I just can't resist the challenge of taking something old and unloved and making it useful. And my latest target is the much misunderstood Nokia N96, from 2008, still one of the largest-screened non-touch Nokia smartphones and with more gadgets than you can count - yet a device that was panned on release, plagued with performance problems and never sold as well as it should have done. In the latest in my series of 'pimping' articles, I look back at the Nokia N96 and what's needed to keep it topped up and current.
Maybe I'm turning into a sentimental old codger, but despite Nokia's efforts with the recent E7 (and N97 before it), the majority of modern smartphones are turning into either large screened tablets or tiny-screened thumb qwerty affairs, with a side branch of low end numeric key-driven devices, effectively for the feature phone market. It occurs to me that five of the very best form factors of the last decade, all of which debuted on Symbian, have been (sadly) forgotten, despite their proven advantages. A quirk of providence? Or negligence on behalf of the manufacturers? Here are the form factors which I'd like to see revived, with modern software and services on-board.
You know what it’s like, when there’s a problem that you’ve already solved, but you can't quite bring yourself to use the solution? I think that’s the situation that Nokia find themselves in now. With a wave of new games arriving, those offering multiplayer over the internet are hitting the same problems. Nokia could solve this with some legacy code, but will they?
It's always good to take a reality check. Cooped up in AAS Towers, scribbling away until the small hours, whipped on by Rafe (but enough of our own private life), it's easy to get caught up the same sort of technological whirlpool as those over in San Francisco in the USA. With our thoughts full of smartphones, operating systems, Internet clients, app stores and email protocols, we forget that we don't represent the mainstream. In the push towards all these mobile devices simply being called 'phones', a huge, whopping caveat needs to be borne in mind.
Great stock is placed in the idea that the mobile phone is the one thing that you will always have with you. And that means that in the current wintery weather sweeping through Europe, stranding countless travellers and making the trips of pretty much everyone that little bit more… interesting…. has made the mobile phone an even more vital tool for the traveller. Given that I was attempting a London to Edinburgh journey yesterday, I’ve some thoughts on the mobile phone to choose when the modern ill wind blows from the north.
One of the much-hyped additions to Symbian^3, over S60 5th Edition, was the ability to have multiple homescreens, Android-style. Surely more homescreens are good, surely more widgets are good - or so goes the theory. But I'm not so sure, having lived with the N8 for a month. Here's my Luddite and rather unfashionable perspective on the homescreen phenomenon.
Throughout 2008, I worked through a series of features, entitled 'Camera Nitty Gritty', looking at specific aspects of camera phone performance, with special focus on Symbian-powered hardware and on exploding (and expanding on, as appropriate) some mobile photography myths. Two full years on and with the new Symbian^3-powered generation of devices now available from Nokia, it's high time for an update, although I'm not going to make you work through another series of twelve articles - this time I'll keep it concise and keep everything in the one feature!
One of the applications which arrived very late in the day for S60 5th Edition (i.e. Symbian^1) was Nokia Internet Radio - it seems that haste isn't the order of the day for Symbian^3 either, with no obvious multi-station Internet radio clients in the Ovi Store for the Nokia N8, C7 and C6 - yet. However, all is not lost, as I found out when embarking on a little end-November quest for working Internet radio for my N8...
Over on the Nokia Conversations blog, they’ve looked at the history of their “Snake” game. Right from the first bundled version on the Nokia 6110 handset through to Vanixon’s Snake game on the Ovi Store. It’s a nice article that I suspect gets to where the author wanted (i.e. let’s link to a game on the Store) but really does show just how much Nokia’s eye is no longer on the Snake. When you look closer, the winding path of the snake seems to follow Nokia's smartphone strategy.
Talk about the clash of the titans. But not really as equals - you'll remember my musings last week on smartphone (converged devices, where, by my definition, Nokia and Symbian are strongest) vs superphone (large-screened Internet-centric devices)? I've picked arguably the best of each breed here, the Nokia N8 and the massive HTC Desire HD, and stuck them in a room to fight it out. Thankfully, my theories are borne out in the head to head below, their different strengths and weaknesses hopefully evident to all. Whatever your own theories and favoured platform though, I'm sure you'll find the blow by blow comparison interesting.
