All About Symbian - News Headlines

News Headlines - Miscellaneous

Pages: [1] « 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 . 10 . 11 . 12 . 13 » [50]

The Nokia X6 unboxed and pecked apart

Whenever Ewan mentions that he's 'unboxing' something, we trust him to produce something that's "different". In this case it's the new capacitive-screened, music-focussed Nokia X6 smartphone which gets the treatment in a special video, embedded below. And it seems that a few mm of plastic on the X6's side has really gotten Ewan's goat. More from him on the X6 in due course.

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous at 10:06 GMT, Jan 3rd || 27 Comments

The Symbian Phone of the Decade

I asked an eclectic selection of 20 luminaries, bloggers and power users from the Symbian ecosystem: "Which is the Symbian-powered smartphone of the Decade? Which one was most significant, the most memorable, the most game-changing and the most loved?" Here are their answers, for your interest and amusement - and yes, a clear winner emerged...

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous, Industry, Editorial Thoughts, Events at 9:59 GMT, Dec 31st || 48 Comments

Pitching my smartphone recommendations

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?

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous, Links of Interest at 8:40 GMT, Dec 28th || 49 Comments

How to: Know how much power each component of your smartphone uses

It's all very well listening to advice on ways to cut down the power used by your smartphone, but have you ever seen the power savings quantified? Can you put numbers to the various techniques and settings? You can now, with my handy guide. Although testing was on a Nokia N96, the findings should apply to any Symbian-powered smartphone.

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous at 14:34 GMT, Dec 24th || 9 Comments

The Samsung i8910 HD to get full kinetic update

Samsung has officially announced a big new firmware update for its i8910 HD, bringing faster web browsing, faster multimedia access and, most desired of all, full Symbian^2/N97-style kinetic scrolling in all dialogs and screens. See below for the press release text. The bad news? You'll have to wait until next month to get it, via PC Studio update.

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous at 17:56 GMT, Dec 23rd || 13 Comments

Vodafone data free for all from Dec 25th for the rest of the year!

Vodafone UK customers (PAYG and monthly) apparently all get free data from Christmas Day to New Years Day - yes, it's only 50p a day, but still a handy little stocking filler from the big V? And got to be handy for all those people unwrapping Vodafone-branded phones and wanting to try them out for free....

# Posted by Steve in Miscellaneous, Industry at 15:38 GMT, Dec 22nd || 8 Comments

From iPhone to N97 mini? An opinion from the other side!

As an experiment, I lent my Nokia N97 mini to All About iPhone's Matt Radford, to see what he thought of the device and its interface, coming from a staunch iPhone background. Embedded below is my ten minute catch-up interview with him, for your interest. A fuller textual report from Matt is in the works over Christmas, pudding and festivities permitting!

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous at 14:51 GMT, Dec 22nd || 30 Comments

30 secs vs 30 minutes, and Bluetooth 4 with Wibree now official

As you wind down for Christmas and New Year, a chance to clear some Links of Interest from my inbox. The ever insightful Tomi Ahonen, as part of a rant against smartphones not taking over from PCs, makes some interesting observations about 30 second tasks versus 30 minute ones. Only a short piece and worth reading. And the Bluetooth SIG has formally adopted the new Bluetooth 4 spec, (rolling in Nokia's Wibree work), meaning that ultra low power wireless communications between all our devices is getting ever closer. Quote from the press release below.

# Posted by Steve in Miscellaneous, Links of Interest at 10:24 GMT, Dec 21st || 2 Comments

Top Ten Things Nokia could have done with their London Nokia Store

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... Can you add to the list? What did the Apple store do right and Nokia do wrong? (and you're not allowed to say 'Sell iPhones'...)

# Posted by Steve in Miscellaneous, Editorial Thoughts, Events at 14:46 GMT, Dec 15th || 22 Comments

How to: use Google Mobile to replace a dozen other applications

It's all very well having huge screens, tens of thousands of applications and even virtual and physical qwerty keyboards, but there's plenty you can do without typing a single character using Google's humble new Mobile App, using voice recognition on a vanilla, cheap S60 3rd Edition phone. Here are a few ideas - you might be very surprised!

# Posted by Steve in Miscellaneous, Editorial Thoughts at 18:21 GMT, Dec 14th || 9 Comments

The Nokia 5530 gets a v20 update

There are plenty of reports of firmware updates for Nokia smartphones over the last few days from various world regions, watch this space for more. New today (screengrab below) is v20.0.080 for the Nokia 5530 Xpress Music (you know, the smallest S60 5th Edition one), weighing in at 140MB via Nokia Software Update and rolling out Over The Air as I write this. All these Nokia devices should preserve all data, apps and settings, but an extra sync/backup might be a good idea, as usual?

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous at 9:18 GMT, Dec 14th || 17 Comments

Symbian's Right to Reply to the industry - I interview Lee Williams

With Symbian taking a right royal bashing in the tech industry gossip columns in recent months, I was determined to get Symbian's side of the story. Heading to their HQ in London, I collared Executive Director Lee Williams for a 20 minute interview, putting over my (and your questions). Here's the interview, transcribed in full (grab a coffee first). And, if you prefer, embedded below is a condensed 9 minute video version, forming the lion's share of my Phones Show programme 97.

# Posted by Steve in Miscellaneous, Industry at 19:58 GMT, Dec 10th || 18 Comments

Nokia flagship stores update

Just a quick note about the widespread reporting of Nokia's intent to close the three flagship stores (in London, New York and Chicago) - e.g. Chris's analysis here. Rafe is investigating the story behind Nokia's strategy, so watch this space for his report. In the meantime, yes, I agree that the flagship stores were about more than just making a profit and it's a shame to see them go. But, putting them into perspective, Nokia has pointed out that have (ahem) 600,000 other relevant retail outlets around the world.

# Posted by Steve in Miscellaneous, Links of Interest at 10:04 GMT, Dec 10th || 30 Comments

Looking around Orange France's home of the future

So what do you do when you're one of the targets of the network operators in France? This week I saw round the technology labs at Orange France to see a few minutes into the future. Under the guidance of Communications Director Eric Barilland, the “Orange Apartment” was my home for a few hours. Read on....

# Posted by Ewan in Miscellaneous, Events at 7:47 GMT, Dec 9th || 0 Comments

The Forgotten Sync

There's a nice rant by Ricky Cadden here, referring to Unohtaneet Sync but meaning Ovi Sync, the SyncML-based system that syncs your Contacts, Calendar and Notes up to Nokia's servers in the cloud. The 'Unohtaneet' bit means 'Forgotten' in Finnish, in case you hadn't twigged, and Ricky handily rants about several aspects of this key Ovi service which seems to have been left trailing by Nokia over the last year or so. Attention needed, Nokia, methinks.

# Posted by Steve in Miscellaneous, Links of Interest at 12:59 GMT, Dec 7th || 1 Comment

Samsung i8910 HD: Miscellaneous Musings

I'm repeatedly called a Nokia 'fanboy' in various comment threads by a small but determined set of Samsung i8910 HD-owning zealots*, and I'd like to respond with my own objective thoughts on the state of this Symbian flagship. Read on for what's good and bad about the i8910 HD (Omnia HD in some markets), along with a number of relevant links for further reading.

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous, Editorial Thoughts at 8:30 GMT, Dec 6th || 51 Comments

The PsiXpda debuts

Not Symbian, but hopefully of interest to any ex-Psion or ex-Nokia Communicator users, it seems the general form factor has been revived, with a new startup, PsiXpda, with photo below, offering a clamshell high spec, QWERTY-driven part-PDA, part-laptop. And, impressively, far from being vapourware, it's available next week. See below for links and details.

# Posted by Steve in Miscellaneous, Links of Interest at 19:34 GMT, Dec 4th || 25 Comments

On cue, the Sony Ericsson Satio gets an update, to "R1C"

The Sony Ericsson Satio has received its first public firmware update, to version R1CA037 (from R1Bxxxx), which was released via Sony Ericsson Update Service (involving a Windows utility) in the last 24 hours. It's a 106MB update and addresses a litany of stability issues, including non-responsive touchscreen, media playback freezes, sub-par speaker sound and erratic camera. I'll be trying it over the weekend and will report back on the difference it makes. Comments most welcome from others who have applied this update.

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous at 12:19 GMT, Dec 4th || 39 Comments

Ovi Store client gets an update

Nokia's Ovi Store client just got itself an update, to v1.05 (436), with smoother operation and (doubtless) a few bug fixes. If your 'old' client is recent enough then you should be prompted to auto-update, otherwise zap it and re-download from store.ovi.com or Download! (depending on device).

# Posted by Steve in Software, Miscellaneous at 11:25 GMT, Dec 4th || 6 Comments

How to: Control music and audio on your touchscreen phone without touching it

One of the big selling points about the original Nokia N95, N86 and 5730 XpressMusic (among others) has been that they have hardware music controls. So, while pocketed, or while in another application, or even with eyes closed in bed at night, you can still skip music tracks, pause podcasts, and so on. But with the new breed of touchscreen phones, you're out of luck in this department. Or are you? From (arguably) the "AAS dept of the bleedin' obvious", see my How to: Control music and audio on your touchscreen phone without touching it.

# Posted by Steve in Hardware, Miscellaneous at 8:56 GMT, Dec 4th || 11 Comments