No, not a blatant Phones Show plug (though Phones Show Chat 18 is out), but a serious attempt to provoke thought and discussion. Ahead of a video feature on smartphone recommendations, I've opened up my thought processes to you below, in some detail, breaking down the market into a whopping seven stereotypes(!) Maybe you'd like to chip in with comments, recommendations and disqualifications of your own?
Read on in the full article.
Wow gr8 work steve..
Also iphone 3GS stands out to be a winner in all dept.. Thats amazing!
I have an Iphone 3GS and had many Nokia's before (E90, N95 8GB, N82, E85, all communicators).
But the media creation is not that great (only 3MP Camera, no flash). How can you put this on top of the the media creation devices.
I'm currently looking into buying an Samsung i8910. With the new firmware and availability of custom firmwares this looks very promising..
Steve, what's your idea here?
The Nokia N79 Active, if you manage to find one 😊
@wiltjer: Can't believe I'm being the iPhone advocate here(!), but the 3GS's cam and (especially) video is actually very good. I've got video samples from James Burland from the 3GS which rival the Nokia N86. And its mike is also excellent.
Ah, um, slitch, that is only when it's in 100% optimal conditions. I have free access to the 3GS (or rather, I bully my friends into lending me use their phones quite often) and I NEVER ever bother using the camera for still or video when it's a sunny day and I'm outdoors. Otherwise the captured image becomes very noisy, to the extent that I will just delete the file on the spot.
A sort of proof (but the files aren't with me, however) : My friend and I took a picture from the same spot (well, side by side, actually) and I used my old 5700XM, and him his 3GS (we were taking pictures for a project, then I thought about comparison WHILE doing the project, hence this 'showdown'.) It was indoors and the lighting was average, and oddly, even though the 3GS has more detail due to the 3.2MP camera, the amount of noise was worse. :S
Very good job! EVERY SINGLE TIME I use your grid I either get my current smartphone or the one I want(if I'm in the market for one).
Sometimes I wonder why the operators don't have something like this in their shops.
As for the web-a-holic section.... I didn't know the HD2 had support for flash(I would immediately disqualify any device from this category if it didn't support flash)
Cheers and happy holidays from Romania!
hi Steve:
Just tried your Grid... result: winner Samsung i8910 HD, runner up: Nokia N97 mini
Again your grid gives me an almost perfect answer
Thanks for being the smartphone hero
I am afraid, very afraid that the category road warrior is headed for demise. Sadly, since I have lived, breathed and slept with these things since my first Series 3A. The E90 has stopped without a successor, the HTC doesn't have a real OS, the N97 hardly qualifies. I am dreading the day my E90 will die on me.
I just cannot imagine there is no market for a properly keyboarded, large screened communicator anymore. People happily tote a whole laptop all over the world, but would not want to be seen with a slightly larger phone? If someone shovelled a decent phone and some netbook-like capability into the form factor of a Psion 5MX or Revo I think you would have a killer. At least for a more than attractive niche market. I would go for it like a rocket.
Maybe the N97 shows the way- why not go the other direction and make a larger version, optimised for office use? The marginal development costs I am sure must be very small. This market would not consist of design freaks so any successor could use the same outer hardware with just a few adjustments to keep it updated.
I could even imagine a third party doing this- buying or licensing the innards of a phone and fitting it to a custom exterior. If you can separately buy coloured exteriors for phones, why not the keyboard and screen?
Troll alert:
"Also iphone 3GS stands out to be a winner in all dept.. Thats amazing!"
Always amazes me how many Apple sycophants turn up on this site.
Steve - granted Apple have made great strides with the iPhone's camera/video capabilities but with no flash for the camera surely this makes its inclusion as one of the top media creating smartphones questionable. I would find the absence of a flash to be annoying since it restricts the occasions when the camera is available.
While I may not have always agreed with Steve in the past, I have to say that he is spot on in recommendations.
To clarify a few points first. Yes, in low light situations, the iPhone's camera and vid functions are not up to par with a camera with either a single or dual LED, however, in equally lit situations, i.e. sunny day, normal day with backlighting by the sun, the camera responds very well, and vid quality is not bad. The point being, the iPhone is sold as a media, jack of all trades device. It does some things much better than others. Second, point and most crucial in my opinion is that any time an Apple or iPhone enthusiast drops by, the typical myopic troll baiters show up to throw an insult here or there. The fact is, currently the iPhone is smoking just about anything Nokia can throw at the wall in many of the most important user categories. Steve's article simply drives home the point. The iPhone offers a better user experience to the average user out of the box that no phone maker can "currently" come close to. You can hate iPhone users, call them posers, say the phone is a fashion statement, etc... but the fact remains that it is the best and easiest phone to use for MOST people and this is where the money is. As an N86/iPhone user, I find that I reach for the iPhone 8 out of 10 times when I want to do something, be it call, watch a video, listen to music, whatever as the iPhone provides a better experience.Third point. The integration between iTunes, The App Store, and Mobile Me is completely seamless and something that NO ONE has to offer. Ovi services are simply lacking when compared to the Eco-system that Apple has put together in support of their device. They did this in the space of 2 and a half years while Nokia has been floundering with Ovi for what seems like forever.
Again: Kudos on the article Steve.
Nice categorisation Steve, but, overall I preferred your earlier broad categories since they nicely tied things up in a way which is easier to remember.
Having recently purchased an iPod Touch I can appreciate why you chose the iPhone as the media consumer king for example. This probably still wins in this category. In fact it's almost a walkover of Kauto Star proportions.
In your messaging broad category I don't see how the iPhone will ever win. It's too much of a pain entering information using the touch screen. I'd take a keyboard/keypad any day of the week. I'd choose a Nokia here and the specific model is tricky to nominate.
The media creating category would also be a Nokia, and your previous choice of the N82 is probably right up there still, amazingly. The lack of camera flash causes me to rule out the iPhone here.
How can anyone even think of putting an iPhone in the media creation category. Sure it's video/picture capabilities are not bad in sunny condition, but who on this planet that doesn't live in miami or the sahara has sunny condition every day? And even in those places the sun sets at some point. And I haven't even mentioned indoors...
So is the iPhone an excellent phone? Hell yeah! But is the iPhone my first choice when it comes to media creation? Absolutely not, not even my 5th choice...
Media Creator:
N82
Comms Junkie:
N97, E75
Media Consumer:
iphone
Work addict:
E90
Tech Enthusiast:
N900
Web-a-holic
N900
Honestly, with RIM offering well-integrated clients for all the major social networks and still unparalleled Email Performance - should'nt there be at last one listed?
Granted, their current OS is far from beautiful, but BBs just... do the job well.
Overall, the Milestone (Droid) is the best of the crop right now in my opinion. Although it isn't the best in every category, it excels as the best all-rounder. Putting it only under the 'Tech enthusiast' category is flawed. It's the most complete smartphone (not completely perfect of course) I've owned up till now. It certainly beats the iPhone (which I also own) in every category except 'Hardcore mobile gamer'.
I agree with E90 is a great work addict companion. Would be less anxious of a new communicator if a new firmware update would bring it to par with the E75 or E72.
The N900 should be a winner in more categories IMHO. But then again, this is coming from Litchfield who continues to live in his Symbian fantasy world.
Good point about Blackberrys. I keep forgetting about them - RIM have rubbish PR, I hardly know anyone who uses one, and the few I've borrowed were very primitive in terms of OS.
But the Bold should be in there somewhere, I suspect...
Unregistered wrote:The N900 should be a winner in more categories IMHO. But then again, this is coming from Litchfield who continues to live in his Symbian fantasy world.
The N900 is lucky to be listed in ANY of the categories, given that it's an unfinished product. Have just sent mine to Tim Salmon for a second opinion. Listen to next week's PSC to hear what he thinks of it 8-)
PS. And yes, before anyone says it out loud, many of Nokia's other phones have arrived 'unfinished' in 2009...
joness9 wrote:Troll alert:"Also iphone 3GS stands out to be a winner in all dept.. Thats amazing!"
Always amazes me how many Apple sycophants turn up on this site.
To be a troll someone would have to be deliberately provocative and argumentative, neither is the case here since the iPhone 3GS does indeed feature in the most catergories, which to me would signal it as the best 'all-rounder'.
had I bought an iPhone three years ago, it would now be updated with the latest and greatest features from Apple. Not just bug fixes, but new features would've been added.
I didn't.
I bought the extremely expensive E90 from Nokia instead, and I've been stuck with the exact same functionality, a handful of bugs that probably never gets fixed, while I can see new S60 phones with fancier functions. My E90 browser has not been updated the past year, and it's still not displaying the majority of web pages. WiFi with WPA-2 still makes the connection hang, BlueTooth still makes hickups or freezes the phone now and then etc. etc.
I wonder why Apple and Google are in luck, and why so many are switching from Nokia to producers that actually doesn't turn their backs on their customers...
I second Raven's opinion.
Why isn't the Droid/Milestone, for example, in the multimedia consumer category? It has:
- a truly gorgeous 3.7" WVGA transflective screen
- one of the loudest speaker I've ever encountered
- better MP4 support than any Nokia phone (e.g. it plays the VGA version of the Phones Show)
- a xvid/divx player that even supports the elusive matroska video (mkv) video format (yxflash)
- several excellent podcasting apps (doggcatcher and beyondpod, to name two), which are capable of resuming an interrupted download without ending up with a corrupt file
- official Pandora, Last.fm, and Spotify clients
- for UK residents only, a iPlayer app (beebplayer)
What more could one ask for?
Unregistered wrote:Nokia lacks updates!
The Droid/Milestone, N900, iPhone etc are all dead ducks for me, because for my needs they are all all just too large. For me, pocketability is fundamentally important, and if a phone does most jobs brilliantly, it's still no good if it's a pain in the ass to carry constantly. The beauty of Nokia is that they still make pocketable devices. That's the reason I carry one, no manufacturer makes a phone that small that is as well featured.
As for the 3GS camera, a lot of bollocks is being talked about its low light performance. In flash range it loses, but in low light for subjects that are *beyond the range of the flash* it's brilliant. My friends have them and at theatre lighting levels, shows and gigs and they can achieve reasonable pictures, but no Nokia or flash phone can compete. So where it matters (i.e. in situations other than a load of silly party face close-ups) it wins out.
Seven categories. Of course they are all biased towards 'All about Symbian's' best loved handsets. Create a category that a particular phone will fit and then add that phone, aka N97.
What about the punter who wants a small light handset, say less than 90grams, that will hold all his music tracks; a phone that can compete with the small ipod but at the same time have all the features of a bigger Symbian s60 phone.
What category does a phone like that fit into?
I think the Nokia 5630 is Nokia's best handset. It is small, light and is full Symbian s60 phone and has more features than the 5800. Any company can build a brick and cram it with features; Nokia has the balance right with the 5630 music xpress.
I think 'All about Symbiam' is becoming 'All about smartphone.'
rvirga wrote:Hear, hear. I've run into that problem with the Nokia 5800, and then again with the Samsung i8910. In fairness, it's Symbian that lacks updates, not Nokia. It's the same story for non-Nokia Symbian phones. Apparently the explanation is that the OS, as released by the Symbian Foundation, is in a very raw state and requires heavy customization by the phone manufacturer (Nokia, Samsung or SE), who is then unwilling to do the same work all over again when a newer version of the OS is released. Incidentally, this is also the reason why there isn't a Symbian analogue to Android's Google Experience program.
That's simply not true. Nokia 5800xm went through 7 updates from V10 to V31 in 10 months. That is truly brilliant support for a low cost entry level device.
As for Google Experience, where can I get one......vapourware still. Apparently there is a Nexus coming but no-one knows when exactly. You are correct, there is no Symbian analogy to something that still doesn't exist. I will be giving it a wide berth because the Google cloud lock-in thing just doesn't appeal.
Non Google Android phones get the same treatment as Symbian get, the HTCs get SenseUI, the Motorola gets Blur etc.
Unregistered wrote:That's simply not true. Nokia 5800xm went through 7 updates from V10 to V31 in 10 months. That is truly brilliant support for a low cost entry level device.
As for Google Experience, where can I get one......vapourware still.
rvirga wrote:What a bunch of BS. I don't care about the number of updates, I care about what new features they bring. Nokia can take a firmware, increase the version number, and re-release it, and that would certainly counted by you as an "update", but what new would bring to the table? Nothing. Btw, taking some old firmware and re-release it with a new version number is basically what Nokia just did with v35 for the N95 and N82. What amazing features did these 7 updates bring? Kinetic scrolling? Nope. A better homescreen, something the 5800 is in dire need of? Nope. An update to the web browser, so that I can finally browse the ArsTechnica forums? Nope.
Do you even know what Google Experience means? The Droid is a GE phone. The HTC G1/Dream is a GE phone. Whenever you see "with Google" in the back, that's a Google Experience phone. The G1/Dream was originally released with Android 1.0, and then received official updates to 1.1, 1.5, and 1.6. And now, according to T-mobile officials, it will get 2.0. It's not just a handful of bugfixes, it's a lot of new features. With Symbian, not only you can't update to the next major OS release, you can't even upgrade to the next feature pack!
Droid is GE? What a disappointment then. New OS releases are OK, but regardless of OS an original iPhone is still 2G only. I'd rather have a new phone than a ropey battered old one.
As for BS, you have a very large cattle ranch churning it out by the ton. The 5800 is a cheap entry level phone and you could buy 3 cheap phones as they are released and still have money left over from what you would pay for a iSlab, a Droid or a G1. It is simply BS to compare an entry level phone to ones 3 times the price. I notice you feel the need to drag in other phones to the discussion, probably a sign that your argument is lame. As if a sign were needed.