Guest writer Ow Kah Leong reports here on Spotify, the subscription music streaming service, which has opened its virtual doors to extra countries around the world, including Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Mexico, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland. Yet Spotify is not necessarily in the Nokia Store in those countries. Of course not - that would be far too easy. All is not lost though, as Kah writes below.

Ow Kah Leong writes:

In case you're getting caught up with Spotify, see David’s review in 2010. I will not be too detailed, as David did a pretty thorough job. What's new here is the country support and the means of getting the application installed.

The three screen shots below show the installation process. Point the browser to m.spotify.com. Choose the closest Nokia model  to your phone. Obviously, 808 is not listed but N8 works fine for me.

Voila! Spotify is in the house!

One note: Do not use Facebook account to register for your Spotify account. The mobile app does not accept the credentials. So choose a user name and password in the oldfashionioned way. You can always connect your Facebook account later.

Above right is the first screen on launching Spotify. You need to go online for the first time to set up everything. It will let you choose between wifi or mobile data, so no worries over data charges.

The UI is clean and easy to navigate. 5 tabs – Playlist, Search, Play, Home and More – lets you navigate quite easily. Tapping on More and then About tells you this is a 2009 creation It’s a wonder this works at all! 'More' shows you all the settings that you can tweak. Not really a lot.

Home shows you what are the hot tracks at the moment:

Playlists shows you all the playlists that you have set up on your desktop client. Note the playlist below Housemartins. The app doesn’t seem to support Chinese characters. So while the songs can be played, all details won’t show.

Play is actually like Now Playing. Album artwork will show and tap on it gives you more options.

Search allows you to search and then view your results via 3 tabs – Tracks, Albums and Artists:

In conclusion, it’s indeed a wonder that Symbian users can still use this cloud service on the move. The app is pretty comprehensive in functions and is still smooth in operation. Truth to be told, it doesn’t look like a 2009 app. There are a couple of niggles – no support for Chinese characters, the pre-Belle keyboard and it doesn’t function in landscape. The keyboard issue is particularly glaring in Asian markets, where there is a strong following for Chinese artitsts.

But hey, Symbian was meant to be dead. So forget the niggles and load up the songs!

There's a topsy turvy piece over on My Nokia Blog, with regular writer deaconclgi expounding on the good and bad of two weeks with the Nokia 808 PureView. It's fair to say that he was stunned by the camera and very pleased with overall speed and even UI, but that 3G unreliability issues tarnished the fortnight. Was he just unlucky in where he lives or is this sort of network issue now more commonplace? Comments welcome. Personally, I tend to keep my 808 in 2G mode to save power and only flick on 3G when there's something heavyweight to do.

The good first, from deaconclgi's piece:

First and foremost, everyone, everyone, (did I mention everyone) has been impressed with the results from the 41MP Sensor, no really, EVERYONE! Family, friends, coworkers, random people I’ve met, AT&T employees, store manager, people online, have all been blown away by the results!!! Their initial shocked response is a hearty  “NO WAY!!!!!” when they see 41MP Carl Zeiss on the camera hump! When I show them the pictures, either by starting out fully zoomed in to a 38MP photo and saying things like “Look at the accurate colors, you can zoom, see the letters, make out details, blah blah blah” and they are not overly impressed…

I then say this line “Looks pretty good for a phone (downplaying the quality), until you realize….that the picture was taken from…(zooms all the way OUT to show the scene below)”

People have literally been fumbling over themselves in disbelief, grabbing coworkers to come and see the amazing detail. Jaws…..dropped. I came back to the AT&T store for an issue with my wifes data plan and some employee I never met said “you must be that guy with that crazy camera phone, my boss wast JUST talking to me about you, err your phone!!!”  I also demonstrate the lack of noise and the purity of colors and people are won over. Once again…Jaws..of…EVERYONE…dropped…for….days. Of special note is that people respect the Carl Zeiss branding, and that name alone validates the 41MP camera and the sentence “Oh, it’s a Carl Zeiss too!!!” is the second thing heard after “My goodness….41Megapixels!!!!!!” Xenon flash freezing the moments? Look. Click. Captured. Done.

Great stuff, and deaconclgi then goes on to demo the Xenon flash, Rich Recording in video, the incredible screen contrast ratio, and much more.

The experience turned sour when he played with 3.5G data in his area though:

Notice I said “device” and not smart phone. I have never owned any electronic device this unstable. Just as honest as I am about the camera, I am honest about this. No dramatization,  my 808 restarts itself no less than 5 times a day, almost 7 days a week. Granted, it has only happened while using the phone about 3 times a WEEK but when I unlock the phone and see each home screen reloading, I know the phone has restarted itself. The phone has restarted when listening to music, browsing the web, looking at pictures in the gallery or just plain sitting on my desk. I have had to pull the battery about 3 times total over 2 weeks from the phone becoming frozen like a dummy display unit. A special thing that I must say, this is NOT the fault of Symbian so before anyone comes in and cries “Symbian Sucks!!!” it is a known HARDWARE issue.

I honestly, sincerely, almost teary eyed, do not understand how Nokia let these units be sold. It is actually sad, no, really, really sad. It is as if there wasn’t any quality testing on the devices themselves. I’m sorry Nokia but the state of a lot of the 808s out there is heartbreaking and not like the Nokia that we have all come to know and love and admire for industry leading build quality and reliability. If the 808 was a huge success, I believe Nokia would have to issue a recall or face a class action lawsuit. If it wasn’t for the A+++++++++++++++++++++ camera and Rich Recording, owning the 808 would not be recommended to anyone. Harsh, yes, true, definitely for THIS 808 and many others.

Special note, there are 808s that do not suffer the effects of the HSPA bug to the same extremity or at all and I hope that you all do not experience the baffling, sometimes frustrating, game changing instability with your 808. Your usage experience may vary.

 

Interesting stuff,  my 808 has only crashed once in the last month, while I was driving with 3G (though not HSDPA) turned on. Of course, the writer isn't helped by living in the USA (I think), where there's very limited Nokia Care Point availability in terms of fixing what is probably a marginal motherboard capacitor. In the meantime, I think he'd find the 808 completely stable with 3G turned off and relying on EDGE for email/social etc.

You can read on in the full article. Comments welcome.

AntiTheft Sentinel is a simple idea, implemented simply - if someone tries to pick up your phone while the utility is 'activated', they'll trigger the accelerometers and set off the alarm. Is it foolproof? No, but then it's still a deterrent to casual in-office fidders - which is, perhaps, what you're most worried about?

Here's AntiTheft Sentinel in action:

An opening splash screen and then (right) into the default 'Disarmed' pane.

The Settings icon actually just brings up this help/info page, somewhat disappointingly, I'd have expected sensitivity settings, at the very least... (right) tapping 'Activate' initiates a 5 second countdown and then your phone is 'Armed'.

If anyone moves or jogs your Symbian smartphone, the alarm goes off, with flashing red and white and with a siren sound sample playing (on repeat); (right) of course, it's quite easy to knock the utility on the head if your colleague/thief happens to know a little bit about tech!

Of course, there are caveats galore here:

1. the speaker on your phone may not be incredibly loud
2. even if it is loud, a simple finger or palm over the speaker slot and it's more or less silenced
3. even with the alarm sounding, the thief can still press the home key and navigate into apps to look at your data (while the alarm keeps playing in the background)
4. if the miscreant knows anything about smartphones and/or Symbian, they'll try long pressing the 'home' key, whereupon they have a one tap action to close AntiTheft Sentinel
5. if the thief is very careful, it's possible to lift the phone and move it, level, out and away without triggering the accelerometers (I tried)

But I'm being a little picky. The utility is totally free and, while it won't stop someone at a coffee shop running off with your Nokia 808, it may still offer some casual protection around the office, where noise levels are lower and where they're going to be seen. Plus, they can't get far!

You can download AntiTheft Sentinel for free here in the Nokia Store.

We all organise our days differently. Sometimes it's a question of absolute time, which is when daily alarms and Calendar entries get set. And sometimes it's a matter of 'half an hour from now', whether it's exercising or cooking or, indeed, anything else. This latter scheduling exercise is something that's not handled easily by the Symbian built-in apps, which is why the new third party MultiTimer is welcome. It's slick, it works, and unlike other timer apps it handles multiple timers running in parallel, and it could well become another Symbian OS favourite.

Here's MultiTimer in action:

A helpful on-screen hint to get started, in this case setting up a cooking reminder - digits are altered using the large, finger-friendly pad and you can rename each timer as needed with QWERTY input using the default pop-up Symbian keyboard

You can set up as many parallel timers as you need, and each is remembered, even after it has finished, meaning that things you regularly need to time (e.g. "skipping" or "rowing" or, just "egg") are saved for one-tap re-use. There's individual timer control or you can pause or stop all timers with the top-of-screen controls; (right) when a timer is ended, if you have all the options turned on (see below, left), you get MultiTimer sounding a piercing 'beep', plus it comes to the foreground, flashes the screen, and carries on doing so until you manually hit 'close'.

The options menu lets you toggle on and off the various ways in which MultiTimer can act when a timer ends - it's very flexible; (right) a scrolling help screen - I welcome the returning trend in modern applications to have 'Help' on their menus again - not everything's intuitive to everyone!

One caveat about using MultiTimer, or indeed any other application in this genre, is that it can only alert you to the end of a timer period if you keep the app running - it doesn't seem to use any massive resources, but you'll want to 'hide' it or switch away using the phone's 'Home' key to do other things on the device rather than closing it down. If, for any reason, MultiTimer is closed (e.g. if you have to reboot the phone to change a microSD) then your timer status will be lost. The actual timers and their initial delays are saved always, but it'll forget where you got to and start each timer from scratch each time. Hopefully not a huge issue to most.

Recommended. You can download a 'lite' version here in the Nokia Store for free (the 'lite' version doesn't have the range of extra alert types, you just get the beeping, plus the alarm stops after a while) , but to be honest, if you think this is the sort of thing you might need, just buy the full version for £1 instead.

Ah yes, Symbian, the platform that just won't die. Rolling out today are a big set of 'New homescreen widgets' for the Nokia 808 PureView and other Symbian Belle Feature Pack 1 and FP2 smartphones (i.e. the late 2011 and 2012 devices). The new platform widgets include a release version of the (previously beta) Webview, a new form of contact shortcut, a stopwatch, a front-camera 'Mirror' utility, and 'Toggle Flashlight'. More below.

Here's the way the update is announced, in SW Update on each device, a 1MB update rolling out from today:

Note that a restart needed after installation, so make sure you have saved any documents/draft emails or noted any reading positions (etc):

The new items available on the Symbian Belle FP1/FP2 homescreen are:

• Webview widget (as featured most recently here, during its Beta Labs outing), showing a window onto any live web site of your choice. And yes, you can have multiple Webview widgets on multiple pages, if needed - they refresh whenever that homescreen is viewed. The version here is just one minor build on from the last beta version, by the way (21.00 build 35)
• Mirror widget, designed for people to check their faces (etc.), effectively a shortcut to an embedded 'front camera' utility, with QVGA 'capture' (yes, yes, low. The hardware supports VGA on most devices, but for some reason software for the front camera only has access to the lower resolution). Note that this doesn't work on the Nokia 700, as it doesn't have a front facing camera...
• Toggle Flashlight - as it sounds, turns the LED flash light on as a torch - presumably for those who haven't discovered the keylock toggle long press shortcut for this - or who want to get the torch on NOW and not in five seconds time 8-)
• Stopwatch - as it sounds, a quick and useful 'instant stopwatch', with just pause and stop controls
• Contacts Communication - a one-touch way to phone or message a favourite contact - tapping on the body of the thumbnail brings up the contact record in the usual way

(In addition to the above, 'Latest Mail' is possibly new, depending on your device - it was already on my Nokia 700, for example. Data points welcome if this was new to your device, etc.)

Very useful platform additions, and well done to Accenture and Nokia for getting these out the door to the last generation of Symbian devices. I'd expect these to come for the larger band of 2010/2011 Belle Refresh devices too, at some point, I'm sure that's on Accenture's continuing road map for Symbian.

PS. If you see updates for Wi-fi, YouTube and Gallery, note that these have been reported on previously, notably here. Relax, it's all safe to install - just sit back, restart and enjoy the new stability and features in Symbian.

In the second of an occasional tutorial series (here's the first part, looking at a murky scene-made-good taken on the Nokia Lumia 920), I take a recent photo of mine, also shot on a smartphone, in this case the Nokia 808 PureView, and show the quick-fire thought processes that went into creating it. Again, the tutorial is applicable to all phone camera users and again my aim is to get you thinking more when you next want to snap something photogenic. Comments welcome if I've helped and/or succeeded!

The first part in this series tackled this moody steam scene:

For the second part, I wanted to try something a little brighter, helped by Spring arriving in the UK, here's my shot, click it to download the original or enlarge it in your browser:

Not wishing to seem too boastful, but this shot was done in 20 seconds, in one go. In other words, unlike with the steam scene, I didn't think I needed multiple 'takes'. I was in the park with family, saw the great light and super daffodils, crouched down, took the shot and moved on. After a while, you'll develop the same feel for framing and light, hopefully, and you'll instinctively know what will come out well and what won't.

As with the first part in this series, let's take the various aspects of the shot in turn.

Light

In this case we had a patch of flowers in partial shade, with sunny background and a single flower lit by a shaft of sunlight, behind me and to the left. Ancient photographic wisdom says to have the sun in the hemisphere behind you for best results and this definitely applies to phone-shot snaps, since the thin devices we currently sport have very limited protection from the sun's rays creeping into the camera glass and causing unwanted reflections and 'flares' in the final photo.

I was shooting on the Nokia 808 in this case, which is somewhat notorious for not handling very bright spots on an image well (at least not without manual fiddling, e.g. to exposure or scene mode) and there are certainly some very bright spots on the daffodil, but I think I just about got away with it in full 'auto' mode. Having a phone camera with integral HDR would be handy here, I think (though see the section on 'Motion' below).

Position and framing

Obviously, the main subject is the gorgeous flower, but having just this in the centre and not much room for anything else - or having it small in the frame amidst a lot of other floral detail - would be too blatant - or too distracting. You'll often hear about the 'rule of thirds', which I interpret to mean that if the framing of a shot isn't obvious then aim to have the main subject one third the way from left to right (or vice versa) - it's usually evident which way to go (which way is the subject 'facing').

I then crouched down to the same level as the daffodil, so that it would appear with no tilting (as you'd get if snapping from slightly above). To avoid focussing on the centre of the frame, in the background, I focussed on the flower by tapping it explicitly, though I could have done the same on many phones by focussing with the flower at the centre and then reframing the shot before taking the final picture.

Depth of field

Taking macro shots is something that most modern smartphone cameras do well and if you go to extremes (in terms of the difference in distance between the subject and background - or vice versa) then you can even get some 'depth of field' (this is a typical 'bokeh' shot), with the flower here in perfect focus and the background gently blurred. Very artistic.

In fact, because I was using the Nokia 808, I had both good news and bad news to contend with. Its large lens makes depth of field smaller and 'bokeh' easier to obtain, but on the other hand it has issues focussing closer than about 20cm. For the 808-only, the trick is to stay at 20cm, but then use some of the PureView lossless zoom (which runs up to 3x) to appear to get closer. For the shot above, I estimate I was zoomed in by 2x. And no, don't try digital zoom on any other current device!

Motion

The heading might seem strange, given that I was photographing a flower, but in fact motion was a real problem here. Most obviously, flowers are very light and they're always bobbing around to some degree in the breeze - they're rarely still enough to take a 'dead cert' photo. Yes, the shutter speed in good light, for any phone camera, is going to be quite fast, perhaps a hundredth of a second or faster, but if the subject's moving in the wind then there will still be a little motion blur if you look closely.

What with me being a perfectionist, I used the simple trick of getting someone else (in this case my nephew) to hold the stem of the flower, just out of shot, to try and keep it still in the breeze. It still moved slightly, so I also timed the shot for when I sensed there was a small lull in the wind.

Finally, there's the motion of the phone camera too. This was on the Nokia 808, which doesn't have the Lumia 920's Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS), so I had to be careful not to 'jerk' at the shutter key. Happily, I've got quite practised at this by now. And, of course, my body had to be still, so it's always worth standing or sitting as 'stably' as you can, giving yourself the best chance of the camera unit in the phone also ending up shooting from a stationary position.

__________

If all the above thoughts and notes seem over the top or burdensome to you, note that they become second nature once you're more experienced. In practice, I noticed the flower(s), took out my Nokia smartphone, crouched down and (with the help of the extra hand mentioned above) took the shot, taking a total of twenty seconds at most.

Hopefully some of this has given you a few ideas for your next outing with your own trusty camera-equipped smartphone, anyway. Watch this space in a few months time for a third part in this series.

Another day, another Symbian platform update(!) This time it's tiny, though, a mere 3kb (yes, kilobytes) and pitched as a '3G network compatibility fix'. It's not clear whether this was a planned patch to adapt Symbian Belle FP2 to carrier protocols for 2013 or perhaps a software workaround to avoid the 3G glitches some 808s are seeing in weak signal areas.

Here's the patch showing itself (also verified on the Nokia 700, so this isn't an 808-only thing):

You can check your Nokia 808, 700 or 701 for the update by going into SW Update as usual on the menu. Note that a device restart isn't needed.

Data points welcome on whether this improves the 808's stability in areas of low 3G signal. You may remember that Nokia Care Points had been adding a capacitor to the 808's motherboard to cope with some electronic aspect of 3.5G to 3G to 2G transitions, but it's possible that this software includes new timeouts and error handling such that a hardware modification isn't needed.

Comments most welcome, I'd like to get to the bottom of this.

An exciting week, eh? I wonder what Symbian platform updates will arrive tomorrow!...

Yes, yes, this is Google's mapping product and imagery and this isn't an Android site, but thanks to the rather useful Google Maps clients on both Symbian and Windows Phone, everybody can benefit from today's massive Google Street View update, bringing coverage of Hungary and Lesotho (I had to look it up too) and a whopping 350,000 miles of new or updated street imagery. And, as usual, all for free, so thanks Google.

From the Google blog:

Today, we’ve reached 50 countries with the launch of Street View in Hungary and Lesotho and are significantly expanding our coverage in Poland and Romania, among other locations around the world. This is also the largest single update of Street View imagery we’ve ever pushed, including new and updated imagery for nearly 350,000 miles of roads across 14 countries.

Now you can take a virtual stroll through the historic center of Budapest, right along the Danube (the river that carves the city in two). See the Hungarian Parliament building or the famous Chain bridge.

View Larger Map

Budapest, Lánchíd (Chain bridge)

...We’re also refreshing and expanding existing Street View coverage in France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore and Thailand. And, we’ve added new special collections of a host of picturesque spots—using our Street View Trike technology -- that include Portugal’s Pena National Palace, or the Sha Tin Che Kung Temple in Hong Kong or the Kilkenny Castle in Ireland.

View Larger Map

Kilkenny Castle, Ireland

 

Great stuff and all easily accessible and enjoyable using the free Google Maps client for Symbian (out of date in terms of UI but still fully working and downloadable (again, after a brief hiatus) from m.google.com in your web browser (or from here):

On Windows Phone, you can use the gMaps Pro client (recently updated for full Street View navigation) to achieve the same browsing of our planet:

Oops, looks like the Street View car caught the castle during a period of maintenance!

Well done to Google for all the work mapping and photographing the planet, and well done as well for maintaining all of this with an open API that software can hook into, in this case on both Symbian and Windows Phone.

I'm someone who is fascinated by numbers and data points, in this case stats from a well known Symbian developer, Hugo van Kemenade, author of Mobbler, which has been around for all varieties and interfaces of Symbian for years. Meaning that looking at his download numbers and breakdown is very interesting indeed. I wonder if a few other developers might share their numbers too? In the meantime, a little extrapolation brings up charts and stats which will be surprising to many.

Firstly, here's Hugo's own report, based on the device names of app purchasers:

With a second year's worth of download data, it's interesting to see S60 3rd Edition is still going strong.

Figures for the last full month (March 2013):

=============================
11 Symbian Belle models:        28.7%
3 Symbian Anna models:  1.1%
5 Symbian^3 models:     4.6%
12 Symbian^1 models:    30.5%
38 S60 3rd ed. models:  36%
-----------------------------
22 S60 3.2 models:      17.5%
12 S60 3.1 models:      14.9%
4 S60 3.0 models:       3.1%
=============================

Let those figures sink in for a moment. April 2013, well over two years since Symbian itself was effectively canned, almost two thirds of downloads from the Nokia Store are still coming from pre-N8 devices, i.e. resistive touchscreens, stylii, d-pad and keypad-driven candybars, etc.

When I look at the installed base of smartphones, grouped by OS, as I do regularly, I've experimented with charts assuming that sales from just the last three (or two) years should count towards the 'active installed base', i.e. those phones and their users still contributing to the platform and ecosystem by, for example, downloading applications. But, given Hugo's figures, maybe I should even be looking at a four year rolling summation at least? The charts for two and three year summations are in the link above, but for completeness, re-doing my usual spreadsheets but taking this four year rolling summation, gives us:

For the purposes of the 'active installed base' chart above, I think we have to assume that three and four year old iPhones and Android devices are just as likely to still be in use (somewhere). In practice, the Android figures should be significantly less since older Android hardware is physically no longer capable of running newer versions of Google applications (etc) that get pushed out via the Android Play Store. Go on, try using a 2009 or 2010 Android phone now - it'll get filled with app updates from Google and the phone will physically stop working. Whereas using a 2009 or 2010 S60 phone is quite practical, at least for its core functions. So, if anything, the chart above is too generous to Android by up to a couple of hundred million. The platform would still be the most numerous, but by a much smaller margin.

We do, however, based on this prospective four year rolling summation, arrive at interesting conclusions further down the chart:

• As of the start of 2013, there are still as many active Symbian users on the planet as there are iPhone users
    
• There are still ten times as many active Symbian users on the planet as there are Windows Phone users

Of course, I'm not blind to market trends. As always, looking at the installed base doesn't take into account momentum - there are clearly huge numbers of iPhones and Android devices being sold each year and so the trends in the curves above will continue - Windows Phone, Nokia's adopted new 'future proof' platform, will also continue to grow, though active Symbian devices on Planet Earth will continue to be more numerous than active Windows Phones until at least 2015.

The median of Hugo's download numbers seems to be placed somewhere in the S60 5th Edition range, so we're talking 2009-ish - so getting on for four years ago. In fact, if we extrapolate his platform breakdown to the overall Symbian installed base (just over 250 million devices), we might conclude that there are still around 80 million S60 3rd Edition smartphones in active use, many well over three years old and some as old as seven years), plus another 70 million or so active S60 5th Edition devices.

There's a big caveat on all this, of course, in that I'm assuming that Hugo's Mobbler downloads are typical of the whole Symbian application scene. It's entirely possible that his application appealed more to users of older phones, skewing the results. Which is why I'd love to hear from other developers here.

One other very interesting conclusion from Hugo's chart is that it seems that Symbian Anna is almost non-existent now and Symbian^3 showing slight numbers compared to Symbian Belle, showing that Nokia's over-the-air (and Nokia Suite) programme to upgrade all the N8/C7/E7/E6 generation devices to Belle has been a huge success. Many people argue that it's only really geeks that upgrade their device's firmware, but the stats here show that 80% of the total Symbian^3 generation now has Belle installed.

Given how precarious firmware updates were only a few years ago, it seems as if in-place updates really have now matured. Certainly for the N8 or E7 or C7 owner, having now had around four major firmware updates pushed to their devices, for free, with a virtual 100% success rate, their initial investment in their smartphone must seem extremely worthwhile, in terms of sheer value for money.

Ah yes, any excuse to put more bikinis on AAS.... The appallingly cheesily named 'SuperSexyPuzzle' turns out to have slightly more merit than I thought it would, plus you can rest assured that all the ladies pictured do in fact keep their clothes well and truly on. Worth £1? Yes, if you like the classic sliding tile puzzles, and you'll have more fun assembling these than pictures of flower pots or bicycles...

Here's the game in action:

Left and right nudge arrows switch between the 80 or so images, all work and family-safe(ish) - some seem to be scanned in and the issue of copyright did cross my mind once or twice. Still, here we are... The 'Photo Gallery' option lets you browse the original images full-screen, should you want to.

Once underway, the selected photo is scrambled in typical 'Puzzle 15' style (and it really is random, it'll be different every time) and then it's tap to slide in the usual way. And yes, these puzzles are harder than they look. A good ten minutes or so for each one, I'd think. The number of moves taken is shown on the left, but not actually recorded by the game, which is something of a missed opportunity.

The Help icon ('?') brings up the original image, side by side, in case you're not sure what goes where. As usual with these puzzles, the tricky bit is getting the last few bits of the background into place!

As you'll see from the example above, many of the images are resampled at play-time into the square format, resulting in some rather squished ladies. More care should have been taken by the developer to start with squarish images...

And if all the glamour is too much for you, there's a simple numeric version to calm you down...

All sex and no substance? Not quite, though there's plenty more the developer could do here to apply gameplay polish as opposed to nail polish (ahem, I'll get my coat...)

You can buy (again, shame about the name, though it is at least descriptive!) SuperSexyPuzzle for £1 here in the Nokia Store.

Definitely a casual game for the 'Brain Training' fan, Find It Fast sees you scanning an ever changing grid of two digit numbers, trying to pick out the one shown at the top of the screen before your ten second timer runs out. Seems easy at first, but after a few minutes when your eyes are glazing over with the mass of numbers, when your brain hurts and your fingers are complaining as well, you'll find that ten second limit becomes tougher - much tougher...

Here's Find It Fast in action:

Colourful, note the 'Migital' branding, there are prompts when starting to sign into a Migital account and try other games, plus a few Symbian dialogs which are a little offputting (e.g. "Allow access to user data"); still, on with the game, I suggest 'Medium' or 'Hard' if you actually want a challenge.

The number to find is flashed up at the top of the screen and you then have to tap on it within 10 seconds - harder than it looks once your concentration starts to waver... On the 'Hard' level, each grid is completely filled with numbers

Sound effects are minimal and vibration effects are non-existent, leading me to suspect Migital of re-using code from other games here; somewhat annoyingly, the high score table doesn't distinguish between scores at the three difficulty levels, so 255 on Easy is worth as much as 255 on Hard, which doesn't seem fair...

It's fast, cheap and casual, but it will appeal to some, I'm sure. And hey, it's Fun Friday.... You can grab the free version here (presumably with ads) or buy the full game for £1 here in the Nokia Store.

Useful widgets are always popular on AAS and this range of colourful nHomeCalendar widgets should be no exception. Offering a full month's calendar in a single homescreen widget 'slot' does require you to have pretty good eyesight, but it's a nice idea and, of course, tapping the widget brings up the full Calendar, ready for your usual activities. Choose between black, red, green (as shown below) or blue.

Here I'm adding nHomeCalendar Green to my E7 homescreen:

Days which have entries (in any supported calendar) are shown in a red highlight here, so it's easy to see how busy you are. One possible request for a future version would be to have small nudge arrows (or hotspots) at left and right, to nudge the calendar on month by month, but the widget is still very useful as-is. And value for money, of course!

Only one particular nHomeCalendar can be added to each phone, so you can't have it on multiple homescreens unless you go for a different colour for each!

You can download the various nHomeCalendar widgets here (they're all free):

• Green
• Black
• Red (obviously, days with entries have to be marked in a different colour here - green!)
• Blue

IDC has released its traditional quarterly stats on the smartphone world, showing that 216 million devices were sold between January and March 2013, growing by 41.6% from the 152.7 million smartphones shipped a year ago in Q1 2012. Furthermore, for the first time the number of smartphones shipped exceeded the 202 million feature phones shipped in the same quarter.

Samsung, Apple, LG, Huawei, and ZTE make up to the top five smartphone manufacturers, with some of the traditional manufacturers pushed down to lower rankings, as they go through transformation strategies: Sony (6th), BlackBerry (7th), Nokia (8th), HTC (9th). LG's better than expected figures are a result of strong sales of the Nexus 4 and L series product line. The Chinese manufacturers enjoyed strong growth as they expanded outside of their home markets.

From the press release:

"Phone users want computers in their pockets. The days where phones are used primarily to make phone calls and send text messages are quickly fading away," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. "As a result, the balance of smartphone power has shifted to phone makers that are most dependent on smartphones."

"In addition to smartphones displacing feature phones, the other major trend in the industry is the emergence of Chinese companies among the leading smartphone vendors," noted Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC's Mobile Phone team. "A year ago, it was common to see previous market leaders Nokia, BlackBerry (then Research In Motion), and HTC among the top five. While those companies have been in various stages of transformation since, Chinese vendors, including Huawei and ZTE as well as Coolpad and Lenovo, have made significant strides to capture new users with their respective Android smartphones."

Top Five Smartphone Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, Q2 2012 (Units in Millions) 

Smartphone shipments and market share over time

The chart below, based on IDC data, information from manufacturers and our own research, shows smartphone shipments over the last two and half years. The key trend over the last year has been the continued dominance of Samung, the rise of the Chinese manufactuerers, and the broadening of the smartphone manufacturer base (i.e. more companies producing smartphones).

Samsung and Apple are clearly the dominant players in the smartphone space, combined they account for one out of every two smartphones shipped in the last quarter. Samsung alone ships more smartphones that the next four biggest manufacturers combined.

The chart also offers an illustration of the fall in shipments of Nokia, RIM, and HTC. All three were in the top five smartphone manufacturers a year ago, but have since been displaced by Huawei, ZTE, and LG.

The chart below shows the same data, but expressed as smartphone market share, which makes it easier to see relative performance over time.

We're almost exactly a year on from our first hands-on with the Nokia 808 PureView, hailed by me, somewhat tongue in cheek, as Nokia's custom design for me, from my own personal checklist. Insane camera, Xenon flash, replaceable battery, FM transmitter, large OLED screen, deafening speaker, and so on. All present and correct. One year on and, thanks to a brace of updates and third party additions, I find myself just as in love with the 808 now as when I first popped my microSIM card in... 

When the Nokia 808 PureView was first unleashed upon the world, it's fair to say that some parts of its software loadout were missing in action. No, not a better web browser or Social utility, though the faster processor and greater RAM in the 808 did ameliorate these previous annoyances to some degree. I'm talking about the appallingly stripped down Gallery, the absence of Skype, missing music player album art, etc.

In typical Nokia fashion though, and despite the drastic manpower cuts on the Symbian side of the company, we've had a stream of major and minor firmware updates to the device, plus last minute additions to the third party scene that continue to persuade me, even in the face of new smartphones in my world that really impress, like the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, that the Nokia 808 still does everything I need better than anything else in the world. And, judging from some of the comments in recent AAS articles, it does seem as though I'm not alone.

Here then is a rough summary of 12 months of updates and additions to the Nokia 808, as chronicled in these very (web) pages:

• Firmware update rolling in urgent bug fixes
• CuteTube received many updates (e.g. here), bringing a sumptuous YouTube browsing and downloading experience
• Skype re-available for the 808 (though no video calling - sob)
• Big Screen update and more hits
• Firmware update: Belle Feature Pack 2 (a huge update, including a new staggered keyboard with word prediction, a new version of Web, a new lock screen shade system, new widgets, new Music player UI, and much more). Plus associated (separate) updates to Calendar, Nokia Social and Nokia Music
• Twitter and Flickr sharing options arrive for Gallery
• A big Gallery and Camera update (so adding multiselect for sending, deleting and sharing, plus easier settings resets in Camera)
• A number of Dropbox clients appear, summarised here
• Updated world maps and public transport databases made available
• Telephony update
• Evernote client (NoteKeeper) updates, keeping the 808 current with your cloud-based notes
• Several updates to Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, e.g. here, bringing better web browsing
• CoverUp reappears, bringing fixed album art for all local music
• Wifi stability update (apparently some 808s didn't like certain older routers)
• Swype didn't get developed further, but its certificates did get updated, meaning that I for one have started using it in preference to the FP2 keyboard, which I didn't like(!)
• QuasarMX appears, offering gapless playback of music
• Massive updates to Gravity, with more Twitter image previews, Facebook and YouTube module overhauls, compatibility fixes, and more... (link to latest beta)
• New homescreen widgets (Mirror, timer, Webview, etc.)
• 3G networking 'workaround' fix

The list isn't definitive, but I've tried to pick out some highlights. Taken as a whole, on top of the excellent Nokia 808 hardware, the updates present a fairly compelling case for the Nokia 808 PureView as a 2013 smartphone. 

Gravity, the all purpose Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, Foursquare (and more) client; the revamped Gallery

It's true that the screen resolution of Symbian's UI, 360 x 640, is looking low compared to the other top end 2013 flagships and this is perhaps a showstopper for some. It's also true that Web isn't as slick or fast as Chrome, Safari (etc) on iOS and Android. Finally, it's true that there isn't the same choice of games or applications on Symbian - there are apps to do almost anything, but in some cases you haven't got much choice of title.

Three caveats that don't bother me at all. I heard Nokia 808 fan Mark Peters say on a podcast recently that, despite him loving the 808's hardware, Symbian was a "dog's dinner", which I contend is too harsh. It's a mobile operating system from a different age that has been patched up an awful lot, which is fair enough, but it's certainly still very usable in the right hands, as is evidenced by my testimony above and the long list of updates and feature enhancements above.

Of course, at least half the updates above have come from third parties, but this is, if anything, a healthy sign, that there are still developers keen on the platform. The Nokia 808's monster hardware, at least from the perspective of humbler Symbian smartphones, really has been taken on to new heights in the last year, and credit must also go to the few remaining Symbian-facing folk at Nokia and Accenture, keeping the core updates going.

Will the same pace of updates continue throughout 2013? Unlikely, though I don't think we've seen the last of them as yet. Will the Nokia 808 PureView fall out of favour if Nokia puts the same camera technology into a Windows Phone 8 device? I think we might see a few more Symbian die-hards jumping ship at that point.

In the meantime, my 808 takes the best photos and videos, plays the loudest podcasts over the widest range of audio options, runs the best all round social client in the world, in Gravity, and, yes, even lets me browse the web almost as fast as on Android, thanks to Opera Mobile.

A sneak peek at an early PureView testbed - spot the 808 in the making?(!)

Nokia may have designed the 808 as a showcase for the PureView technology. Or it may have designed the phone specifically for me (flattering!) More likely, it was developed as the ultimate Symbian smartphone for everyone reading this. The best of all worlds, as future proof as was possible (given the OS), no compromises. That it made it out the door, given the political climate inside Nokia, was surprising and extremely welcome.

Here's to the ultimate Symbian smartphone then, one year on and better than ever.

With the 'last' new Symbian smartphone now a year old and with Symbian-powered hardware now no longer being sold in shops, Nokia has started simplifying its online support for the platform. Only a small step, but new themes (from the vast majority of creators) won't be published through the Nokia Store after July 1st 2013, we've quoted the official Nokia Publisher email below. Is this a big deal in the grand scheme of things? Not really, though it will annoy independent commercial theme developers, of course, who liked the direct payment system through the Store.

Here's the email that went out to existing theme publishers this morning:

Dear Theme Publishers,

With Nokia's family of Asha and Lumia devices gaining momentum, we have reviewed all developer partner programs at Nokia. Our aim is to ensure sufficient investment and support is being provided to help developers and publishers leverage the growing business opportunity in the Series 40 and Windows Phone platforms. To ensure the highest quality Theme content, we are implementing a Publisher Partner Program from 1st July 2013. Candidates for inclusion in this program are chosen by Nokia and have already been notified. After 1st July only these select partners can publish new Theme content to Nokia Store.

We regret any inconvenience these changes to our content programs may cause and we welcome developers and publishers to work with Nokia to take advantage of the growing opportunity represented by the Series 40 and Windows Phone platforms. Best regards,
Nokia Developer Experience

Themes FAQs:
Is the move to a Publisher Partner Program a sign of a bigger ramp down?
It is the result of an ongoing review or our current programs designed to ensure the best personalization content reaches partners. We have not announced any further changes to our programs.

What will happen to existing content?
All existing content will continue to be available for download and developers and publishers will continue to receive download and revenue reports as well as payouts for
downloads.

Who qualifies for Publisher Partner Program for Themes?
Access to this program will be selective and based on the discretion of Nokia. The goal of program is to ensure wide selection of good quality personalization content for consumers.

If I am not selected to the Publisher Partner Program, can I update my Themes content in Nokia Publish after 1st July 2013?
No. You cannot make any changes to your current content submission. You are welcome to unpublish your content from Nokia Store.

It's perhaps not surprising that small parts of the Symbian ecosystem would start to be pulled down, though do note that there are thousands of themes already in the Store and that all of these (including commercial items) will remain fully available after July 1st. Plus there may be some new themes from big companies that Nokia has selected (though I wouldn't hold my breath here...)

It's also worth noting, of course, that just as in the early days of Symbian, there's far more to add-on software than just the on-device store, it's trivial to download and sideload themes from .sis files sourced from the wider Internet. For newly created free themes after July 1st, users will simply have to look at existing theme download sites. Commercial themes are more complicated, of course, since the Nokia Store made it easy for users to 'pay' - maybe we'll start to see 'donation-ware' themes later this year.

For what it's worth, here's my favourite free Symbian theme, Belly Jean (modelled on the E6!), and (as a good example of what I just said) it sits outside the Nokia Store:

Belly Jean (direct download link)

Never mind our story on how new commercial themes like this won't be possible after July 1st - theme makers will no doubt make hay in the intervening two months, getting some great theme designs into the Nokia Store before the deadline. In this case, Magic Glowry, looking rather resplendent in my screenshots and gorgeous on an AMOLED-screened Symbian Belle device...

From the developer's announcement page:

After a Long Gap,ARX Designs Once Again Proudly Presents a Totally Redefined New Theme for Nokia/Symbian Belle Phones  i.e. “Magic Glowry”

A Theme Which is Redefined to Maximum Possibility to give a New and Fresh look to your Smartphone….
Theme Powered by Classy Transparency,Bright and Vibrant Colors to give a Fresh UI ,Fully Vector Theme(Doesn’t Affect your Phone’s Performance), enriched with Supernova Icon Set-which is totally new and unique,Contains Numerous of 3rd Party Apps Icons to Theme the UI Max. & Much more 

Indeed. Cough. Here's Magic Glowry in place on my Nokia E7. As promised, the elements do rather 'glow', on the AMOLED screen:

Installed and setting as my theme - beautiful, both backdrop and icons!

The artwork is nearly all vector (so speedy), plus there are loads of third party icons included, giving almost all of your app menu a new look...

Music player and Calendar inheriting a slightly new look in terms of gradients, backdrops and elements...

The keyboard is very understated, which is odd, but at least it emphasises the distance between the virtual keys; (right) a beautiful vector shade to the norifications pane....

I only feature themes periodically as a rule, but this one's quite special. Plus I'm going to be doing more theme features as we head up to that July 1st deadline...

You can buy Magic Glowry here in the Nokia Store for £1.50 (in the UK). Not bad at all. 

In the first (seemingly) of a new series over at My Nokia Blog, 'deaconclgi' has highlighted a long unsung hero of Symbian: its file system and File manager ('Files' on newer phones). With iPhones and Windows Phones not having any user accessible file system, and with many Android phones not coming with a file manager at all, it's a timely reminder of how good Symbian/S60 users have had it over the last ten years. Quotes below.

From deaconclgi's piece:

Symbian. A lot of us have been using Symbian for years now and have become accustomed to its features and while some of those features have been duplicated on other platforms, their implementation may be different from on Symbian. For this article, I would like to talk about Symbian’s standard file manager called Files.

File managers are not exclusive to Symbian and have been and are present in some form on other mobile OSes such as Android, Windows MOBILE, Maemo, Meego and the like. The main difference is that the availability of a file manager may vary from device to device using the SAME OS. For example, on Android, manufacturers (Samsung, HTC..)have picked up the slack and now include a file manager in their custom builds of Android but to my knowledge*, (*correct me if Google has now included a file manager in stock Android) Android still lacks a default, built-in, user accessible file manager.

What that means for users of other OSes is that there isn’t a guarantee that they will have a file manager on every device that they buy. The user may have to search and download any of the free or paid file managers. Some people know how to do this and are willing to do this, others are not, while others see no use for a file manager on a phone in the first place. The other scenario is that an OS (iOS, Windows Phone, others) may not have a file manager in the OS at all or have one with so many restrictions that it barely allows you to manage your files. This brings us back to Files, the standard built-in Symbian file manager:

 

Read on in the full article.

Also interesting was the hundreds of comments posted on the article, with a number of people asking the question "Why on earth would you want a file manager in 2013?" In other words, surely each application will pull in the data it needs without any manual intervention? It's a valid point, not least because iOS and Windows Phone manage without a file system at all.

I'd reply with two points:

• every smartphone HAS a file system, that's how computers work - even if the OS hides its inner workings from the user.
• if someone has to ask the question at all then a file manager isn't for them. On the other hand, anyone with any ambitious needs (emulators/utilities/side-loaded apps/extensions, etc.) will be looking for a file manager first and foremost. Two completely different classes of user.

It's also worth noting that, for the really technical user, you can go further and install the freeware X-plore, which allows access to a number of parts of the Symbian file system that 'Files' hides (from novice users).

I already reported on the starting of Alvin Wong's experiment in using the 2008 Nokia E71, running S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the struggle of keeping something so old up and running with 2013 apps and services proved too much and Alvin gave up after six intense days. But his article series (here's the conclusion) has been fascinating and my only question is why he didn't try with the E72 instead, which, although almost as old, had a more advanced version of S60 and far better camera. Ah well, that'll be another article for someone (me?) for another day!

From Alvin's final article part:

Right now, I hear you saying, “So, an iPhone is better than an E71. Thanks, Captain Obvious, for that wonderful insight.” But there was a time when phones like the E71 made a lot of sense and became popular while the iPhone was a niche product at best, one that was ridiculed by many mobile enthusiasts. There was a time when the E71 sat on a store shelf right beside an iPhone, while Android remained in its infancy. As I alluded to in a previous article in the series, the smartphones of today are so far removed from the smartphones we used to have that it never ceases to amaze me how far things have moved along in such a short span of time. The smartphones of the past were voice-centric devices, but the smartphones of today are more web-centric than ever.

Symbian S60 was developed during an era when the mobile web wasn’t available to everyone, and as a result access to the Internet merely existed as an option that users could take advantage of if they really wanted to. The web and the services that exist on it were never a central focus of the platform, and that probably contributed in a big way to the strong US-centric sentiment that S60 was old and outdated; one thing that the iPhone provides is access to all the web services you use in the form of easily-downloaded apps on your homescreen in addition to built-in support for some of these services, while a phone like the E71 has just about zero support for any web service other than email and Flickr out of the box, and no easy or elegant way to augment its built-in functionality even back in 2008 when it was new.

You can read on in the full article, plus see the other parts in the series:

This is the conclusion to a 5-part series exploring whether one can buy a second-hand S60 smartphone for what it would cost to pick up a brand-new Asha feature-phone, and whether it is actually worth the effort to do so. If you’ve missed any of the earlier parts in this series, you can read them by clicking on the appropriate links below:

1. “You won’t last 2 weeks”
2. The days when setting up a smartphone took 8 hours
3. Hitting the limits
4. How can it be this hard to watch a YouTube video?

With regard to my suggestion that the E72 might have made a better experiment/choice, here are some of the improvements made for the later model:

• S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, with hundreds of small improvements, not least in the area of more seamless connectivity
• Full compatibility with the free-forever version of the (Nokia/)Ovi Maps voice-guided satnav solution
• A standard 3.5mm audio out jack, with media control via a borrowed (or bought!) Nseries multimedia headset
• A really rather good 5 megapixel autofocus camera - it may not be Carl Zeiss branded but it still knocks spots off the 5mp cameras in (for example) HTC's smartphones of the same era. Or indeed some units from the current era.

Comments welcome!

Bloomberg reports that Nokia Growth Partners, the venture capital and investment arm, has made an investment in Pelican Imaging, a company which is developing array camera technology solutions for smartphones. This technology, which recently came to wider public attention through the Lytro camera, uses a microlens array to create a light-field camera, also called a 'plenoptic' camera, that can capture 4D light field information about a scene.

This light field information effectively records extra data about the light hitting the camera and allows for additional processing techniques to be applied. For example, depth information can be obtained for every pixel, allowing the focus of an image to be changed after it has been captured (i.e. refocus a photo after capture). It also allows for multiple focus points, scaling and segmenting of images, easier and more sophisticated post-capture manipulation (change backgrounds, apply filters), glare reduction, 3D model creation, and more.

Pelican Imaging's computational array camera system, which has been in development for 5 years, was first discussed in a 2009 press release. In 2011, the company announced it had developed the first prototype, which used an array of 25 lenses. The technology has been refined further and reduced in size, such that the current version is 50% thinner than existing mobile cameras. This characteristic of the camera makes it particularly well suited to smartphones, where the camera module is frequently one of the key determinants in the thickness of a device.

Nokia has a long history of imaging innovation, most recently apparent in its Pureview devices, the 'Nokia 808 Pureview' and 'Nokia Lumia 920', and the investment in Pelican Imaging should be seen as the latest step in a deliberate strategy to focus on imaging as one of Nokia's key innovation pillars, which the company believes will help it differentiate its devices from its competitors.

Nokia has its own in-house imaging experts and has made a number of imaging related acquisitions, most recently picking up Scalado last year, but it also has a long history of external partnerships and investments. The most high profile partnership has been with lens designer Carl Zeiss, but nearly all of Nokia's major imaging innovations have been created as a result of joint projects between Nokia and its suppliers (e.g. EDoF camera modules, Carl Zeiss Optics, N95 sensor, N8 sensor, PureView 808 sensor, HAAC microphones).

While it is still relatively early days for light-field cameras it is clear they do hold considerable promise and Pelican Imaging looks set to be a pioneer. In the Bloomberg article, Nokia Growth Partners' Bo Ilsoe is quoted as saying that array cameras are "on the cusp of being commercialized and Pelican does software for that", before going on to add that "it’s very complicated to do this algorithmically and Pelican is one of the companies that has mastered this technology".
   

Array camera in a Lumia smartphone?

Nokia Growth Partner's investment does not necessarily mean the imminent arrival of a Nokia device with such camera technology included, but does provide a strong hint about the future directions in which Nokia is thinking. In the past, Nokia Growth Partners has invested in other imaging related technology companies, such as Heptagon, which have later gone on to become suppliers for Nokia. While Nokia Growth Partners is run with the goal of achieving positive returns on investments, a strong secondary aim is the support the creation of products and technologies that may have applications in future mobile devices or products (i.e. helping seed new mobile innovations). 

The challenges facing array camera in smartphones are around the processing power requirements for a high number of pixels, the development of the necessary processing algorithms, and the production of any hardware, most notably the optics, in high volumes.

Array cameras require additional processing power because many more pixels are involved than in a single-lens camera and because additional software processing is required. Devices such as Nokia's 808 Pureview, although taking a different approach, do show that it is possible to deal with one billion+ pixels per second with current smartphone processor technology. The challenge around processing software is the key area in which Pelican Imaging has been placing most of its efforts, such that most of the broad scale technical challenges have been solved. The production of hardware in high volumes may be more difficult, but it is notable that this is an area with which Nokia has a great deal of experience, having partnered with multiple companies in the development and production of new mass market hardware components.

I've moaned about Nokia Store issues before - sometimes things gets fixed, sometimes they don't. But it all leaves the average user with a frustrating experience and, often, something that's simply 'stuck' downloading. Is there a recommended way to proceed? Well, not an official way, but see my workarounds below.

There's definitely something unstable about the server software used by the Nokia Store, at least in terms of how it communicates with the on-device client - as someone who does a lot of downloading and installing in my activities for All About Symbian, I'd estimate that 30% of all my downloads/installs fail in some way. Armed with a few strategies, everything installs in the end, but if I were an average user than I'd be tearing my hair out. Let's see if we can save some of that hair...

Download stalls

This is common and seems due to a communications (flow control) bug between the client and Nokia's downloads server. An application starts downloading and then just.... stops. You can tap on the pause control all you like. You may even tap through and get to see a 'resume' button. It rarely does any good though. The install is frozen and, worse, any other application downloads/installs you have queued up behind it will stay queued (as shown below).

1. tap the 'home' icon
2. tap the 'X' icon to exit the Nokia Store client
3. wait 10 seconds (so that the Store client really has been fully unloaded from RAM)
4. start Nokia Store again
5. go to the right hand 'My stuff' tab

That's usually enough for the Nokia Store client to attempt to restart the download process from scratch and (usually) succeed, as shown above. If not, rinse and repeat all this.

Download failed

This happens for around 10% of all app downloads. There's a prompt to 'download file again', which can get annoying after the fifth or tenth attempt...

1. tap 'Download' again.

If this doesn't work then try again in half an hour - one possible cause of this error is due to heavy demand at Nokia's end. Another cause is a flow control problem when downloading large files - the 100MB+ games in the Store have often taken half a dozen attempts to download successfully.

Qt Smart Installer fails

Just as common, for Qt apps, is that the so-called 'Smart Installer' fails (eventually) with a pop-up message saying to find and tap on 'Smart Installer' in the app menu, in order to continue the install process.

1. tap Smart Installer - sometimes this does work
2. if not, look in the Nokia Store for another Qt app you wanted to download anyway and install that (instead)
3. assuming that this then goes OK, you'll almost certainly find that the state of Qt's Smart Installer has been reset sufficiently for your original install to then finish. Start the download/install process again.

Acceptable?

If all this seems like a huge amount of hassle to simply download and install an application, something that would happen on iOS or Android in under ten seconds, then you'd be right. It's not clear whether most of the blame should be assigned to the QML-written Store client, to Nokia's servers, to Qt or to Nokia itself, generally.

The situation is quite clearly unacceptable, though now that Nokia don't sell Symbian smartphones any more, it's perhaps unrealistic to expect any great manpower to be thrown at the problems. And even then, you have to wonder how many Symbian-literate programmers are still available to work on the multiple issues.

However, Nokia did promise support 'until 2016' and, to my mind, running an application store and managing things so that it works at a basic level quite clearly comes under the umbrella term of 'support'. If any Nokians, especially from the Store team, are reading this then I'd welcome some official comment or action.