I am migrating the blog from b2evolution to Wordpress, meaning no new posts will be published here.
The posts here, along with all comments, will gradually be copied over to the new site.
The Nokia N8 was finally supposed to be released at the end of this month, but now Unwiredview.com reports that it has been delayed, once again, until October.
There is no doubt the Nokia N8 will be a very important device for Nokia, but not because of its specs and what it will bring to the smartphone market, not even because of Symbian^3, but because it will be Nokia's opportunity to prove that they really can deliver when they set their mind to it. As such, it is arguably the most important device Nokia has ever released to date.
As I wrote a while back now, a firmware update was provided by Nokia for the E72, which was available to me only a few days later and which I then immediately installed.
I have used the phone now for several weeks with the updated firmware, and I think that I can safely draw some definitive conclusions not only about the bugs that I reported here and the firmware update, but also provide some overall impressions of the E72.
I have just looked at Apple's presentation of the iPad and am genuinely surprised, and disappointed by Apple's new "revolutionary" and "awesome" product. It reminds me of Palm's Foleo in more than one way.
The Palm Pre was released over 6 months ago now, yet Palm still doesn't sell unlocked Pres on their website. Instead, their only goal seem to be to hook up and sell their phones with only one carrier, and ignore the rest of the potential market (read: "the rest of the planet").
Those of you who have read some of my other posts probably know at this point that I am not very impressed by the iPhone in its current incarnation. But what would it take for me to actually consider buying an iPhone?
During my trip to Madrid, Spain, I had the chance to play around with the Palm Pre for a while (yes, I try out phones even on my vacation if given the opportunity!), and here are some of the impressions I was left with.
As many of you probably know, Nokia released a firmware update for the E72 this week, going from version 21.024 to 22.007. I have not been able to install the new version since it is not available for my region yet. But I did some searching and found a couple of persons claiming that they had noticed some improvement with Bluetooth headsets, though they did not seem overly excited either, which could indicate that the issue is far from resolved.
As soon as I get my hands on that update, and I am checking for it daily, I'll install it and test the BT performance.
UPDATE:
I have now reported on the update provided by Nokia.
So after a loooong holiday break it is nice to be back again!
During these past weeks there have been plenty of rumors, news and even THAT launch we all saw coming based on the many leaks prior to it, so there will be a lot of stuff to cover. In other words, great circumstances to start a new year, and a new decade for us mobile geeks!
Today a number of upcoming HTC devices were leaked, both Android and Windows Mobile. These are presumably all the phones that will be released by HTC by the summer of 2010.
I have read several comments where people criticize this new WM lineup, stating that they are too low-end and uninspiring; judging by some of the comments, some seem to have expected the successor to the HD2 already.
I beg to differ.
*********
UPDATE:
I have now reported on the firmware update provided by Nokia, and general impressions of the E72 after 3 months of use.
*********
I mentioned in my "preview" of the E72 that opening and switching between programs was slow, partly due to the animations, and that I would not buy one until that was sorted out.
Well, I read that the animations could be disabled, so I tried that and sure enough all the lag completely disappeared.
Thus, I now own an E72.
It is a great device, but I have discovered a few problems with the the current version of the firmware, some of them quite serious.
Over at PDA247 they raised a question I have often pondered on: what does "smartphone" actually mean?
The simple answer, for me, is that a smartphone is a device that has phone capabilities and that provides some/a reasonable degree of PC functionality.
I also had the opportunity to try the HTC HD2 the other day.
I won't provide any details of it, as there are plenty of excellent online reviews available already.
I will say though that the rave reviews it has received are well deserved. If I were interested in a touch screen device then the HD2 would be my choice, hands down. The only potentially negative thing that can be said about it is the size, but if you can live with that then the HD2 is, right now, the touch screen device that "rules them all".
As I mentioned in my previous post I am interested in the new Nokia E72.
Well yesterday I had the chance to play around with it for a good 20-25 min, and here are my first impressions.
OK, picture this.
You are at the office. You leave your desk for a minute and have left your S60 powered Symbian smartphone on the desk. At that moment an alarm/notification goes off, it can be your alarm-app or your calendar, it doesn't matter which.
Now tell me what's wrong with that picture?
During the end of Palm OS's Garnet's existence, it was [rightfully] criticized for not being able to run several applications at the same time. Of course it was not as if Palm did not want to add application multitasking to its phones/PDAs, it was simply a limitation of the OS: Palm OS was never designed to run multiple apps at once.
Then comes the iPhone, which can't multitask either. And all of sudden it not an issue anymore. Some people even go as far as to state that it is actually a good thing, as they do not need to manually close down apps! In other words, what wasn't good enough 5 years ago is now, for some people, the best thing since bread came sliced.
How's that for hypocrisy! Or maybe it is just ignorance... or living in denial....
These are the 5 apps I always install on my WM devices, and without which my phone simply is not complete:
The advances in the last 10 years of handheld computing have been quite staggering. We have gone from, in the case of the Palm Vx which was the device at the turn of the last century, a black and white 160x160px screen, a 20 Mhz processor and 8 MB of memory, to 480x800px color screens, 1 Ghz processors and up to 32 GB(!) of internal memory.
I don't get BlackBerry.
OK, I do.
Well sort of.
The killer feature of BlackBerry is obviously push email. That goes without saying. And as such it is of great utility for professional use (where "professional" = "for use in a work environment"). So for people whose lives revolve around real-time email, BlackBerry is an "option" (as opposed to "solution").
So far so good.
I have always stated that the majority of iPhone users are people who have previously used a feature phone, hence the huge wow-factor among its users.
Android is like one of those prodigy kids (or in Google's case, adolescents) that can play the piano at the age of 5: as impressive as they play you know they are not at a professional level just yet but that it is only a matter of time until they get there. It is not a question of "if", but "when".
Symbian is the OS that arguably generates the least buzz these days (WM 6.5 certainly hasn't received rave reviews, but at least it gets *some* reviews). Ever since they decided to go open source under the Symbian Foundation very little, if anything, has materialized from a consumer's point of view.
I remember when Palm presented the Pre back in Jan '09. The impression it left was thoroughly positive, which was a combination of the looong wait for the replacement to PalmOS and certainly because the features and the UI presented that day looked genuinely good.
XML Feeds
Recent comments