I think Symbian is a long way from being toast, regardless of how good any future iPhone is. Let's face it, many people are not going to be happy only being able to install applications on their phone which Apple deem worthy; while the AppStore sounds like a good idea, it *is* very restrictive and will put off some/many developers from switching to the iPhone platform...
A letter from the iPhone world
One more advantage the N95 and N95 8gb have over the iPhone is that it is very accessible to visually impaired and blind users like myself (with one hand of course 😊). I can access all applications and features in the device using a mobile screen reader such as Mobile Speak for Symbian phones. codefactory.es/en Apple on the other hand has completely shut the door in terms of making iPhones and iPods accessible. The built in text to speech (Voiceover) in a Mac also has limited functionality compared to the likes of Jaws and Window eyes available for Microsoft Windows. Blind individuals today are very tech seby and demand the same functionality out of a computer and mobile device as that offered to sighted users. Symbian and Windows lead the way.
I can guarantee that Chinese input on the Nokia is way way way more simplier than what this guy has written (which is a lot of bollocks with little to no facts).
Chinese input can be done in one of two ways - Pinyin (phonetic spelling) or through reduced strokes (Q9).
Pinyin is favourable in most parts of China as it is a semi official way to input characters in using an english keyboard (it is usually a part of school studies).
The other method - strokes input is fantastically designed and similar to T9 (called Q9). All chinese characters can be reduced to 5 basic types of strokes and can be inputted via the first five keys of the keypad. In theory, Q9 can even be faster than T9 for word selection (since Q9's wordbase is more complete and that Chinese has very little non-official words that is not in the dictionary).
You will find that majority of chinese using their phones use these methods and NOT write the characters on the screen (except Windows mobile users). Writing on the screen is slower overall..
I agree with 99% of what you wrote. The iPhone is a great device but it does not make sense to compare it to any of the Symbian devices. Apples and oranges. The problem that I do have is with what you said about Mac's. After using Windows for many years and then one day moving over to a Mac, I realize that I have less computing issues, and for my needs there is nothing that I can not do on my Mac that I could do on a Windows PC. Sure, there is some software that is made only for Windows but more and more venders are starting to realize that if they want to make money, they will have to embrace Mac OS X.
The App Store is live. I just downloaded 72 applications and games, about 10 of which I paid for. The whole process took about 20 minutes and I didn't even have to log in to anything...
Man, this iPhone is a total joke! Give me the Symbian App Store any day... oh wait, there isn't one...
😉
Jaggz wrote:The App Store is live. I just downloaded 72 applications and games, about 10 of which I paid for. The whole process took about 20 minutes and I didn't even have to log in to anything...Man, this iPhone is a total joke! Give me the Symbian App Store any day... oh wait, there isn't one...
😉
Hmmm, perhaps all these new apps that I have on my N95 got there by magic then.
Oh wait, Handango. How silly of me to not notice they came from there and have been coming from there for years already!
The iPhone is no joke but it has some ignorant nurd users. It has started to get a very gadget-nurd stigma nowadays, not undeserved.
Frankly I found typing Chinese on an S60 device to be very simple.
Every Chinese character is composed of its component "strokes". There are several types of strokes: horizontal strokes, vertical strokes, dots, corners, arcs. On S60 (or indeed any mobile phone sold in the past 10 years at least) you just type the strokes. All very intuitive since it is very close to handwriting.
BTW that Chinese handwriting input Steve showed during the keynote has to be a joke. How do you draw a Chinese character in such a small space using fingers?