Guest writer Stuart Peters provokes thought of the (higher than expected?) worth of a Nokia 808 PureView, 'the ultimate Symbian phone', in 2015. See below for his take on the 808 and a modern approach to use case of the device and its OS, even if it can't be recommended to the masses.

Stuart writes:

The Nokia 808 is the ultimate Symbian phone. It has a 41 megapixel PureView camera and Rich Recording and many other built-in features. However, in these days of app-centric smartphones, it can seem to some like a glorified feature phone. When I do need (modern) 'apps' I have a Blackberry Q5 and it gives me the Android compatibility as well as a physical keyboard. (My Nokia E6 is collecting dust because I have decided to go microSIM for everything.)

Recently, there has been a flood of Nokia 808s available for sale. They are popping up on Amazon and Ebay priced around $200. That price is for a new, unlocked 808. I decided the price was low enough to buy and encouraged my friends and family to take advantage of it. Of course, they asked me: “Why should I buy it? Is the Nokia 808 worth $200?”

Hence this little article!

For some, the camera alone and its accurate imaging, at a price of $5/megapixel, are worth buying. The recently updated maps with offline support allows it to be a standalone GPS. The support of exFAT in the removable microSD allows up to 128 Gigabytes of additional storage now, and more in the future. The FM radio and FM transmitter allow music to be enjoyed any time and any place. The built-in VOIP support enables SIP calls even without a SIM. The ability to share the internet via USB or Bluetooth or Wi-Fi makes it helpful in areas where there is no public Wi-Fi. Sharing audio and video via DLNA and HDMI and component connections makes it an extremely versatile media player.

I see the Nokia 808 and its non cloud-centric design as a benefit. I always take it when I go out on a trip or a vacation and I don’t have to worry about a flood of gibberish coming in to bother me. The people who need to reach me can call and text. Everything else can wait - and I like it that way. If I need to go online then I use my laptop and can connect with the 808 via USB and do whatever I need to do without killing my phone battery.

Could the 808 still be my primary phone? It could because it is almost always with me but then again I carry multiple phones to handle multiple SIMs and to swap them several times a day. (I wish the 808 had easily swappable SIMs, like the N9 or the E7.) It is not dual-SIM so it cannot meet all my needs but at least it has great functionality on whichever SIM I use, roaming or local.

For most people, I cannot recommend the 808 as their primary smartphone. It probably won’t meet their needs. Apps, games and the web are just too ingrained in the smartphone experience. For people who primarily use their phone as a phone without needing many frills, it probably is too expensive. For photography aficionados, I think it is worth it (and I know Steve does) but others might disagree. I am a photography novice so all I know is that my shots look less terrible than before.

All the readers here know the strengths and weaknesses of the Symbian operating system. If they want to get a Nokia 808 at a great price, now may be the best time. Along with the phone, I’ve found some useful accessories also starting to become inexpensive while others, like the Nokia CC-3046 hard case, are impossible to find at any price. I’ll always appreciate Symbian and the 808 because it does most of the things I need a phone to do - as well as doing some things that no other phone can do.

I reported a while back that cuteTube had ceased working because of YouTube's deprecation of its v2 APIs - happily I can now report that the next-gen CuteTube 2 is now available and works fully with YouTube and other video streaming sites. See below for screenshot proof. Existing cuteTube owners can simply upgrade by letting the in-app upgrade download happen and then installing the new client from Files or similar.

Update to the story below: the developer has now put up full documentation and the SIS download on the cuteTube web page!

_______

Most people reading this will already have cuteTube installed, of course. If not, you can get going by grabbing it within AppList. This gets you the old version, but then running it gets you the cuteTube 2 download immediately and automatically. I'm sure that AppList will be updated in due course with cuteTube 2 etc.

Once you have the v2 (.SIS) file downloaded (usually to the root of your mass memory (E:)), tap on it to install as usual. Note that this is a totally rewritten client and will appear as a new/extra icon in your application menu (cuteTube2). Once in place, you can then remove the old version, of course.

The interface is very similar to the cuteTube you've known and loved, but the guts have been rewritten to work with the latest APIs from YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo, along with the possibility of 'plugins', presumably to help cuteTube adapt to future service changes without having to be rewritten again?

Up and running and sorted for 2015 and beyond? cuteTube 2 for Symbian (and Meego)! As usual, you'll need to sign into Google on the first launch, so that the app knows about your YouTube account.

Favourites, subscriptions and playlists (etc.) all work as they should. As does searching for videos...

Search matches and tapping through to a specific video....

You're prompted as to which of the available streams you want to watch. The MP4 one is the best to pick for Symbian phones, of course; (right) the interface also works intelligently in landscape mode.... (and should be fine on the Nokia E6, for example, too..., though I haven't tried it, or indeed the usual cuteTube keyboard shortcuts)

There's also the option to download videos to your phone's storage, which is always handy if you're offline later on a trip.

As with streaming, you get to pick the resolution you want to save the video at.

VEVO and other HDCP encrypted music videos play fine through cuteTube 2, thankfully.

Though, as it turns out, you can't screenshot them playing, since the content is being handled on the fly and can't be grabbed at the OS graphics level. Still, take my word for it, it works!

In this specific group test. I look at capturing high decibel music on a variety of new and classic smartphone cameras, four of which also have OIS to help keep the picture steady too. Add in low light conditions and a dozen factors trying to throw auto-focus out and you have the recipe for a decent multi-device group test. In the ring here were the Nokia 808 PureView, Lumia 1020, Lumia 930, Microsoft 640 XL, Google Nexus 6 and LG G4. Four of the six have OIS, at least three have HAAC microphones, and one has hardware oversampling per frame in real time. Game on!

One of the trickiest bits about testing the video capture capabilities of smartphones under heavy audio load, i.e. at a live music event, is that you usually incur the wrath of the venue staff or security staff, afraid of copyright issues. Then there's the quirkiness of people seeing you pull up to half a dozen smartphones from your pockets one after the other. And the risk of getting mugged on the way out of the building! So you have to pick and choose your events carefully. 

In my case, a local covers band (gigs page here, if you're interested), guaranteed to be pretty loud, with space to film without being pestered and not so territorial about material that they forbid filming. And yes, I'd warned them that I was going to be experimenting with a 'couple' (ahem) of phones. 

I then shot 30 second segments throughout the 45 minute set, alternating smartphones and keeping track of which clip was which, of course. One production note here is that the footage from the Lumia 640 XL and 930, while playing fine on the devices, turned out to be incompatible with my Mac's iMovie software*. These two phone video cameras, though OK, were arguably at the bottom of this group anyway, so you don't miss much by their absence in the compilation - the Lumia 1020's results are much better and fly the flag for Windows Phone here. I do include my comments on the video shot by the 930 and 640 XL below, for your interest.

* this isn't the first time that I've had issues trying to take MP4 video from Windows Phones, I've always said that digital video is something of a black art!

And here's the result, though as usual bear in mind that the quality here (do max the playback window out and also the quality, to 1080p) is after both iMovie's and YouTube's own transcoding, on top of the MP4 encoding used by the phones themselves. But it's enough that you'll get the gist. Oh, and USE HEADPHONES for best effect and evaluation!

As an aid, I've summarised my conclusions in text form below the video.

One note about lighting. The band hadn't set this up very well and the singer's face was permanently in deep shadow. As you'll see above. Very tricky for the phone cameras to capture!

The phones used, then:

Nokia 808 PureView (2012) - mind blowingly good audio. Just stunning, you could film a band with this phone and almost offer the MP4 audio to them to put out as a live recording. The video's very good too, in terms of low noise (the hardware oversamples from the 41MP sensor in real time), though there's no OIS to keep the frame steady and the focus varies a lot if you let the auto-focus struggle with the changing stage lighting. In the final 808 clip above, I manually set focus and this side of things was then much better.

Nokia Lumia 1020 (2013) - good audio, with zero distortion, though not the same presence and fidelity as from the 808. Video's not quite as good either, with all the advantages of oversampling being lost on this Windows Phone version of the PureView sensor, with the result that the frame is noisy. Plua focus is as dodgy if left to its own devices, so you have to set this manually (usually by tapping on a suitable part of the frame). On the other hand, there's OIS to keep the video frame steady and this does work fairly well.

LG G4 (2015) - this is the 'hero' camera for stills, with a f/1.8 aperture that also lets in masses of light when capturing video, as you can see. There's a degree of OIS too, plus focussing is good, though it all comes to a crashing halt because the microphones used just cannot handle high volumes. The distortion in both keft and right channels is quite horrible - in fact, I had to reduce the volume of the G4 clips in the compilation above so as not to cause pain to viewers(!) A great shame, especially in light of the great performance of the other Android flagship here, the Nexus 6.

Microsoft Lumia 640 XL (2015) - audio was decent, with no distortion, though in mono only and without real fidelity. The video was a disappointment though - yes, the room wasn't lit that well, but the performer detail was much darker than it should have been. This might be fixable in software, by the way, so don't write this device off.

Nokia Lumia 930 (2014) - slightly complicated by me using Windows 10 Insiders Preview (but still with Lumia Camera) on it, this was... adequate. The audio was up with the 1020's, the OIS was better, but the frame had quite a bit of digital noise and was (as with the 640 XL) too dark - maybe it's an affectation of Lumia Camera 5 (the common factor between this and the 640 XL, along with neither producing fully compatible MP4s for me)?

Google Nexus 6 (2014) - another top Android flagship, with top notch video capture quality (in theory, its OIS could be used, but I suspect from the results here that it's only enabled for image taking at the moment) and surprisingly excellent audio, albeit in mono (again, this is a software thing and apparently could be patched by Google at some point).

At the risk of annoying table-haters here, I've put (admittedly subjective) scores for all the above into a grid, all initial scores out of 10:

Notes

• I know I'm going to get comments along the lines that I should have got a Samsung Galaxy S6 and iPhone 6 Plus in to join the test. Have you ANY idea how hard it is to get significant groups of hardware together in the same place at the same time and with the right test conditions and without getting intercepted or mugged for the £2000 worth of smartphone in one's pockets?? As always, I can only test what I have to hand and what actually works with my editing environment!
• One of the commenters has suggested that the default audio capture mode of the 1020, i.e. 100Hz bass filtering (designed to cut out wind noise primarily, but also to help tone down bass at concerts), might have an adverse effect on other frequencies. It's debatable but worth a try. Next time I do this sort of test, I'll set audio filtering to 'Off'.

Verdict

With the caveat that it would help to have a tripod or somewhere to steady the phone on, I have to crown the three year old Nokia 808 PureView still the video capture champion, at least in this test, with the Google Nexus 6 just a whisker behind. The 808's lossless zoom also works well in gig capture, I've used it many times, the MP4 files are compatible with everything and the audio is simply out of this world.

The Nexus 6 is a surprise success here, since it's not normally pitched as an imaging/video device. If Google would just enable OIS and stereo capture in a future update (you can do it yourself with a hack) then it would get even closer to the 808 here. In a very close third place is the Lumia 1020, the 808's Windows Phone-tweaked cousin. It suffers a little from the implementation and there's a lot more digital noise in the frame, plus something in the audio chain is hobbled, reducing the sample rate and final audio quality. But still pretty darned good overall and with that same lossless zoom capability, which works, if anything, even better on the 1020 than on the 808.

The 930 and 640 XL video is tarred a little with just not working properly with all my video software (if there's enough interest, I'll upload a sample MP4 or two to the server), but you're not missing much, in that it's just all a little darker and noisier than the 1020. Finally, the LG G4, which produces such stunning images, also grabs more light for video, but suffers massively by the use of cheap microphones by LG in what is supposed to be a flagship.

Andy Hagon will be well known to readers of this site. Partly because he was the guy who rashly sold off his very rare red Nokia 808 PureView. But not to worry, because he bought a replacement white unit and then found a way to change the housing completely, restoring full red 808 ownership. And, with some notes from Andy, you too might want to go 'red'...

From Andy's article:

First job was to simply remove the screws around the outside edge of the device, and then the screws toward the centre which were different types of screws, so it was important not to get the two types mixed up. Then it was just a matter of lifting away the outer casing to reveal the ‘guts’ of the phone (the screen plus the internals).

The thing with replacement shells is that they are almost ready to switch over straightaway, except that not all of the components are included. However, this is obvious once you realise how easy it is to just pry out the various important components like the xenon flash, the 3G/4G antenna, etc., and then all that’s required is to clip or snap them back into their corresponding bays in the new chassis. It might seem daunting, but with a little care and not too much pressure, the things required do come out and away quite easily. Of course, everything is helped along by the soothing voice of Le55ons whose instructions are crystal clear both audibly and visually, so there isn’t a lot of room to make mistakes. Interestingly, the speaker component (just as easily plucked out as shown in the video tutorial) was included in my red chassis, so I’m not too sure why that is the case (excuse the awful pun) but it made things a tad quicker if anything.

That famous xenon flash!

You can read the whole thing here. Andy sets it all up, performs the transplant and then reports back on the finished article. Why not think about a change of colour of your own 808 too? 

Mine is currently white, a colour which, curiously, suits the 808 a lot more than most modern large screened Android phones, in my opinion.

Fahrplan is a third party alternative to Nokia/HERE's Public Transport and has been consistently updated over the last few years, I've done a summary of the changes below. And you can grab it in the AppList Store, of course (where else?!) If you live in a supported country, of course. Still an impressive third party project though.

From the current description in the AppList Store:

A journey planner and timetable application for a lot of train and public transport lines in Europe, USA and Australia.

Fahrplan features:

• Plan a journey from one station/stop to another (with one via station if supported by provider).
• Select type of transportation (depends on provider).
• Real-time timetable information for a station/stop (with direction if supported by provider).
• Find a nearby station based on your GPS location (if supported by provider).
• Add station to favorites for quick access in future.
• Add journey to calendar.

Currently supported providers are:
* Germany (bahn.de) - supports via station and GPS location.
* Germany, Munich (mvv-muenchen.de)
* Austria (oebb.at) - supports via station and GPS location.
* Austria, Salzburg (svv-info.at)
* Denmark (rejseplanen.dk) - supports via station and GPS location.
* Switzerland (sbb.ch) - support via station, timetable with direction and GPS location.
* Norway (reiseinfo.no / nri) - supports GPS location.
* Netherlands / Belgium (9292ov.nl) - supports via station and GPS location.
* Sweden (vasttrafik.se) - supports via station and GPS location.
* Sweden (resrobot.se)
* Ireland (transportforireland.ie) - supports via station.
* Australia, Victoria (ptv.vic.gov.au) - supports via station.
* Australia, Sydney (transportnsw.info) - supports via station.
* USA, SF Bay (511.org) - supports via station.
* Dubai (rta.ae) - supports via station.

Since I last featured Fahrplan here, back in 2012, when it was in the Nokia Store (RIP), here's a changelog up to the current v2.0.26, to whet your appetite:

• Improvements to EFA (Dubai, Ireland, Munich, Victoria, Salzburg, SF Bay, and Sydney) service.
• Improvements to Hafas Binary (bahn.de, and OBB) service.
• 9292ov.nl: Display train number in journey details and timetable, attributes in journey details, distance to a station when searching by coordinates, and walking duration.
• New: Greek translation.
• Display parser short name on main page.
• New: Slovenian translation.
• Fix: Rendering of details page could get borken (occured with MVV, but possible with all backends).
• New services: MVV (Germany, Munich) - supports via station and GPS location, SVV (Austria, Salzburg) - supports via station and GPS location, ResRobot (Sweden) - supports GPS location.
• Service names now follow the same pattern.
• Defunct London service was removed.
• New: Swedish translation.
• Fix: "Earlier" / "Later" was broken in bahn.de service
• New: Improved About screen
• New: Display of announcements for most services.
• New: Display of canceled trains / stops in journey details for bahn.de and öbb.at services.
• New: Display of parallel / alternative trains for bahn.de and öbb.at services.
• New: Display of routing type (i.e., transfer, walk, bike, car; if provided) for bahn.de and öbb.at services.
• New: Display of realtime train information in timetable for sbb.ch service.
• New: Polish translation.
• Fix: Empty entries in journey search results when using "Earlier" / "Later" button.
• Fix: Some stops were displayed with wrong encoding in öbb.at service.
• Fix: "Walk for %2 min" message
• New: Train direction is displayed in journey details for most services.
• New: If available, additional information about the train is displayed in journey details for most services.
• New: Duration of walk is shown for bahn.de.
• New: Information about train cancellation is displayed for bahn.de and öbb.at services.
• Performance improvements for sbb.ch, reiseinfo.no, rejseplanen.dk and 9292ov.nl services.
• öbb.at now uses new protocol which brings performance improvements and uses less traffic.
• Additional info about journey is no longer added to calendar entry if compact format is selected in settings.
• New translations: Romanian, Persian and Dutch.
• Existing translations were updated.
• You can now easily translate Fahrplan into your own language: see link in the About page.
• Real-time delay info is now displayed in journey details for bahn.de.
• Bugfix: Via station was ignored in bahn.de backend.
• New backend: 9292ov.nl.
• More train selection options in rejseplanen.dk backend.
• Defunct and duplicate Sydney backend (131500.com.au) was removed.
• Translations update.
• New backends: ptv.vic.gov.au (Victoria, Australia) - supports via station; Sydney (Australia) - supports via station; SF Bay (SanFrancisco, USA) - supports via station; London (London, United Kingdom) - supports via station; Ireland - supports via station; Dubai - supports via station.
• date and time is now formatted based on the phone language;
• it is now possible to switch between old and new (more compact, introduced in 2.0.14) formats of description in calendar events.
• few small UI improvements.
• A lot of work was done on the backends that fixes bugs and brings some performance and memory usage improvements. In particular, a "Station name is too ambiguous" error which happened with some stations is now gone.
• possibility to select target calendar to add journeys to;
• possibility to select favorite icon position;
• favorites and selected stations are now saved per backend;
• better error reporting for bahn.de backend;
• few small UI improvements.
• new Settings page.
• Removed appbooster for symbian
  
• Added "now" feature to symbian

You can grab Fahrplan in the AppList Store for Symbian, of course.

Hopefully the AppList Store is working out for you all. See here just in case you haven't already got this installed or if this is new to you. Also, if you have custom firmware installed, make sure you tick the option in settings to show 'unsigned' applications, you'll see extra applications!

Written by me over at AAWP about the Lumia 1020, CBD, Xenon and PureView zoom, you won't be surprised to note that all the points made apply equally to the Nokia N8 and 808 PureView, so I thought I'd throw in this link-of-interest. And no, we still don't have anything decent from 2014 or 2015 as yet. Maybe N8, 808 and 1020 owners just form a self-selecting group that's being totally ignored by manufacturers? I despair, I honestly do...

From the conclusion to the article:

As hinted above, the real answer to my 'Why can't we have a camera phone this good in 2015?' is that smartphones have all headed to the middle ground, the compromise, and that a manufacturer would say "If you're fussy enough to need all the above, just take along a proper camera - it'll do an even better job, as it'll have optical zoom and an even brighter flash!"

They're right, of course, that's the obvious solution for the shutterbug on a challenging day out. But am I totally alone to believe in true convergence, that I want my smartphone to completely replace a camera, no matter what the event or conditions? Nokia, with its 808 PureView and then Lumia 1020, managed to get two models out the door which almost perfectly matched this converged need, in 2012 and 2013. But nothing since, and we haven't even smelt a whiff of a Lumia 1030 or similar yet. And Samsung abandoned its "K" line after one model, the K Zoom, again in 2013, so there's nothing elsewhere in the phone world either.

Again, am I a voice crying out in the wilderness here? When someone asks YOU "Wow, where can I get a phone that has a camera like that?", wouldn't it be great to point them towards a shop where the brand new 1040 (or whatever) had just been released?

I do fear that any 1040 in development, with Xenon flash and large sensor again, may have been killed over the last 12 months with all the cuts at Microsoft. Satya (Nadella) and Terry (Myerson) - prove me wrong. Please!

Worth a read of the full article anyway, if you're a Xenon, CBD and AMOLED fan....! You can gloss over the use of a Windows Phone as the example if you wish, all the smartphone imaging points are still valid.

In many ways, the 808 PureView would have done better than the 1020 in the suggested summer fayre use case because of the faster shot to shot time - and my 808 stays fully charged on my desk. Next time out, I think I'll take that - and my SIM card - instead!

In another guest article from Stuart Peters, he runs over some of the software and hardware accessories that keep his Nokia 808 a 'hero' device, even in 2015. What do you think of his picks? Dare you push the 808 this far as well? 

Stuart writes:

The Nokia 808 PureView was released more than 3 years ago (that’s 21 dog years!) As the last stock of that classic are being emptied out of warehouses, the price is now is falling below $150USD in Amazon and eBay. Perhaps this is due to the Nokia Store being closed and the Nokia account no longer working and sellers are trying to sell at any cost. However, we Symbian aficionados should see this as an opportunity. 

How can the phone be relevant for 2015 and beyond? One way to get more value out of the Nokia 808 is by augmenting the out-of-the-box experience by adding hardware accessories and software apps. Since I have encouraged others to get the Nokia 808 I have decided to start using it as my main smartphone. I have found that with the right enhancements it 
can still be a “hero device” that others can be envious of.

Below are curated lists of five apps and accessories I have for my phone. Starting with some of the apps I use to add value to my smartphone:

1. Audio Recorder Pro is a Dictaphone app with some very special features. It uses the Nokia Rich Recording for high fidelity recording of sound. It also allows the recording of voice calls and FM radio.
2. Fring is what I consider Facetime for Symbian. Though it exists on other platforms, I only use for video chatting between Symbian phones. You can download it here.
3. Mobiola Webcam creates a video transmission from your phone’s camera to a computer via USB, WIFI or Bluetooth which can be used as a webcam. It also can stream whatever is displaying on your device’s screen via all the methods mentioned.
4. Voice Inbox is a simple yet elegant on-device answering machine app which can be an alternative to carrier voicemail options.
5. WhatsApp allows the sending of messages, audio, pictures and video to other WhatsApp users. They still support Symbian and are releasing updates via their website.

On the hardware side, here are some of the accessories I use with the Nokia 808 and other Symbian devices:

1. A MicroSDXC card currently allows for up to 200GB and more to be added to your phone. Since the exFAT storage system is supported by Symbian, the maximum will continue to grow as technology advances.
2. A Nokia CA-157 OTG Cable allows for peripherals to be attached to the PureView such as flash drives, keyboards, cameras and other phones.
3. A Nokia CA-75U Video Cable allows for video display though the RCA terminals. It allows backward compatibility to older televisions and monitors.
4. The RetiCAM Smartphone Mount with Grip is a secure way to hold your smartphone to record videos or pictures with or without a tripod.
5. Z:ero digital earphones are the start of a revolution in audio. The USB OTG port sends the digital sound stream to the earphones which use an in-line digital-to-analog converter and amplifier to make high fidelity sound. These work with all Symbian^3 and above smartphones. 

The Nokia 808 might be getting old but it is definitely not obsolete. It can still be a multimedia powerhouse and an audiophile’s dream.

As part of ruthlessly ripping through my Curated Symbian Games Store page, and removing all links to the defunct Nokia/Ovi Store (RIP), I noticed that quite a few previously commercial games are now free in the official replacement (web-based) Opera Symbian Store. For example, all the acclaimed Zingmagic board/strategy titles. Then there are the previously commercial games like Traintiles and Fruit Ninja, now free in the AppList Store. 

Here then is me discovering the Zingmagic 'free' versions in the Opera Mobile Store:

Not sure what 'Lumia Deals' is doing there, but plenty of free games and demos in the Opera Store; (right) all the Zingmagic free games are now in my 808's Games folder...

Here's Chinese Chess and Spades in action. Although each game does ask for an access point, presumably to pull in ads in the past, there don't seem to be any ads now. Did I just not play the games far enough in or are there really no ads anymore? Comments welcome!

Just hit the Store icon on your phone and the Nokia Store should smoothly redirect you - otherwise just use the links below to grab the SISx files?

ZingMagic Chess V
ZingMagic Four in a Line
ZingMagic Hearts
ZingMagic Backgammon Pro V (reviewed here)
ZingMagic HomeRun
ZingMagic Spades
ZingMagic Chinese Chess
ZingMagic Checkers
ZingMagic GoMoku

There are plenty of other examples of commercial titles that are now free, plus others which now come up as free demos (presumably with in-app purchase), in the Opera Store.

Then there's the popular AppList Store for Symbian, which most people reading this will already have installed. Two of the higher profile commercial games now added to its ranks include:

• Traintiles (reviewed here)
  
     
• Fruit Ninja (reviewed here)
   

Shout if you notice any other welcome freebies. I've got a few other candidates in mind that I'll add to this page in due course.

There really has never been a better time to be a gamer if you have a Symbian smartphone.

One of the elements of the Symbian 'experience' that broke recently was the email set-up process, with the shutting down of Nokia's email configuration server. Effectively, if a new user (or an existing Symbian user re-setting up an old device after a reset) tried to set up a new mailbox then only Exchange was offered - if your email host only offered IMAP4 or POP3 then you're now out of luck. It's disappointing that this was turned off before the original '2016' deadline for support, but hey, I've been pointed to a workaround that can be used without relying on external configurators.

(Thanks to Eric, from the Delight team, for the heads-up.)

Essentially, the old way of setting up a new mailbox was to enter your intended email address and then a Cloud-hosted wizard would leap in with the right IMAP/POP3/security settings. But now that the Cloud bit is broken, another way of setting up email is to have a special utility, in this case MailboxCreator, create a dummy email account, from which starting point you can dive into Settings to tweak its configuration manually:

The problem: only Exchange accounts are supported for auto-set-up now that Nokia's configuration server is offline; (right) grab the Mailbox Creator application and install it in the usual way.

Mailbox Creator's certificate is valid until May 2016. If you're reading this after that date then set your phone's date back a year or two and try the installation again! (right) Running this utility from the main application menu results in one simple pop-up, shown here.

Head into your Mail application and you should now see a dummy email account, by default one for Gmail, the most common in use today. Below the account, you'll see Settings, so tap on this and then on the dummy account name. If you're going with Gmail then just edit the email address, name and passwords, etc. as needed. If you're using a different email host then you'll have a few more fields to fill in (e.g. mail server addresses).

Of course, all of this relies on a modicum of technical knowledge by the person setting things up (which is why I haven't spelt out how to navigate Mail's UI - if you can't cope with that then you shouldn't be fiddling around entering mail server URLs, etc!), along with cooperation from an email host in terms of the settings needed, but at least we now have a genuine workaround for the current set-up issues.

You may wish to bookmark this page for future use!

9GAG is a renowned source of funny, ironic and pointed graphics, GIFs and jokes - and now it's available on Symbian, thanks to a new third party client, GagBook. It's not a 100% fill rate for GIFs because of RAM limitations, but most if it worked fine. See the screenshots and links below.

From the AppList description:

GagBook is an unofficial mobile app for 9GAG website, currently available for SailfishOS, MeeGo Harmattan and Symbian.

• Simple, smooth and native UI
• View posts in different sections, eg. hot, trending, fresh, etc
• Full screen view of image with pinch-to-zoom
• Login (with email only) and voting
• View comments for each post
• Save image
• Share post using Harmattan's integrated sharing

Limitation/Known Issues/To Do:
- GagBook may fail to work anytime when 9GAG update their website (if this happens, you will see "error: Unable to parse response")
- Image upload is not supported
- Large image will be stretched down due to hardware limitation
- Some animated GIFs will not play properly due to hardware limitation

Here's GagBook in action:

Settings, including dark and white themes... Plus your login details to 9GAG, needed for many entries which are NSFW (Not Safe For Work)...; (right) a choice of section timelines....

Static jokes and GIFs are easily viewable, along with comments....

Larger images require scrolling on the small Symbian screens, but still work well. Wow to this Batman plot twist, eh?(!)

You can grab it here in AppList.

Hopefully the AppList Store is working out for you all. See here just in case you haven't already got this installed or if this is new to you. Also, if you have custom firmware installed, make sure you tick the option in settings to show 'unsigned' applications, you'll see extra applications!

Guest author Massis Sirapian takes mapping fans of a geeky nature through the process of getting Nokia Maps favourites on a Symbian smartphone to Microsoft Maps on a desktop (Windows 8.1 or 10) - and thence to Windows 10 Mobile potentially, of course. Note that I haven't tried any of this, so I'll refer you to Massis on Twitter if you get stuck!!

Massis writes (and please bear in mind that his native language isn't English, so do get in touch with him if any steps aren't 100% clear!):

The process here is exporting Symbian/Nokia Maps Landmarks, not exactly HERE ones. I had exported my Nokia account landmarks before the Nokia account was retired.

This being said, here's what I do/did:

1. On a Symbian device, LmManager has to be installed. 
2. Launch it, then use options, misc, export. This will export all the landmarks into a .ldb file. With any file explorer, it can then be exported to a PC.
   
    
3. .ldb is a XML file but yet not very legible or usable. I used gpsbabel to convert it
4. I've found out that Microsoft Maps, on Windows 8.1 or 10, only understands decimal coordinates. That is to say N XX.XXXXX W YY.YYYYY .
   Geocachers are used to N XX° XX.XXX, E YY° YY.YYY, but MS are decimal only. So we need to convert the .ldb file. 
5. gpsbabel is used on the command line, and the correct script is : 'gpsbabel -i lmx -f eposlm.ldb -o text,degformat=ddd -F outfile.txt' (eposlm.ldb is the file we saved on the symbian device and copied to the PC. We're saying its format is LMX ; for the output, we want decimal only and a text file. The export file is, in this example, outfile.txt.)

We now have a long list of landmarks, but written in very legible format. The outfile.txt file will contain a list of favourites, formated as follows:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Covent grill                          N51.51131 W0.12319 (30U 699619 5710611)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Pembroke pub                N51.48903 W0.19150 (30U 694975 5707949)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
and so on.

In Microsoft Maps (e.g. in Windows 10 Mobile), we just have to type "N51.51131 W0.12319" in the search field, and it will find it. Press it to add to favourites, as any spot on the map. 

Of course, for addresses, it is easier to type the full address. But when you have some mushrooms spots, cottages in the middle of Finland, etc. in your landmarks, entered as coordinates or saved when on the spot, this allows you to migrate the exact coordinates from Nokia Maps to the new Microsoft Maps (which I believe will take over HERE on Windows 10 and its Mobile SKU).

___________

Thanks, Massis!

Just a quick note to highlight Carthago, a car2go-Moovel app for Symbian, coincidentally updated to version 7.56i today. This 'reestablishes access to car-location maps for existing users'. If you haven't heard of it, see below for the download link. Car2go is described as 'SPONTANEITY ON WHEELS' and involves picking up, driving and leaving public cars in various cities across the world, around 30 at the time of writing.

The Carthago aplication is a practical solution for interfacing with the car2go/moovel booking system. It works worldwide in all 30 cities where car2go/moovel exists. A simple authorisation process only needs to be repeated once every three months for every country Carthago is used in. After this authorisation-process, Carthago will identify the phone’s location (which can also be manually set) and find one or more (1,3,5, all) free/available car2go/moovel cars in the surroundings, and locate them on a zoomable map, take a reservation (and cancel it) when required. It remembers a “home” address if told to, and has quite a few other settings to simplify booking. It is fast and – for whoever knows what car2go is about – more or less self explanatory: just take the time to experiment.

From the product and FAQ page:

The Nokia app that finds the closest available car2go for the selected city.

• Suitable for making reservations
• Shows the current reservation on the map (v.7.54i)
• Current reservation can be cancelled
• Your most recent location is saved automatically
• Optionally set any address manually
• Once authorised for making reservations, your credentials are saved in the app context, nowhere else
• You can verify your authorisation status
• English, German or Dutch user interface
• Automatic detection of new cities
• Parking lots/charging stations with availability
• Various zoom options
• Minor updates preserving your settings available through the options menu without the need to reinstall
• Can NOT be used to open cars

Configurable options:

• Show 1, 2, 3, 5 or all available car2gos
• Select the city
• Set start-up mode
• Maximum zoom level

You can find Carthago, implemented as a Web runtime application for Symbian, here in the Opera Store.

PS. And, by the way please do complain to car2go Customer Relations about their idea of making cars accessible only to people with iPhones and Android-phones instead of the nice blue member cards! 

Sorry folks, no time to delve into mini-reviews/recaps of these applications, but I did want to highlight that they've all been added to the AppList Store for Symbian this week. See below for some relevant application and coverage links.

You can grab FBReader here in AppList. Here's the blurb for it:

FBReader is a free (and ad-free) multi-platform ebook reader.

Supports popular ebook formats: ePub, fb2, mobi, rtf, html, plain text, and a lot of other formats.

Provides access to popular network libraries that contain a large set of ebooks. Download books for free or for a fee. Add your own catalog.

Highly customizable. Choose colors, fonts, page turning animations, dictionaries, bookmarks, etc. to make reading as convenient as you want.

You can grab Situations here in AppList, last covered here. Here's the blurb for it:

Every day, we use our phones to change its behavior. But let your phone do it for you:

- Forgot to switch to silent during meetings?
- Have Music player opened when you connect your headphones.
- Extend phone's battery life when not in use.
- Let your phone reply missed calls with SMS.
- Receive SMS when your kids are leaving school and arriving home.

You can grab QuasarMX here in AppList, last covered here. Here's the blurb for it:

QuasarMX is a fast and convenient audio player optimized for mobile devices.

Features:
* Intuitive swipe user interface
* Fast library overview and filtering
* Supports many formats (MP3, MP4, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, ALAC, etc.).
* Integration of external services like LyricWiki or Last.fm
* Cover Art Downloader

The PRO version offers gapless playback, equalizer, playlist management and many other features.

You can grab Droper here in AppList. Here's the blurb for it:

Droper is a Symbian Dropbox client that allows Dropbox users to access and modify their synced files and folders. It can also be used as a light-weight Dropbox client for desktop platforms like Windows and Linux.

Hopefully the AppList Store is working out for you all. See here just in case you haven't already got this installed or if this is new to you. Also, if you have custom firmware installed, make sure you tick the option in settings to show 'unsigned' applications, you'll see extra applications!

The next time you look at your on-device application store, with a progress bar showing that an update to, say, Photos is taking an outrageous 30 seconds to apply, here's a cautionary data point from a decade ago...

Pedants will argue that the N93 shown was from 2006, not 2005, but I always love for excuses to show off this tech marvel. So excuse the tech license....!

2005

Reading (usually on AAS) that there was a fix for a particular issue I was having with Gallery (Photos), one of the built-in applications on my S60 smartphone, I decided to do something about it:

09:30 Taking the morning off work, I set off for my local Nokia Service Centre (Camberley).

09:55 Arrived, checked in, Pete wasn't too busy and said he could have a look at my phone and check for the new firmware if I left it with him for an hour.

10:00 Went for a walk, bought a pasty and drink, watched the world go by.

10:30 Bored. Bought a magazine to read.

11:00 Popped back into the Centre and Pete had my phone wired up to a heavy duty PC. "Any luck?" I say, hopefully. "Yes, the new firmwares are on Nokia's servers" he says, "but your phone isn't taking the update."

11:15 After four attempts, the phone grudgingly starts to reflash its software.

11:25 "All done", says Pete, "and no charge, since it's in warranty!". Phew.

11:30 My S60 phone all booted up (you can't rush it), I check Gallery (Photos) and yep, all is now well. Oh, and that annoying SMS issue seems to be sorted too. 

12:00 Arrive at work, just in time for lunch. A generally productive morning's effort, I thought.

2015

8:00 I glance at my Lumia 1020 smartphone. "Oh, Photos is working better now! That's good." I set off for work as normal!

______________

It struck me, while watching updates to core system applications stream into a few of my smartphones (in this case a Lumia 1020 and Samsung Galaxy K Zoom), how far we've come. What used to take half a day now happens in the background without us even noticing. The combination of:

1. a working Store/Download system (pioneered by Nokia [badly], successfully realised by Apple in 2008, and now standard on every phone)
2. splitting as much OS functionality as possible, from system applications to service modules, out into a Store for end users to download

Has all meant a massive improvement in how our phones can be more secure, more reliable and generally more up to date. So the next time you watch impatiently as Microsoft Photos or Google Play Services (or similar) trundles across your screen in an outrageously long 30 seconds(!), just pause and remember how things used to be.

Anyone else remember th bad old days?(!)

My last camera phone comparison for over a month, I promise(!), the arrival of the much-praised (in terms of its imaging) Xperia Z5 prompted another comparison across a range of test shots against the classic (Symbian) Nokia 808 PureView and the (Windows 10 Mobile) Nokia Lumia 1020 and Lumia 930. Apologies if you're not interested in camera-centric features (in which case move right along), but (with the very latest iPhone 6s here too) the opportunity was too good to pass up - a genuine 5 way shootout between some of the best camera phones in the world from the last few years.

It's an impressive line-up of candidates, you'd have to agree. The Xperia Z5 shown here is the Compact version, though the camera is the same across the Z5 range (not unlike the way the camera is the same between the imminent Lumia 950 and 950 XL, where users can decide on form factor rather than absolute specifications). The three Nokias are getting long in the tooth, but still put up a good showing, as you'd expect, though the newest devices can't come fast enough, albeit under Microsoft branding now.

After the initial scene set-up, so that you can see the context of any crops, I've included 1:1 crops at a friendly web resolution here, so that you can see any detailed differences between the various photos - it's getting harder as all the devices get better, which is why I keep having to make the test shots challenging. I'll score each out of 10 as we go and then there's the fun of adding up at the end to discover some kind of ranking.

Note that resolution differences mean that the 808, which outputs by default at 5MP after oversampling from a native 34MP (in 16:9), was set to 8MP in its 'Creative' mode, while the Lumia 1020 was driven using a third party app (ProShot) to get it to 12MP mode and the Lumia 930 was driven by the same app to get it to 10MP mode, all oversampled. Meanwhile the Sony Xperia Z5 outputs by default in 8MP after oversampling from a native 20MP, and the iPhone 6s produces native 12MP images. So all are in roughly the same ballpark in terms of detail and resolution, hopefully.

Test 1: Sunny landscape

My standard 'out of window' suburban landscape (sorry if it's boring, but sun has been so rare this last week in the UK that I had to take the 10 minutes that was available!), but with plenty of building and natural detail. Oh, and don't expect much difference, this is the really easy shot!

Here are the crops, in order from top to bottom: Nokia 808 PureView, Lumia 1020, iPhone 6s, Xperia Z5, Lumia 930:

As you might expect with such ideal lighting conditions, there's very little to choose between the different shots, with only minor differences in character, saturation, sharpening, etc, all subjective in terms of what you like in your photos. Personally, I prefer the Lumia 1020 shot above the rest, but it's possible that I'm more attuned to its output after two years of use. All phones do well here, though I'm going to dock the Z5 slightly as I feel it over-exposed the image a little.

Points: Nokia 808: 9; Nokia Lumia 1020: 10; iPhone 6s: 9; Xperia Z5: 8; Lumia 930: 9

Test 2: Sunny macro

An ornament in the sun, under controlled conditions at around 10cm, with painted writing to analyse with theoretically excellent contrast. Here's the overall shot:

Here are the crops, in order from top to bottom: Nokia 808 PureView, Lumia 1020, iPhone 6s, Xperia Z5, Lumia 930:

All three of the Nokia PureView devices struggle here - the 808 most, which had to be taken out to about 30cm and the digital zoom used, in order to be able to focus, the 1020 to about 20cm, and the 930 just about coping at 10cm, but with sub-optimal results. Meanwhile, the iPhone 6s nails the shot, the clarity, the detail, the colours. And the Xperia Z5 isn't far behind. A real spread of scores and results here.

Points: Nokia 808: 5; Nokia Lumia 1020: 4; iPhone 6s: 10; Xperia Z5: 9; Lumia 930: 6

Test 3: Low light, still life

My typical indoor low light test - a radio at around 80cm, lit by a single 10W bulb in a lamp as the only source of light. Here's the overall shot:

Here are the crops, in order from top to bottom: Nokia 808 PureView, Lumia 1020, iPhone 6s, Xperia Z5, Lumia 930:

Low light is, of course, where OIS and PureView oversampling win out - the Lumia 1020 wins this test shot by some way in terms of clarity and detail, with the Nokia 808 and 930 in pursuit. The iPhone 6s does pretty well considering the lack of OIS or other noise-reducing aids, though the Z5 goes out in a direction all its own with the colour cast here, plus it also has the most digital noise.

Points: Nokia 808: 7; Nokia Lumia 1020: 9; iPhone 6s: 6; Xperia Z5: 5; Lumia 930: 8

Test 4: Very low light, landscape

The same suburban shot as in test 1, but at extreme dusk, with very low light - an ultimate test of sensor and optics. Here's the overall shot:

Here are the crops, in order from top to bottom: Nokia 808 PureView, Lumia 1020, iPhone 6s, Xperia Z5, Lumia 930:

OIS should be the clincher here, and it is, with the Z5, 808 and iPhone 6s all having to use shorter exposures in order to keep the photos crisp enough (i.e. free of hand wobble) - the 808 simply can't cope here - perhaps going for too little noise and a 1/10s shot. The iPhone goes for 1/17s and does remarkably well, helped by some digital accelerometer-triggered magic, I suspect (picking a moment when the phone is genuinely still). The Z5 shortens exposure again, to 1/30s and keeps things nice and crisp as a result, but there's not really enough light for its sensor here and the photo is definitely noisier.

Meanwhile the OIS-equipped Lumia 930 gets a crisp shot with very little noise at 1/10s and the Lumia 1020, with its much bigger sensor, manages with an OIS-helped 1/17s shot to achieve astonishing detail and crispness given the extremely low light levels.

Points: Nokia 808: 1; Nokia Lumia 1020: 9; iPhone 6s: 7; Xperia Z5: 6; Lumia 930: 8

Test 5: Down the pub, mock-up!

Never mind ultra-low light, throw in a moving subject as a challenge! OK, without my trademark 'drink and laugh' test, but I got my normob teenager to use each phone in turn to snap me talking animatedly in lowish indoor lighting, with flash, as if down the pub, a very typical end user environment. Here's the overall shot:

Here are slight crops (I didn't go in all the way here - absolutely no one thinks of pub snaps as high art, so pixel purity isn't as important as capturing a moment!), in order from top to bottom: Nokia 808 PureView, Lumia 1020, iPhone 6s, Xperia Z5, Lumia 930:

No surprise that the two phones with proper (Xenon) flash, the Nokia 808 and Lumia 1020, pull off an almost perfect pub photo, with crisp subject and pleasing lighting. But the Xperia Z5 gets closest of the LED flash challengers, with a 1/30s exposure possible, thanks to its relatively large sensor and large aperture - the Z5 photo looks a little artificial, but not offensively so. Meanwhile the iPhone 6s's small sensor struggles to acquire enough light in the 1/20s exposure, so the result is dark and unsatisfying. The Lumia 930 brings up the rear - its 2013 sensor clearly showing its age when combined with mere LED flash.

Points: Nokia 808: 9; Nokia Lumia 1020: 9; iPhone 6s: 5; Xperia Z5: 7; Lumia 930: 3

Verdict

Adding up the points gives us an idea of overall still camera image quality across this wide range of light conditions:

1. Nokia Lumia 1020: 41 pts
2. Apple iPhone 6s: 37 pts
3. Sony Xperia Z5: 35 pts
4. Nokia Lumia 930: 34 pts
5. Nokia 808 PureView: 31 pts

That the once unbeatable Nokia 808, from early 2012, is now in fifth place shows how the world of smartphone imaging has been changing. Larger apertures and Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) now make possible impressive performance in low light away from the in-room Xenon use case. In fact, from personal experience, I'd put in the LG G4 and Samsung Galaxy S6/Note 4/Note 5 cameras up at the same level as the iPhone 6s and Xperia Z5 here. 

All in second place to the Lumia 1020 though, which still seems to be top dog in terms of still imaging prowess, though its start up, focussing and shot to shot times are all a problem if you're in a real hurry, of course. Which is where the likes of the iPhone and Xperia Z5, with far faster processors and phase detection auto-focus, come in. And for the man in the street, the gap in raw quality from these up to the 1020 is probably not worth worrying about for most use cases.

And this all sets the scene for the last hurrah for the ex-Nokia imaging engineers, now working at Microsoft. The Lumia 950 and 950 XL, both running full Windows 10 (Mobile), combine every trick in the book from the devices above (aside from Xenon, though they do have triple LED flash) and should come in right at the top of my next comparison, in December. 

PS. Thanks to MobileFun for the loan of the review iPhone 6s and Clove for the loan of the review Xperia Z5 Compact.

Almost as soon as cameras started to arrive on smartphones (the Nokia 7650 was the first - I still have mine!), bright minds started to wonder if it would be possible to not only snap a scene, but actively zoom the shot before capture (as you would on a standalone camera). Early approaches were terrible, of course, but then we had a succession of interesting approaches, most of which are grouped in the photo below. And, a decade later, in late 2015, is there a consensus, a winner?

(From left to right, staggered - the Nokia 808 PureView (Symbian), the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom (Android), the Nokia Lumia 1020 (Windows Phone), the Nokia N93i (Symbian S60), the Samsung G810 (Symbian S60))

Simply 'zooming' with an old fashioned camera phone means horrible 'blocky' results, of course - we've all seen them. A 2MP (say, this was 2005 or so, after all) camera was 'zoomed' and all that happened was that existing sensor pixel detail was blown up to encompass more than one pixel in the final image, i.e. the zooming process didn't reveal any new image information, it was simply taking pixel level detail and making it larger, warts and all.

Optical part 1

In fact, results were so terrible that most commentators, at the time, simply decried digital zoom as the spawn of the devil and told users to avoid it like the plague. And rightly so, though there's a twist in this tale in recent years, as we'll see below. The first to innovate were Nokia's engineers (a common theme in this smartphone imaging world), with the Nokia N93 and N93i (in the photo above), with a transformer design, based around a huge central barrel, in which was housed a genuine 3x optical zoom and (for the time) a decent sized sensor. The result was sensational 3MP images, with the user zooming in as required before pressing the big circular shutter button. All of a sudden you could capture photos at events (etc.) that weren't previously possible (on a phone).

Samsung had a go too (yes, they used to be in the Symbian world, back in the day), with the G810 shown, building a 3x optical zoom into a more traditional phone body, albeit at the expense of a very thick phone and with a smaller sensor. The G810 never got sold to the mainstream (making mine extremely rare!) but it turned out to be a bit of a lemon because of a characteristic of optical zoom that the N93 also suffered from to a degree. 

The sealed optical zoom module in the Samsung G810, from 2008...

Downsides and the dawn of PureView

You see, as with a typical optical zoom, as the multi-element lens system is tracked in, zooming the image, the amount of light that's allowed in reduces drastically - think of a corridor that's narrowing in aperture, with the result that, when zoomed in, unless you were starting with plenty of light, results were often digitally noisy and unpleasant, especially with 2006/7 sensors. Additionally, the camera units were complex and costly, as you'd expect. Which is why two Finnish engineers at Nokia, on a business trip to Tokyo, came up with the idea of a simpler, part optical (in that we're only talking light rays with real information hitting real sensors), part digital (in that the interface surfaces what's happening with the smaller sensor area being used), zoom system, using a large 41MP sensor and traditional auto-focus optics, but using software to extract the required image, up to 3x zoomed, algorithmically, from the high resolution sensor.

It took a while to perfect the technology though - famously, up to five years, until 2012 before the Nokia 808 'PureView' was ready. Using the existing Symbian platform as a base, a dedicated imaging chip was used to do all the real time oversampling and interpolation that was needed to pull off the zooming trick. And not only for stills but for video too, i.e. mimicking what you'd get if you had optical zoom, except without any reduction in the aperture through which light was needed to arrive. In other words, even when the camera was zoomed by 3x, each sensor pixel in use (effectively the central region of the 41MP sensor) was still receiving just as much light as when no zoom at all was used.

This, along with the physically simpler and more durable optical design, meant that the Nokia 808 PureView became the gold standard in smartphone imaging, and specifically zooming. The following year saw a version of the same camera, slightly slimmed, on a more modern platform, in the shape of the Lumia 1020. Although there were some compromises from the loss of a little sensor real estate (1/1.2" down to 1/1.5") and from the loss of the dedicated imaging processor, the zoom functionality remained. And, in fact, worked even better on the 1020 because of the use of a better sensor technology and the addition of another new element - OIS.

The 1/1.5", 41MP camera module from the Lumia 1020, shown here as is, then the OIS mechanism for adjusting the optics, then a cut-through of the optics stack, and finally the huge sensor, laid bare.

OIS, Optical Image Stabilisation, is even more important when talking about zoom than when considering normal snaps, since when you're zoomed in by 3x, every hand wobble is effectively magnified by the same amount. You can see this by looking at the viewfinder on-screen while zoomed in on the Nokia 808 or N93, for example. And, when shooting video especially, all these wobbles are captured for posterity. OIS means that any device wobbles are compensated for in real time by adjusting the exact angle of the optics, hundreds of times a second - meaning that you can have longer exposure for zoomed stills and that zoomed video footage is beautifully smooth, almost as if shot on a tripod.

Optical part 2

The system worked so well that it has been copied a few times by competitors, though not quite on the same scale - Sony's Xperia Z3 and Z5 range, for example, proclaim 8MP 'supersampled' 'superior' shots from an underlying 20 or 23MP sensor. Samsung though, did return - for the most striking of the products in the group shots here - to experimenting with true optical zoom, though this time round they got round the problems with miniature mechanisms by re-using existing telescopic zoom hardware from their standalone cameras. Even here, Samsung was limited, in its S4 Zoom and K Zoom products, because of the nature of 'optical', in that the zoomed light tunnel was constrained enough that they had to go with a relatively small (by 808 and 1020 standards) 1/2.3" sensor. This ultimately limited the quality of the images in adverse conditions, though the K Zoom in particular was something of a favourite of mine, despite its other, related issues.

You see, in addition to performance problems with optical zoom, there's also the matter, if implemented with a telescopic, multi-part, exposed mechanism, as on the K Zoom shown here, of durability, and specifically dust resistance. You'll notice that the N93 and G810's optical zooms were all contained within a sealed glass environment - the S4 Zoom and K Zoom were vulnerable to dust getting into the optics and onto the sensor - with resulting 'blobs' and shadows creeping into images. Google it - it's a real 'thing' with these devices, sadly.

The Samsung Galaxy K Zoom, shown retracted and extended, besides a Lumia 1020: the physical difference between high resolution software zoom and optical zoom clearly demonstrated

So the high megapixel super-cropping zoom solution from Nokia is the best we've currently got? Just about, it's physically simple and works well, though both the 808 and even the Lumia 1020 are now effectively obsolete, meaning that we're stuck with the 20MP sensors and 2x zoom on the likes of the Lumia 930 and 1520. 

Interpolative zoom

Yet the world and expectations have moved on slightly - whereas a 'pure', and quite possible 3x zoomed image was quite acceptable at 5MP, we're now seeing that resolution on even front facing cameras and most rear facing cameras are up in the 13MP-16MP region. Giving little wiggle room in resolution for any kind of competitive software zooming. But I wanted to give a shout out to a modern image processing technique, as used first properly in the likes of the Galaxy Note 4 (in my tests, though plenty of flagships have followed suit since).

You see, it's already a tough job taking R(ed), G(green) or B(lue) data from adjacent sensor pixels and combining them using a 'Bayer Filter' to produce a meaningful full colour image. There's already a healthy degree of guesswork going on inside the software to make sure that colours and details are as accurate as they can be - and most top phone cameras now do an amazing job. But the latest algorithms go further, not only Bayer filtering but also interpolating detail between the sub-pixels when required (e.g. when digital zooming). So on a 16MP flagship camera, a user can now use digital zoom by 2x and the end result is cleaner and more finely detailed than we have any reason to suspect. Yes, a lot of the data at pixel level in the final JPG is actually 'made up', i.e. pure guesswork, but the software is now so clever that the eye and brain are fooled into thinking that zoom magic really is happening.

Just a side note: beyond simply making your distant subject seem 'bigger', zooming has other benefits, whichever technology is being used:

• You can see better what you're shooting on the phone screen
• The algorithms in the phone Camera software can better focus
• Ditto for getting a better light reading for the subject and auto-adjusting exposure and shutter speed

The purist in me would rather have genuine optical zoom, but I accept the physical limitations. Next in line, I'd rather have the 41MP PureView zoom in a durable, light-friendly solid state form, yet I accept that non manufacturer is currently doing this. And they're not bothering because of my last point above - superfast imaging chips and super-clever software are regularly producing zoomed rabbits out of hats on phones like the iPhone 6 and Galaxy S6 ranges. 

The future

Next up is the Lumia 950 range, of course, from Microsoft, with 20MP sensors but 'next generation' oversampling/OIS and PureView zoom. I'm expecting 2x true lossless zoom into the sensor and then another 2x interpolated zoom in the chipset and its software. Giving, overall, a genuinely useable 4x zoom yet in a phone body that's less than 9mm thick. And that's stunning. It's been a fascinating journey, hasn't it?

PS. Industry watchers may have spotted the launch and then delay over production of the Asus Zenfone Zoom, using a G810/N93-like miniature optical zoom that wraps light through two right angles in its journey to the sensor - I'm really not surprised that this hasn't appeared yet - even with 2015 sensors and technology, physics dictates that there's just not going to be enough light to go round in terms of capturing photos which are perceived to be good enough by modern standards.

PPS. I haven't forgotten about the Lumia 1020's 'Zoom later'/reframing approach, either. But this is something slightly different and (ahem) the article's long enough already!

cuteRadio is the de facto best independent Internet Radio application on Symbian - yet it's been down for much of the last few months, thanks to issues with the service it had been using. Happily, Stuart Howarth, the developer, has implemented his own, flexible cuteRadio Data API and cuteRadio's now back and rocking, with all your favourite Internet radio stations.

From the Marxoft blog:

All versions of cuteRadio have now been updated to use the new cuteRadio Data API. This should avoid any further downtime issues. The old service hosted at Heroku will be closed soon.

The new version can be accessed via the 'Update' menu function within the existing application - note that the version on AppList hasn't been updated yet. A new SIS file will be downloaded to the root of your phone's mass memory and you just need to tap on it in Files, etc.

Checking for the update and finding the new v0.4.0...

The update is saved, installed and then... fulling working again!

Editing smartphone-shot video on a Windows PC has rarely been without quirks. There are the major commercial editing systems of days gone by (represented here by Pinnacle Studio 19) and then there were 'lite' utilities like Windows Movie Maker. The latter seems to have passed away in the Windows 10 age, but remembering that the excellent all-purpose Nero suite for Windows used to have a reliable (if limited) video editing facility four or five years back, I headed for the latest edition of Nero too - and found that Nero Video/Vision is now all grown up.

Oh, before you accuse me of selling my soul to commercial software, note that I did a lot of research into the dozens of various freeware and shareware alternatives, but didn't find any that weren't either a) buggy, b) nigh on impossible to figure out, c) too limited to be of any use, and d) infested with adware and other nasties. So commercial it is, with Nero Video 2016 available from 24 Euros (sold from Germany) and Pinnacle Studio 19 starting at £40-ish (in the UK), so neither exactly break the bank considering the amount of sophistication on-board.

Commercial video editing used to start at £100 and go up through the roof from there on, but it's a LOT cheaper these days and, considering the amount of time you'll both spend and save in terms of relatively gentle learning curves, there really is little reason to spend tens of hours fiddling with a tool that's really not fit for purpose when a little outlay will see you getting on with your life much more quickly.

I should explain that my goal was to emulate a typical smartphone user's task of collating captured 1080p video in MP4 files, imported via USB or (as a last resort) backed up and then downloaded via OneDrive or similar, then trimming them, overlaying and inserting stills, adding titles and then exporting at full resolution and quality to both:

1. DVD (for parents and grandparents!)
2. a file which can be uploaded to YouTube or similar (for the current and future generations, who are more tech-savvy)

In each case, I was looking at speed, interface intuitiveness, raw functionality, rendering speed and issues and quality of the final result.

I should also add, for those wondering, that I also tried Adobe Premiere Elements 14, since this seemed to be playing in the same 'home editing' space, but it proved too buggy and unstable on my test PC - this has been a common theme of Adobe software in the past. I'm sure there will be patches coming out in the medium term, but in the meantime Elements 14 was more expensive than the other two options here and patently didn't work as well - at least not yet.

Pinnacle Studio 19

I've used Pinnacle on and off over the years and the non-linear-editing interface is intuitive and familiar - just import the MP4 videos and JPG photos into the project 'bin' and then drop them as required into the multiple layers of AV in the timeline. Overlays, audio-ducking and more are handled smoothly, and I especially liked the audio display for video clips, letting you spot instantly (for example) where someone is speaking and then letting you drag a clip end point to trim it appropriately.

There are around 1000 (yes, a thousand!) visual effects that can be applied to clips and images - a nearly full screen clip effects editor pops up, though (having been used to iMovie on the Mac) the way all effects are controlled using explicit sliders and numeric fields took a bit of getting used to - whatever happened to using the mouse on-screen?

As clips and overlays are added, as effects are tweaked, video is pre-rendered in the background, with a green 'processing' shade nearly always visible - until this is complete for each element, previewing isn't really possible and this does get in the way sometimes. Given time though, rendering out was perfect and the DVD creation tools here are also top notch. There's a lot of maturity in Pinnacle Studio 19 and it shows.

Which is not to say that you shouldn't pause before considering it. Not because of price (it's a bargain) but because your current Windows PC might not be up to it. I was 'only' working at 1080p but my 32-bit Windows 10 system with 4GB of RAM struggled in terms of performance, with numerous 'blue circle' cursors (indicating that the app was busy and that I should wait). Despite this spec being well within the 'minimum' as detailed by Pinnacle, I'd go with the 'recommended' spec of a 64-bit system with 8GB or more of RAM. Really. In which case the biggest expense by far will be upgrading your PC or even buying a new one. Ahem.

There was the odd glitch too - for some reason Pinnacle Studio 19 kept jumping into full-screen mode and then back completely at random - I couldn't see a reason or find a setting to control this. Just bizarre. And yes, my Windows 10 and Pinnacle Studio itself were patched up to date. I also found it odd that projects aren't saved as you along, so if there IS a crash then you're at the mercy of any 'recovery' code. These notwithstanding though, and assuming that your PC is up to the task, I found Pinnacle Studio 19 thorough and extremely competent. It may not be the most elegant video editing system, but it's always obvious what is happening - and that's half the battle.

Nero Video 2016

A very different beast to Pinnacle, above, Nero's video editor (usually found as part of one of the Nero media suites, but often available separately) has always been relatively lightweight and somewhat wizard-based - and a lot of this is retained, with 'Start here', 'Next' and 'Burn'/'Export' workflow rather dominating. But the core video editing section, where you combine clips, overlays, effects and more is well done. It's true that you don't get to see a mass of regular thumbnails nor audio waveforms, so trimming video is a little hit and miss, but everything slots into place and is preview-able immediately. 

There's an option to turn on 'background processing' to improve previews, but this didn't seem to make much difference on my test hardware - there were no delays in either case and I sped through the editing process very quickly indeed. Splitting video clips is done in a completely different manner to that described in the online manual - which is bizarre - but I found the appropriate scissor tool in the end. Adding any of the hundreds of effects is very easy, as each comes with dozens of presets - just choose the one you want and drag and drop it - with a little luck you'll never have to enter numbers or percentages to customise one of these.

The hierarchy of the mini-suite does come back to bite though. For example, if you opt to step forward in the wizard-like process to DVD creation then all your nice 1080p MP4 footage gets downgraded to 480p permanently (ok, you could re-import from your original files, but it's still annoying). So if you plan to export to file and then DVD then you have to go in the right order!

The range of export options is generally good and results were rock solid, though yet again there's no auto-save. Haven't these video editor manufacturers ever heard of applications crashing?

Verdict

Ultimately, how you edit your smartphone-shot video on a Windows PC is determined by your budget and equipment to hand. If your PC has 8GB (or more) of RAM and is 64-bit and relatively new then knock yourself out and go with Pinnacle Studio 19 - it's an all-in-one approach that will do everything, from creating a DVD for the grandparents right up to pro-level editing for broadcast use. If your machine is slightly slower in spec (for example, a laptop) and with 4GB of RAM - or if you just want to pay quite a bit less - then go with Nero Video 2016, you'll have a fast and smooth workflow to file or DVD that will get the job done with no hiccups.

And if your PC has only 2GB of RAM then.... you need to upgrade or replace it! Or consider editing on the phone itself if your goal is YouTube - the chipsets inside smartphones these days are often faster at handling video then all-purpose Intel chips inside PCs, amazingly.

Comments welcome - hopefully the mini-reviews above have proved useful. What do YOU do, as a Windows user, when your mum, dad or grandparents say, at a family event that you're shooting on your smartphone, "Can I have that on DVD please?"

Unsurprisingly, the end of Symbian as a viable smartphone platform just got even closer, with Microsoft (Symbian's new owners after the Nokia Devices buy-out) shutting down all the servers handling Over The Air and Nokia Suite firmware updates. In theory this will happen at the end of this year, but some readers are reporting that it's all shut down already. Not that any of this will stop real Symbian hard core users, mind you, since the Delight custom firmware images are still available, as are SIS installation files for many third party applications. But, bit by bit, it's getting harder and harder to stay on Symbian without an excessive amount of work.

Here's the very brief Microsoft statement:

Software update service discontinuation for Nokia Belle and Symbian phones

Software update service for all the Nokia Belle and Symbian phones will be discontinued at the end of December 2015. The phones will no longer be able to receive Over-The-Air (OTA) software updates or software updates via Nokia Suite.

Given how long it's been since every other Nokia-provided service for Symbian was shut down, it's a miracle that all this was still working at all up until now. There's certainly no love for Symbian within Microsoft and all the Symbian enthusiasts within Nokia moved on to other companies before Microsoft took over.

The reality of smartphone use in 2016 is that it's not enough to be a great 'converged' device anymore - there's an expectation of being able to hook up, to share, to connect, and all of this requires support from the various online services. Which is where Symbian has fallen down, mainly because of the abandoning by Nokia of development of the OS.

PS. Although I'm posting the odd story to AAS and still own my own (bought) white (and Delighted) Nokia 808 PureView, it's only really a reference and play device these days. With the arrival of the Windows 10 Mobile-powered Lumia 950, we now have imaging that exceeds the 808 for everything except extreme zoom and Xenon use cases, along with better specifications and performance in every single regard.

If you've seen the odd error message recently on a Symbian smartphone, at least when using it on Wi-fi, it's because Nokia's longstanding connectivity-test.ext.nokia.com server is now offline, the latest in a long line of Symbian support resources to disappear under Microsoft's ownership of Nokia's Devices division. All a bit disappointing, but what can you do when there's 0.0% enthusiasm for keeping the OS going at Microsoft and very little legal imperative to do so? The good news is that Wifi connectivity does work on the whole still, albeit without automatic connection.

Head into Settings/Connectivity and you'll probably see the error messages against your known wi-fi networks. All this really means is that Symbian OS was unable to 'phone home', since home was repossessed a couple of years ago. So don't panic too much. (right) Typical errors in applications are email failures, but manually connecting up and hitting refresh normally does the trick. All a bit of a pain though!

The web (here in Web and Opera) will still be fine too, ditto all other Internet applications, provided you make sure you're hooked up to Wi-fi first (and never mind the 'Limited Connectivity' message).