In our latest AAS podcast, Insight 105, Steve and Ewan discuss the news and announcements from Barcelona, including the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro, Symbian^3, Skype for 5th Edition, Nokia's Maemo/Moblin deal, Windows Phone 7 Series Pocket Pro Mobile (or something like that) and anything else which we thought of interest and relevance.
Read on in the full article.
Nokias trend has been that Internet tablets gets symbians future specs first.
That said, I bet N98 or so, will have A8 and 256mb Ram...
Now if that's going to happen, I bet couple of enthusiasts starts whining, where's Snapdragon and so on...
I see it that A8 is enough. Mobile power talk is too much going to PC world talk, that you have to have 666Ghz processor and so on, when 666Mhz does its job well enough.
I hope a really great Nokia phone (N97 replacement) will be available before HTC Desire. If not, HTC/Android it is. I will probably miss only one thing - Gravity.
I've been saying that gravity should be a full sutie of services including a nice HTML email client. how many apps would he sell if he included that?
Heh, but you do realise gravity is as awesome as it is simply because it's constantly being improved! But yeah it would be awesome to see more stuff coming from its maker.
Great podcast guys, really enjoyed listening to this episode. I posted up on Twitter a while back asking my followers what would they like a Symbian device completely built by @janole, and the feedback was very positive.
I am actually glad that the Symbian^3 interface still retains some tradition and looks like it might be usuable 'offline'. Especially the new Windows Phone 7 ( or whatever it is called) looks highly interesting to me as a geek, but I have to wonder what the use case would be for people who don't do twitter, facebook or online gaming.
It all boils down to the question - shouldn't a phone/mobile computer be also useful for the non-techaddicts and without an expansive data flatrate?
"Cue Terminator music", 2010 was the year it started ...... the U.I. wars.
Well actually it's been going on for awhile, but this year I think it matters more when making a choice for a new phone than ever.
Last year we had :
WebOS
Windows 6.5
Symbian^1 ( 3rd/5th )
iPhone OS 3.0
Android
Rim OS
and to a lesser extent Maemo.
Not forgetting all the proprietary feature phone UI's/OS's ( S40, Brew, etc )
And this year we have :
Windows 7
Bada
Meego
Symbian^3 and Symbian^4
Maybe to much choice for Software Developers ? or maybe a wider choice of OS's will provide more freedom and less competition ( Apples app store is nice, but it's getting a little cluttered, and can be quite hard to see the wheat from the chaff. )
It'll be interesting at the end of 2011 ( When my N97 Mini's contract is up ), which UI/OS's are still "alive".
Ohh and Data paging on Symbian^3 sounds alot like a page file system ( ie. Virtual memory ), which would make sense as Maemo has Virtual Memory.
Writable Data Paging is what Windows calls "Virtual Memory" I believe.
Pages of RAM are paged out to mass storage when not currently needed. (Its how N900 can claim to have 1GB ram when in fact i believe it has 256mb of real ram)
"Windows Phone 7 Series Pocket Pro Mobile (or something like that)"
WP7. Simples.
WDP is *like*, but not the same as Virtual Memory. It's more suited to mobile devices which use flash memory - as flash wears down with each write. Paging as done by desktop operating systems can be a little bit agressive in more demanding use-cases so the implementation details are a bit different.
It works the same as Demand Paging, where executables that are not actively being used are 'paged out' to a swap area on the embedded memory (that would be your internal drive on the N97, or some other larger memory area). This free's up space in the RAM for applications that are being used. We all know that Symbian is prone to out of memory errors, but if you consider how little RAM some of them have (what is it, 128Mb on the 5800/N97?) this is impressive. In Steve's phone showdown he says that the N1 has 200Mb of RAM free to begin with. Great, but that means it's still using 250% more RAM than Symbian.
Demand paging was chosen to be implemented first because it offers a performance improvement as well, since only the code that needs to be used is loaded, whereas before a lot more would have been. Data paging can actually severely decrease performance, just as virtual memory can. Hopefully it shouldn't be too apparent.
So the long and the short of it is that out of memory issues should be a lot rarer now. Although the trade off as always will be reduced performance instead.
Happy multitasking! 😊