests, patience is needed, since PhotProc needs to do a lot of work to accomplish all this. So much so, that it implements its own 'job queue', reminding me of setting off batch processes on my mainframe overnight in the 1980s. See below for more.

Symbian and Windows Phone-powered Nokias in Phones Show 200

Thu, 16 May 2013 08:14:00 GMT

We haven't plugged my cross-platform Phones Show for ages here on the All About... sites, but I couldn't resist the video below. Not only is it my 200th Phones Show (FX: pops champagne cork!), there are plenty of relevant appearances of Symbian and Windows Phone-powered devices, listed below, with relevant links. And hey, there's also a big review of the Samsung Galaxy S4, which is, in some ways, the benchmark for all of 2013's new releases - it's certainly going to be the biggest selling smartphone - so hopefully worth watching too. If you want to skip straight to the Nokia bits, move to around the 11 minute mark.

Symbian Belle platform variants all get Email, Calendar and Music updates

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:37:46 GMT

The OS that just won't die? Two years and three months after Symbian was publicly put on life support, the platform updates keep coming, with the rollout today for all Belle Refresh and Feature Pack 2 smartphones of a 6MB Email and Calendar update, incorporating better attachment and event handling, plus a new compatibility update for Nokia Music for Belle Feature Pack 2 devices. Whatever modern Symbian device you own, head for SW Update on the device, or plug into Nokia Suite.

By popular demand... the 808 rematched with the SGS4, with no holds barred

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:26:32 GMT

My 5-camera 7-scene test, earlier this week, provoked a lot of comment along the lines of "ah, but you left the Nokia 808 on default settings for almost all of that, if you'd have used Creative mode properly, the 808 would have fared a lot better!" Maybe. In the two examples below, I just show the two main contenders tackling a distant detail and an extreme macro. Seems I was right about the Galaxy S4, you know. And I was right about the Nokia 808 PureView (if the critics had read through all my text)...