Archive for the ‘ Symbian ’ Category
Probably flowing out of Nokia’s deal with Microsoft, Nokia has started the rebranding of its Ovi products (store, music, maps, etc) to Nokia Services. Good move I say. I never got the Ovi brand, and the company’s brand value has always been in the name Nokia.
So, after one week my Nokia E7 starting acting up. It didn’t freeze completely, but the home screen did. I could still get into the menus but could not start most apps. Soft reset made no difference. I couldn’t do a hard reset via the Settings menu or via dialling *7730#. The three button hard reset also didn’t work. I couldn’t get it connected to my pc as the pc wouldn’t see the usb connection. This left me with one solution only, take it back to Incredible Connection, from whom I bought it 7 days ago. And guess what, they swapped it, no questions asked, as it was within the 10 day period. Now I have a new one, and touch wood, it has been behaving very nicely. The E7 really is an excellent phone.
If you have been following my blog you know that I have not posted in a long time. Partly because I got a bit bored with what was happening in the mobile world. In addition I have been using an iPhone 4 and that is so good that I started thinking we should simply all use iPhones. Why bother using anything else? There is no Android phone available today that really matches let alone surpasses, the iPhone. But that was yesterday. Today is a new day. Today is my first day with the new Nokia E7.
Yes, I know Symbian is not nearly as good as iOS or Android, and yes I know I have slagged off the N8 in previous posts. But man the E7 is an awesome piece of hardware. Forget about Apple, forget about HTC, forget about Samsung, forget about Motorola, forget about SonyE. Those okes build boring phones. Nokia’s hardware design rules. The hardware is so good that it makes up for the software. And I don’t know what Nokia has done to achieve it, but Symbian runs and feels better on the E7 than the N8.
I bought mine at Incredible Connection (yes it is freely available in SA) and as soon as the sales person removed the phone from its box, I desired it. It is large and sleek and shiny in an understated classy way thanks to the aluminium casing. The edges are round and smooth, which makes a welcome change from the sharp iPhone 4 edges. The 4 inch screen, an AMOLED capacitive touch screen with Nokia’s ClearBlack technology, is beautifully bright with deep colours, and the 4 inch size hits the sweet spot for me. The 3-5 inches of the N8 is too small for me, ditto for the iPhone’s screen. You can get a 4.3 inch screen on some Androids these days but that results in too big a phone for my liking. 4 inches is perfect. You will notice the difference when you read a PDF using the bundled Adobe PDF reader. On the E7 you can read a page without having to scroll from left to right, while on the N8 the smaller screen size means you have to zoom and scroll, which makes it a very frustrating experience.
The E7 has 5 stylish buttons, the usual power button on the top, a volume rocker switch on the right, the menu key on the front face, a camera button and the screen lock slider button on the left. The slider button has gained cool features. You can associate specific phone functions with the switch, and if you slide and hold it down for a second or so, the phone’s camera flash light turns on and you can use the phone as a flashlight. Pretty cool.
The camera is flush with the phone, unlike the N8′s one which sticks out. It is an 8MP affair, versus the N8′s 12MP, but 8MP is still industry leading compared with the iPhone and most Androids out there, which tend to use 5MP. The E7 takes good pictures, having a flash is great, and the dedicated camera button is the cherry on top. I see there is some photo and video editing software on the phone also.
When you have finished drooling over the beautifully crafted exterior of the E7, slide it open. Maybe slide is not the right expression, it more likes, jumps open. The screen mechanism is spring loaded and the screen opens up at an angle. The mechanism feels very well made and solid. So does the keyboard it reveals. Nokia has outdone themselves with this keyboard. It is large with 4 rows and well spaced keys. It even has arrow buttons to move the cursor around with. Typing on this phone is joy, and yes I know you can type fast on the iPhone, but you do not, can not, get the physical tactile pleasure offered up by the E7′s keyboard.
And then there is the HDMI output. Very cool. Lets you plug your phone into your TV and play movies from your phone directly on your TV. Of course it is a drag having to copy the movie on to the phone first, so Nokia equipped this phone (and the N8) with USB-on-the-go technology. So don’t copy the movie on to the phone, simply stick a USB memory stick containing the movie into the phone and off you go. When I tried the HDMI movie playing business on the N8 I wasn’t that impressed as the N8 didn’t support enough video formats to my liking, e.g. it couldn’t handle XViD (which my Samsung Galaxy S could by the way). Hopefully the E7′s can do better.
Some other cool hardware features on the E7 include a SIM card slot in the side, non-removable battery, no back panel to slide off, compass, accelerometer, and of course it is a quad band phone, which means it will work pretty much everywhere in the world, even in the US. And of course as you would expect, call quality is good.
Ok, so I guess I can’t ignore the elephant in the room any longer. I have to say something about the software on the phone. As you probably know Nokia has ditched Symbian as its top-end OS in favour of Windows Phone 7, and you can see why. Don’t get me wrong, Symbian is not a bad phone OS – it even has proper multi-tasking – but the interface is old and clunky compared with iOS and Android. And there are few apps, a situation that will worsen now that Nokia has ditched Symbian. For example using the iPhone I can control my Crestron home automation system using an app from Crestron, I can control all the TVs in my house using an app called Plugplayer which connects DLNA compatible media sources to media players. The list goes on. Try finding similar apps that will run on the Nokia. Good luck.
I can’t wait for Nokia to bring out an E7 running Microsoft Windows Phone 7. It will be fantastic. In the meantime, I am using the Symbian E7. I will run the Crestron and Plugplayer apps on my iPad and use my iPhone as an iPod.
The long-awaited E7 is arguably the best looking Nokia ever. And the keyboard is apparently excellent according to those who have used it. The screen is a tilting 4 inch AMOLED with ClearBlack. Having used the 4 inch Samsung Galaxy S I can tell you that the bigger screen size is worth it. Unfortunately this gorgeous piece of hardware will no doubt be let down by the software inside. When the E7 was first announced I was dead set on getting one, but in the meantime I have had a N8 and a C7 and the clunky Symbian interface and sub-standard and out-of-date Symbian apps on these phones have changed my mind. I think you will like the E7 only if you have never owned an iPhone or Android phone.
Anyway, the full text of the press release appears below the picture, courtesy of Engadget. I doubt that South Africa is included in the ‘select markets’, but the Nokia faithful will hope nevertheless.
The press release contains no mention of Lotus Notes Traveler, so stay away if you are a corporate Notes user.
The press release from Nokia:
All-in-one business smartphone, the Nokia E7, arrives in stores
Espoo, Finland – The highly anticipated Nokia E7 will begin arriving in stores in select markets this week, with broader availability building up quickly in several markets.
With its tilting 4 inch ClearBlack display, full qwerty keyboard and a fast access to a wide variety of apps directly on the homescreen, the Nokia E7 is the key to having a successful day in or out of the office. Importantly, the device supports business applications from leading enterprise technology partners including Microsoft and IBM.
Key features of the Nokia E7
- Easy access to private and business email
- Create, edit and share office documents and view PDF files with Adobe Reader
- Fast, secure intranet access with the built-in VPN
- High-resolution photos and HD video with the 8 megapixel camera and dual LED flash
- HDMI connectivity to project files, videos and images onto large screens
- 16 gigabytes of on-board flash memory
- USB-On-The-Go, enabling easy file sharing by connecting a USB stick to the smartphone
For business users, Nokia E7 provides direct, secure and real-time access to email, calendar, contacts, tasks and the corporate directory through Microsoft Exchange servers, as well as Office Communicator Mobile, developed by Microsoft for Nokia smartphones, which brings presence and corporate instant messaging.
Additionally, a wide range of entertainment and social services available on the Nokia E7 make it the perfect off-duty companion, and the Ovi Store offers a wealth of apps such as Bloomberg, Angry Birds and Sports Tracker.
The new arrival offers drive or walk navigation in 80 countries. The latest commercial version of Ovi Maps, available immediately via Ovi Store or Ovi Suite, adds visibility to subways, trams and trains, real-time traffic, safety alerts, visibility to parking and petrol stations, speed limit warnings, and improved search and location sharing capabilities.
According to research firm Canalys, over 33m smartphones running Android were shipped in Q4 2010. This marks the first quarter that Android devices has outsold Nokia’s Symbian phones. What makes this even more remarkable is that a year earlier, in Q4 2009, only 4.7m Android phones were sold. At that point Nokia had 44% of the smartphone market. This has now dropped to an estimated 30.6% compared to 32.9% for Android.
Having used the N8 for the past week I have figured out that there are three reasons, and only three, why you should consider getting Nokia’s new flagship phone. Of course if you already have an N8 you will know what I am talking about.
I raved about the hardware in a previous post, so I am not going to repeat mysefl. Suffice to say that it is a beautifully made phone.
But lets look at the reasons why you should not get one, or why, after only a week, I am no longer using my N8 (It is for sale by the way):
Symbian^3
The latest version of Symbian is better than the previous ones, but is still light years behind the competition (Android and iOS). The user interface is not nearly as slick and polished. It is still clunky in places. You still have to double-press in places and single-press in others. The browser still does not wrap the text to fit the screen when you zoom in. And it is not completely compatible with pre-Symbian^3 versions of third party software. Nor is it completely stable. I had lots of crashes, and after one of the restarts some rapidly changing blue numbers appeared in the top right corner of my screen, and stubbornly refused to leave. Resetting to factory settings got rid of it temporarily only. Eventually I gave up trying to remove the numbers which was ok while holding the phone in portrait mode as the numbers were in the top right corner, but when I flipped to the phone to landscape, the numbers appeared slap bang in the middle of the screen. I got the impression that the N8′s software needed more work.
I hope that MeeGo is going to finally get Nokia’s software to the level of Android and iOS, because Symbian ain’t gonna do it.
Text input
This is one phone that cries out for a qwerty. Yes, I know the E7 is coming. The on-screen keyboard entry is painful. Not nearly in the league of Android or iOS. If you get an N8 you absolutely have to get Swype. There isn’t a version available for the N8, but there is one for the C7. So, login to Ovi store on your PC, set your device to C7, locate Swype, then send the link to your phone. Unfortunately Swype only works in landscape mode on the N8, and the Swype keyboard takes too long to appear when you turn the phone from portrait to landscape, but it is still the best way to enter text.
Software on the phone
I think I have already complained about this in a previous post, but some of the software on the phone is plain crap. Especially the Quickoffice Adobe Reader. I found it impossible to read documents with this software. It is too slow to zoom in or out or scroll, and it doesn’t support kinetic scrolling, which means you have to somehow grab hold of the very thin scroll bars on the side of the image and try to drag them. Good luck with that. And then Quickoffice wanted money from me before it would let me view a Word document. What’s with that?
Social networking
Twittering and Facebooking on older Nokia phones like the N97, was rubbish. You had to resort to third party apps such as Gravity. Symbian^3′s social networking is a major improvement on that. There is now a single app that serves up Twitter and Facebook, which is good, but it provides no notifications of incoming tweets for example. Compare this with any one of a hundred free Twitter apps on the Android market, who will all provide you with background updates and notification, all displayed in the notification bar at the top of the screen on an Android phone. Different topic, but notifications in Symbian^3 is an inconsistent mishmash affair.
Calendar
Yes I know not many N8 users will be interested to know that the calendar does not have the ability to store/display meeting participants. E7 users may be interested in this though.
Nokia Mail
The new mail app is much better than the old built-in messaging app (the latter is still used for SMSs). It serves up reasonable looking HTML format emails, but I had on-going problems in downloading attachments. Sometimes the phone would wait minutes before starting a download.
OK, ok enough already. If you still want an N8, here are the three reasons to consider one:
Camera
The camera kicks ass with 12MP and a Carl Zeiss lens. Half-press the dedicated camera button and it locks the focus. It takes beautiful pictures and it takes them quickly. The only thing it lacks is optical zoom, but then so does every other cellphone camera, except for a nasty LG phone I saw the other day.
HDMI output
You can plug this phone straight into your HDMI equipped TV, which means you can watch videos and even youtube on your tv, streamed from your phone. This is seriously cool. The N8 is home entertainment system! Pity it doesn’t support all the popular video formats. It doesn’t do xvid or divx, go figure. The Samsung Galaxy S does. More about this phone in future posts.
Price
The third and final reason to consider getting an N8, is if you can get for free it may be worth it. If you going to have pay for it though, you can spend your money better.
There you have it, three reasons to get an N8. Actually there is a fourth reason – it is very good for playing games, and I mean 3D games like Need for Speed and Avatar – but I didn’t feel like changing the title of my post.
Did I mention that I bought a Nokia C7 at the same time I bought my N8? Don’t think I did. That’s because I had to send it back after just one day. Actually it worked for exactly 30 minutes after I switched it on for the first time, after which it died. Totally. I pressed all the buttons. Even tried the three finger salute, but to no avail. The beautiful C7 was dead. Hopefully for Nokia mine is the exception. Poor quality is the last thing Nokia needs now.
The built-in email client on the Nokia N8 is good, very good actually, especially in its rendering of HTML format emails. But it is let down by the document viewers on the N8. And this goes for other Nokias and Symbian smartphones in general. Quickoffice on the N8 is good enough for viewing Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, but you have to pay extra money to get it to work properly. And the supplied PDF reader, also from QuickOffice, is a shocker. Instead of using the precious screen real estate to display as much of the document, it uses easily a third of the screen for menu buttons and stuff, with no full screen option. And forget about kinetic scrolling, you are lucky if you get to scroll at all, and when it does move, it jumps in big sections. And it is slow. It is unusable. You could give PDF+ a try, which is available at a price in the Ovi store, but I have been using it for a few days and still have to find one pdf document of mine that it can display properly on the N8. Have emailed the developer so will see what happens with that.
Enter Mobile Documents. This a push email solution for Symbian (also for Android soon I hear) with a difference. The email functionality is similar to Nokia’s mail app, but it is its ability to display documents that sets MobileDocuments apart. It uses its own servers to render the document and streams it to your phone. Viewing is fast a-la-blackberry and document size is not limited to the phone’s capability. To top it off MobileDocuments lets you access and edit your cloud-based documents, e.g. I can access my GoogleDocs documents, edit them and save them back to my Google account.
Check it out. It is in beta at the moment and you can sign up for unlimited free email addresses to be pushed to your phone, including your corporate exchange server emails.
In my previous post I said that the Nokia C7 is a beaut. Well, I received my N8 yesterday, and I have to tell you that the N8 is way better looking. Mine is dark grey, which looks very stylish. The phone is thin and light and easy to hold, all metallic with a beautiful screen. No battery cover a-la iPhone which adds to the sleekness and sense of solidness, and two cool covered slots in the side for the memory card and sim card. No pin needed. With this phone Nokia has once again shown that they know how to build stylish quality devices.
The one design aspect that jars a bit is the protruding camera lens on the back of the phone. It is not really noticeable when holding the phone, but put it down and you immediately see that it lies at an angle. Price you pay for that 12 megapixels I guess. The camera does take great looking pictures – best I have seen on a mobile phone. And the camera’s operation is really easy and feels like a ‘real’ camera if you know what I mean. Half press the dedicated shutter button and the image gets locked in focus – good stuff.
Have I mentioned that the screen looks great. Nokia has somehow made the black seem very black and the colours very colourful. And the response when you press on the screen is also good – very springy if that makes sense with good visual and tactile feedback. I know the N8 doesn’t have the fastest processor on the block, but it responds very snappily. A little bit of lag when loading apps, but on the whole it gives the impression of being fast. And it has a dedicated graphics processor should be fast when playing games as well.
So, a beautiful, well-made handset. In my next post I will get into the N8′s software….
If you think the N8 is good looking you will be blown away by the C7. Launched recently by Nokia with much less fanfare than it did with the N8, the C7 is a sleek looking stainless steel and glass encased phone with a 3.5 inch AMOLED touchscreen. It runs the same Symbian^3 as the N8. Comes with an 8MP camera (12MP on the N8), 8MB storage, three metallic colours and unfortunately no HDMI port. What a beauty.
I heard via the grapevine that someone in the UK has made it into the Guinness World Book of Records for the fastest typing on a mobile phone, using Swype on a Nokia N8.
Swype was recently released via Nokia Beta Labs, but for S60 5th Edition not for Symbian^3/N8. There is a way to get it onto your N8 though, go to store.ovi.mobi/content/58438 with your N8 browser to bypass the Ovi Store device filters and download. Some people are reporting success while others are reporting crashes with Swype on their N8s. I am definitely going to give it a go. Soon as I can find a N8 to buy in South Africa.
The speculation is over. Nokia launched its new flagship qwerty slider the E7 at the Nokia World event. And it is a beauty. They should have called it the Nokia E7 Communicator. Looks good enough to wear the Communicator label. Check the specs:
4 inch tilting AMOLED touch screen. NB the screen is capacitive not resistive. The Finns will have to remove their gloves to operate this screen.
BIG qwerty keyboard
Aluminium body. Going to be lovely to hold.
16GB RAM
1200mAh battery. Would have liked to see a 1500mAh battery as used in the E90, N97, E71, E72.
Quad-band GSM and WCDMA
HDMI port to plug straight into your tv
8MP camera
Runs Symbian 3, which I think is going to be better than most people expect.
Comes bundled with a stack of business software, such Quickoffice Premium, F-Secure Anti-Theft, Mail for Exchange, and most importantly for me with Lotus Notes Traveler.
Should be in shops before the year end.
Nokia also launched the C6 and C7 at the Nokia World. Together with the N8 and the E7 these devices all run Symbian 3. No word of MeeGo.
Rumours of an E7 with a qwerty slider have been doing the rounds for a while now, and with the Nokia World event only one week away, the same rumours are surfacing again, this time with quite real looking pics. Somebody found an XML file on Nokia’s website which appear to confirm that the phone will run Symbian3, with a 640 x 360 display, 8MP camera and a full qwerty keyboard. Essentially an N8 with a downscaled camera and a qwerty keyboard. For the business user. Check the pics below. Am telling you right now, if this is for real, I am definitely getting one. Would love to see Nokia kicking some smartphone butt again. I loved my 9300i, my E90, my E71, and even my E72. Even the N900 has redeeming features. Nokia has always known how to make a good qwerty device. Here’s hoping for another.
By now you may have heard of MeeGo, which is the new OS that Nokia is planning on using as a replacement for Symbian on its top-end phones. It is apparently being developed as a joint venture between Nokia and Intel (?) and is based on Maemo, which you may also have come across if you happen to be one of the unlucky owners of the N900. Seems Nokia has decided to Maemo is not good enough, and MeeGo is the answer. Time will tell. I think they should have bought Palm’s WebOS when it was up for grabs, but anyway, have a look at this video showing what looks like the MeeGo UI on Nokia devices. Looks quite cool.
Check out these pictures of the new Nokia N8 at FinestFones. Nice looking phone. Definitely on my shopping list. Keen to try out the new version of Symbian that this phone runs. 
Apparently SA can expect the sleek Nokia N8 in Q3 2010. I don’t all the specs yet, but what I do know is that it will run Symbian 3 which promises to be proper improvement on the current version running on all of Nokia’s S60 phones. With support for hardware accelerated graphics, multiple home pages, pinch to zoom, etc. The N8 will have a 3.5inch touchscreen, a capacitive one, not the usual resistive one like in the N97. This is a major step in the right direction I think, which will make the Nokia and Symbian significantly more user-friendly and responsive. Anyone who has used an HTC HD2 will attest to the difference a capacitive touchscreen can make. The HD2 is the first, and probably the last, Windows mobile phone with a capacitive screen, and it is a pleasure to use compared to its resistive screen predecessors. The N8 will also have HDMI output which means you can stick it directly into you HD TV and watch Youtube on your TV in HD. It will also have a 12MP camera! The rest of the N8’2 spec will be reasonably high-end including a 680MHz processor, which used to be top-end, but there are already a bunch of phones running 1GHz processors on the market today. The N8 looks pretty cool to me. I hope Symbian 3 handles full HTML format emails. You know what would make the N8 even cooler? A physical qwerty keyboard. So gaze upon this leaked picture of what might turn out to be the qwerty endowed version of the N8: 
I have always been a qwerty man, well at least since qwerty phones became available. I have had many, including Palm Treos, Blackberries, Nokia 9300, E90, E71, E72, N97, HTC TyTn I and II. And now I have the Motorola Milestone, which is the non-US incarnation of the Droid, and I think it may well be the best qwerty phone available today. Let’s take a look at the competition:
Blackberry
All the Blackberries, except the Pearl and the Storm, have qwerty keypads. They generally work well as phones, and the Blackberry signature dish, its push email, is legendary. However, the Blackberry OS’ age is starting to show and smartphone activities such as web browsing, youtubing and tweeting are less than satisfactory on the Blackberry.
HTC
HTC has not produced a qwerty phone in a while. I think their most recent one is the Touch Pro 2 which was released early last year already. If you can remember that far back, it runs the now pretty much defunct Windows Mobile, has a resistive touch screen and 528MHz processor. HTC also produced the G1 which was the first Android phone. A good device but very much first generation Android, while the Droid is 3rd or 4th generation.
Nokia
Nokia has produced many excellent qwerty phones, from the brickish 9500 to the latest and very sexy E72. All very good phones, but boy Symbian is old now and it shows. The internal mail client still cannot handle HTML mails properly. The user interface is clunky. The E72 looks gorgeous until you switch it on. The resistive touch screen on the N97 is junk. The list goes on.
Then there is N900. Doesn’t run Symbian which is good. Instead runs Maemo 5. Not many people has heard of Maemo, but it is an open-source development environment and may be Nokia’s strategy for high-end phones into the future. Maemo looks very promising, with over a 1000 apps available already, but the N900 is very much still a work in progress, and lacks too many features to be a serious contender for the top spot.
Palm
Palm has the Pre and Pixie, and the Plus version of each. The Pre is a portrait slider, which is novel. The keyboard is small but very usable. The WebOS software is a slick and very user friendly platform, arguably the best modern phone OS available today. The appstore is also growing by the day. Ignoring Palm’s financial woes, I’d put the Pre into the second spot after the Droid. Its small screen and keyboard counts against it. Also doesn’t help that the appstore is not available to all users, including yours truly
Motorola
Motorola has one or two other qwerty phones, such as the Devour, but the Droid/Milestone is their flagship, so it is safe to assume that it is their best.
The Droid/Milestone
The first time you clamp eyes on the Droid, I doubt that the words “this is the best qwerty phone in the world today” tumble from your lips. It is quite ugly at first glance, and at second and nth glance to be honest. But use it for a month or two, and you will be impressed. It has a large screen (480 x 854 pixels, 16million colours) making it a pleasure to view web pages and videos on. The screen is a capacitive touchscreen requiring the lightest of touches to interact with. It is fast with a 600MHz ARM Cortex processor. It runs the latest version of Android, namely 2.1, which provides multi-touch, excellent gmail integration, and thousands of apps via the Android market.
So there you have it. The best qwerty smartphone in the world today is the Motorola Droid/Milestone. C’mon HTC I know you can make a better one.
It may not obvious from the E5 moniker, but this cool looking Symbian qwerty is the upgrade to the E72. Looks a bit like a cross between an E72 and a Palm Centro, and will be available in a range of fashionable colours. Looks like it will lose some of the metal in the E72 case in favour of plastic which is a pity, but I guess Nokia is trying to appeal to different market segment with this phone – the younger market looking for a qwerty device to do their facetwittering on.
The phone will run essentially the same software as the current E series, namely Symbian 3rd Edition S60, but with Feature Pack 2 which improves the UI. I have an E72 and call tell you that the Symbian interface is ancient and cumbersome when compared with WebOS, Android et al.
Nokia claims a standby time of up to 29 hours for the E5, which will be brilliant if it achieves this in real life conditions. Pity that Nokia is sticking with the 2.4 inch QVGA screen, which has a resolution that is noticebly lower than its competition such as the Blackberry Bold.
Corporate users of Lotus Notes will be happy to see built-in out-of-the-box support for Lotus Notes Traveler. I use this on my E72 and it works like a charm to sync my corporate emails, calendar and contacts. My corporate IT people tell me that it is also easier to setup and support than Blackberry. Never thought I’d hear such heresy from classic BB supporters.
Together with the E5, Nokia also announced the C3 and C6. The latter looks like a replacement for the N97 with a 3.2 inch touch screen (probably still resistive as the Finns don’t like to take their gloves off), and a landscape slide-out qwerty. 
The C3 will run Symbian S40 which arguably puts it into the feature phone rather than smartphone category. It comes among other in bright pink. 
Check this graph from Business Insider. Tells a story doesn’t it. RIM has been steadily increasing its smartphone market share in the US, mainly by expanding into the consumer market. I have been seeing this strategy here in South Africa as well, with multi-coloured Blackberries heavily advertised on TV and print media, clearly targeting non-business users. The fixed-price surf-all-you-can subscription is a good strategy that is winning many new users.
The graph also shows how badly Microsoft needs Windows Phone 7. Apple has had a strong run but have leveled off recently, maybe because people are waiting for the next OS release. Google’s Android going the right direction also. I guess Symbian has yet to break into the US market, but what can be said about Palm? Or more importantly what can Palm do to reverse the trend? WebOS is excellent, but I think Palm needs better hardware, it needs a killer device. In the meantime it needs to push the Pre/Pixie through as many networks as possible, in as many countries as possible, it needs to spend aggressively on advertising, and of course it needs to open its app store to everyone, not just to US users.
I thought I saw Mark Benford, played by Joseph Fiennes, use a Palm Pre in this week’s episode of Flashforward. Couldn’t be sure as the phone was not displayed prominently enough. Anyone else see it?
If you thought Symbian was dead, think again. Featuring multi-touch gesture support (pinch to zoom that kind of thing), single tap (as opposed to the current Symbian which require double tap in some places), hardware accelerated graphics, HDMI output, multiple home screens, and so on, the OS which still dominates the smartphone market in terms of units sold, is finally catching up. Read all about it at the Symbian Foundation. See below for a concept screenshot of a Symbian 3 homepage. This makeover is long overdue. The first Nokia S3 phones are expected to appear in the 2nd half of 2010. Personally I am looking forward to getting my hands on one. Have long been a fan of Nokia and Symbian.
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