In All About Symbian Insight 101 (AAS Podcast 165), we round up the weeks news including updates to Ovi Suite, Samsung's 32 GB microSD card announcement, firmware updates for the 5800, N86, E72 and E75 and the release of Betalab's Gig Finder. We also discuss the UI concept proposal from Nokia for Symbian^4, before Ewan gives us some concluding thoughts on the X6. You can listen to AAS Insight 101 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Read on in the full article.
Ovi Suite will have do something amazing to get me back using it, I can run MFE to sort out my calendar and contacts and then plug in a USB cable to sort out my music before the old Ovi Suite even got started.
Backup... ERM... Well... OK so I do before I do a firmware update but all my plans to do it regularly go out the window after a while.
N96 to the rescue... Need I say more?
S4 sounds interesting but don't we need to get on with it before its all out of date at release?
I would love to try Gig finder but as it does not run on S60 3rd... Not all of us like touch screens.
I do love Ewans approach to reviews but why is it that every Nokia device you talk of, you talk of buggy firmware?
"why is it that every Nokia device you talk of, you talk of buggy firmware?"
Errmm...... [FX: looks in manufacturer's direction]
Somebody could, please, to tell me where the calendar is on OVI Suite? If it isn't there, how can it be close to be ready?
Steve, as a software tester myself I was particularly drawn by the discussion around the quality of the firmware on released devices. I have a few ideas circulating in my head about why this might be, but I'm not going to share them as it's probably insider knowledge. What I will say though is that stability of the initial offering and the length of the test, debug, fix cycle are major factors in quality.
Also, it may be stating the obvious, but in order to remove an issue from software it must be reproducible. That is the debugging engineer needs to be able to consistently make the same failure happen in order to analyse the cause. I know you're going to insist that you are able to find consistently reproducible issues, and if this is the case then the only thing I can think of is that the manufacturers QA teams didn't come across it. All the crashes that I've encountered with my Satio for example have been practically random - and I've never had the media player crash in the scenario you describe even once in over a month of ownership.
(an example of an issue that is reproducible would the problem with the search application taking inordinate amounts of time to complete even the simplest search)
What's with the 2 different numbers for the same podcast? Is that really necessary?
Explanation: It's due to the fact we do podcasts interview occasionally, which full outisde the Insight series...
But really its a legacy thing, it would probably be a good idea to unify these numbers at some point, and just brand all podcasts as AAS Insight... even when they are not the discussion based ones.
@Brendan Donegan
So the legacy problems in SF are too complex to unravel and recreate and decide wheter it's the device or an OS issues and would it be better to start again from the ground up creating a stable OS maybe with a single device in mind for it 😃 ?
On a serious note the casual acceptance of instability by the Symbian world isn't I think helping the cause. The harm it does amongst "normobs" or as one myself-ish could be called "Customers" is huge at a time when it is being compared to other systems. It's not SF's fault but it is to be decried. Particularly as the UI is being compared very unfavourably to use.
"It's a complicated to use and it keeps crashing" Hmmmmmmmmmmmm
Whenever Steve or Rafe talking something meaningful, he jumped all the time in between and talking something else regardless of subject.Even at one point Steve asked to Rafe about his opinion and Ewan started to speak, I call it, "Manner-less" and "Rude"