So you’ve picked up your new Symbian smartphone for Christmas, grabbed one in the sales (the New Year tradition seems to start on Boxing Day here in the UK), or been handed one as a gift. Where to go next? Well whether you’re new to the platform or just need a little reminder, there’s a lot of Symbian out there on the web, so over the remains of the turkey and roast potatoes, we’ve gathered together 101 links to help you explore the world of Symbian and smartphones.
Maybe I'm turning into a sentimental old codger, but despite Nokia's efforts with the recent E7 (and N97 before it), the majority of modern smartphones are turning into either large screened tablets or tiny-screened thumb qwerty affairs, with a side branch of low end numeric key-driven devices, effectively for the feature phone market. It occurs to me that five of the very best form factors of the last decade, all of which debuted on Symbian, have been (sadly) forgotten, despite their proven advantages. A quirk of providence? Or negligence on behalf of the manufacturers? Here are the form factors which I'd like to see revived, with modern software and services on-board.
You know what it’s like, when there’s a problem that you’ve already solved, but you can't quite bring yourself to use the solution? I think that’s the situation that Nokia find themselves in now. With a wave of new games arriving, those offering multiplayer over the internet are hitting the same problems. Nokia could solve this with some legacy code, but will they?
Over on the Nokia Conversations blog, they’ve looked at the history of their “Snake” game. Right from the first bundled version on the Nokia 6110 handset through to Vanixon’s Snake game on the Ovi Store. It’s a nice article that I suspect gets to where the author wanted (i.e. let’s link to a game on the Store) but really does show just how much Nokia’s eye is no longer on the Snake. When you look closer, the winding path of the snake seems to follow Nokia's smartphone strategy.
It used to be just receiving a call, or picking up an email via a push SMS (good old email-to-text gateways back in the nineties). Now, to impress people with your phone in the pub, you need something a little bit better - and it tends to be a game. So what should your Symbian-powered touchscreen smartphone be ready to show off when called into action? Ewan and I run through the Top Ten contenders...
Ewan Spence looks back with a practised eye on Ten Things that Nokia could have done with their Regent Street flagship store in order to have made it a success...
It's been in every S60 phone since the first 7650 came out of Espoo... and it's still delivering for Nokia. Has Java really saved Nokia, asks Ewan Spence?
Steve Litchfield directly compares speeds of text entry on a range of PDAs and smartphones and draws some conclusions about design and general form factor. [original article 2006, updated 2007 and June 2009]
