In All About Symbian Insight number 227, Steve and Rafe kick off proceedings with a discussion of our recent PureView shoot out (Lumia 920 versus 808 PureView), and offer an opinion on which is the ultimate cameraphone. David then shares his experience of MMORPG Warspear Online, and Rafe and Steve add in some app picks of their own. The team finish by pondering whether they would be willing to go back to a retro phone.

This podcast was recorded on Thursday 8th November 2012.

In this podcast we cover:       

• Nokia 808 PureView versus Nokia Lumia 920 camera shoot out
    
• 361 Degrees Live Event
    
• Warspear Online
    
• Fantasy Car
    
• Genius Button Football
   
• Super Robot
     
• Belle Refresh rolls out to more Symbian^3 generation devices
  
  
• Retro phones
  
  

You can listen to earlier episodes of the AAS Insight Podcast in our media section.

Of course, the very title is somewhat contradictory - if you're a fan of something then why would you switch? But there's a question that's been on all our minds for a year or two now: "Given what we currently do with our Symbian-powered smartphones, if we had to jump mobile platform then which one would suit us best?" Now, there may well be hardware-focussed reasons for buying a phone on another platform (Nokia's cameras spring to mind), but - purely on the strength of the software itself - which of iOS 6, Android 4.1 and Windows Phone 8 is the best fit? In other words, which provides the most improvements and least number of omissions? I focus on ten key areas below.

I accept that ignoring hardware factors makes the comparison a little artificial, but then again removing hardware differentiators also levels the playing field and allows the various operating systems, interfaces and ecosystems to battle it out without worrying about speaker quality, glass backs, removeable batteries or 41 megapixel cameras....(!)

The opinions below are based on my own experience of the various platforms as part of my Phones Show coverage and are pivoted around the functionality enjoyed by (and the expectations of) the current Symbian fan/user. For each potential replacement platform below, I grade each out of 10 for each of the 10 areas looked at, so a possible score for each out of 100.

NB. The Symbian reference point here is the Nokia 808 PureView/701 generation, armed with Belle Feature Pack 2. The Android reference point is Jelly Bean 4.2 on the Galaxy Nexus (most Android manufacturers mess with the OS to slow things up with their own skins and tweaks).

Interface and (multitasking) speed

S60/Symbian's interface is familiar and, on the whole, fast. Running applications can be switched instantly, shortcuts placed on any home screen, the applications can be rearranged on the main menu as needed, and the whole thing works in portrait or landscape. A hard act to follow.

Android 4.2 isn't far off, with full multitasking and flexible homescreen shortcuts, though the homescreens and app menu only work in portrait (unless you apply an extra utility - cough) and the app menu is fixed in alphabetic order. iOS 6 is less flexible again, with no homescreens and resolutely portrait operation, though you can at least rearrange applications in the main grids, put them in folders, etc. Multitasking is limited to system applications, but most third party apps now resume fast enough that only those which do heavy lifting of media will be inconvienced by the restrictions. Windows Phone 8 is stuck with a portrait alphabetic app menu and more draconian limits on third party app background tasks, but does have a live tile homescreen system that works well and is very customisable.

Android 4.2: 8, iOS: 6, Windows Phone 8: 6

Email

Email has always been a bit hit and miss on Symbian, not helped by Nokia's decision to experiment with hiving off email functions a few years ago and then trying to re-integrate them half-heartedly in 2010/2011. We've ended up with a passable client but with quirks and performance problems when handling 'rich'/HTML emails and with the severe limitation of only one Mail for Exchange account per device. And the old Gmail client was never really developed beyond the one written for S60 3rd Edition, back in 2008...

Things are slightly better on Android, for which there's a serviceable email client plus a stellar Gmail one - it's still odd to have both, but as a Gmail user I'm not complaining...  iOS's email client has improved a lot over the years and now handles just about any generic mailbox with aplomb - the same is true for Windows Phone: no huge frills, but speedy and reliable. All are an improvement on the situation with Symbian.

Android 4.2: 8, iOS: 8, Windows Phone 8: 8

Social networking

Out of the box, Nokia Social is effective for casual Twitter and Facebook use and for integration with Photos and Contacts. The keyword is 'casual' though - it's all rather slow and hesitant compared to the speed and fluidity of a standalone social client like Gravity. Or Tweetian, or fMobi, or Facial, or facinate - and so on - at least the third party scene comes to the rescue here for power users.

Vanilla Android is light on social features, with just Google+, but the ready availability of first party Twitter, Facebook and other clients, most of which are pretty slick (my favourite is TweetDark), means that adding social is trivial. Each client then adds itself to the sharing menu, for sending media off to your social client with one tap from Gallery. iOS fares better, with Twitter and Facebook baked into the operating system and relevant notifications and galleries. While Windows Phone, in theory, tops the list, with full Twitter and Facebook integration into the main People (Contacts) hub, though actual interaction with social networks is limited and most power users will plump for the first party clients instead, as on Android.

Android 4.2: 8, iOS: 9, Windows Phone 8: 8

Podcast gathering

Back in the day (pre 2010), Symbian was the podcast gathering king, with the phone grabbing latest programmes in the background without you having to lift a finger. Sadly the Podcasting app was axed as part of the ill-fated transition to Open Source code, leaving the third party Podcatcher to fill the gap. This does pretty well, though doesn't reliably auto-delete old podcasts and doesn't remember playback positions from one session to another.

There's nothing built into Android either, though there are a number of good podcatching clients, not least Doggcatcher, which remembers playback positions for all shows and manages space by auto-deleting properly too. iOS 6 now has a dedicated Podcasts client and this, being written by Apple, has some background gathering ability, but it's limited and won't reliably grab every podcast every time without some manual intervention. Windows Phone 8 doesn't have any autonomous podcatching functions (which were removed in v7.5 of the OS, I believe), though we're starting to see third party applications come to the fore, albeit limited again in how much can be done when the application in question isn't actually in the foreground.

Android 4.2: 9, iOS: 8, Windows Phone 8: 6

Navigation

Another very strong suit for Symbian, thanks to Nokia's buyouts in the past of Smart2Go and Navteq - Nokia Maps/Drive is world leading and free forever for complete world coverage, with very few missing spots. Voice guidance is natural and timely and the Points Of Interest databases are pretty good.

Android has the resource of Google Maps and its own take on Navigation, with better search facilities and better POI databases than Nokia but with a navigation experience that's somehow not quite as polished, mainly due to the very robotic text-to-voice used in the instructions (as opposed to human voice samples). iOS 6 (famously) has Apple's own somewhat cobbled-together take on maps and navigation, with plenty of holes and oddities when compared to the coverage and thoroughness of Nokia and Google's offering. Early days for this. Windows Phone 8 now has Nokia map data built in from the start, though I believe only the Nokia devices have the full Drive navigation experience.

Android 4.2: 7, iOS: 5, Windows Phone 8: 8

Music and media loading and playback

Symbian's naturally very strong here, in part because it fully supports mounting mass storage or microSD cards as disks on any desktop, or via MTP or accessing USB storage via USB on the go. For anyone happy with copying files and folders between computer disks, the Symbian way is superbly flexible, even if novices may scratch their heads without an obvious winning graphical interface on the desktop. Video compatibility is excellent, with a wide range of codecs supported. The biggest weakness is not having a native YouTube client, though the third party CuteTube steps in well here.

Android is almost as flexible, though recent devices have required connection via MTP rather than via standard USB mass storage means. Music playback is somewhat messy, with Google's (and other manufacturers') attempts to integrate music with an online store experience (e.g. 'Play Music'). Vanilla Android has only average video codec compatibility, which is why some manufacturers (e.g. Samsung) pay to license extra codecs. A native YouTube client is utterly excellent, as you might expect from Google and is the best way to access video on the move if you have decent connectivity. iOS 6, with no user-accessible file system, is reliant on syncing music and videos from an iTunes library on a desktop, though there are several good YouTube clients as well and the mobile YouTube web site works well. Windows Phone is better, with an emphasis on managing media from the desktop though you can drag and drop via MTP too from a Windows PC, plus a YouTube client for occasions when you want to watch something which you can't massage into this system. 

Android 4.2: 8, iOS: 6, Windows Phone 8: 7

Gaming

Although one of Symbian's weakest areas, we all love a good game and so this area does need addressing. On Symbian, I've loved Micropool, Real Golf 2011, Mau Mau, GT Racing: Motor Academy, amongst others, but the full list of decent games struggles to top 50, whereas we're in the many hundreds, if not thousands for iOS and Android. Windows Phone is up in the hundreds too and seems to be attracting the big name developers, witness Angry Birds Star Wars arriving today, though the platform still has a lot of catching up to do. Screen sizes and resolutions play a big part here too, with most of the decent Android phones now sporting 720p, with iOS running almost as high and Windows Phone also now introducing 720p, enabling better looking and more immersive games. 

Interrupting a game on Symbian usually does nothing to disturb progress, and the same is mostly true on Android, while iOS sees the game stopped dead but often restarted quickly afterwards with little loss of progress. Windows Phone 8 gaming is, theoretically, at the same level as iOS, but games will need recompiling from their WP7 counterparts, which often lose progress and/or restart completely after being interrupted.

Android 4.2: 8, iOS: 9, Windows Phone 8: 6

Weather integration

Nokia Maps' Weather widget is pretty, compact and informative and possibly my favourite weather indicator/forecaster on any platform. You can tap on the city name to pick from other predefined cities, though tapping through the forecast to the full-screen version is often disappointingly slow. There are many third party weather widgets and applications, too.

Android comes with a News & Weather homescreen widget - this can be installed in 'Weather only' mode and provides a good and quick forecast. As with Symbian, Android also has many third party alternatives available, as does iOS in addition to its preinstalled Weather utility. Windows Phone doesn't come with weather software preinstalled, but there are many third party apps to try.

Android 4.2: 6, iOS: 7, Windows Phone 8: 5

Web browsing options and performance

Another Symbian weakness in recent years, slightly disappointing given that the OS led the way in this space with the first adoption of the Webkit engine for browsing, back on the likes of the classic N95. Ever-more bloated sites, slowish processor speeds and RAM have conspired against good performance in Symbian Web and things are only just about useable on the likes of the Nokia 701 and 808.

In contrast, the far more powerful processors in the Android flagships, in the iPhone and in modern Windows Phones, allied to better optimised javascript rendering, have meant a better browsing experience when tackling desktop-class web pages. There's really not much in real world speed between the three modern platforms, though Chrome on Android is my current favourite for raw rendering power.

Android 4.2: 9, iOS: 9, Windows Phone 8: 9

Applications and ecosystem

The issue of ecosystem was mentioned above in regard to games, but much the same applies to general applications and services. Symbian is fine as far as it goes, I've pointed out before how far its application world does go, but attempting to stretch it to access Google+, to play an Audible book or access Lastpass, for example, all result in a strained, geeky experience. I've compiled my own curated list of the best Symbian applications (i.e. not games) and it struggles to get in the hundreds.

In contrast, both the Android and iOS worlds love to publish their own stats, now edging towards 750,000 each, while Windows Phone has just topped 125,000. Take these figures with a pinch of salt, though, this includes every niche title, every novelty, every game, every web page front end, etc. I'd estimate there to be around 10,000 really good apps on Android and iOS, with about 2,000 on Windows Phone. All are, obviously, a lot more than a few hundred. It may be that you don't need that many applications to accompany your digital lifestyle, in which case the size of the ecosystem may not be an issue. However, I recognise that it is an issue for many, not least because the larger the app ecosystem, the more chances of future applications making it to each platform.

Android 4.2: 9, iOS: 9, Windows Phone 8: 8

Which way to jump?

It may be that you're a perfectly happy power user on Symbian and that your current Nokia device serves your needs better than anything else on the market - glad to hear it and All About Symbian will always be here for you. 

However, assuming that you're wondering whether to jump, at some point in the next year or so, to another smartphone platform, which one should you consider first? Adding up the somewhat subjective scores above, we arrive at Android: 80, iOS: 76, and Windows Phone 8: 71. Which perhaps won't be a huge surprise to anyone reading this who has played with other platforms, perhaps in a shop or on a friend's phone.

There's little doubt that Android offers the best fit for current Symbian power users, and it's clear that Windows Phone 8 isn't quite so well matched. (Novice smartphone owners are a different matter, of course, and I would always steer them towards an iPhone or Windows Phone device - far less to go wrong and they won't notice any of the niggles mentioned above!)

The interesting point to consider next is whether you want to follow Nokia's hardware instead of going with the optimum software transition. Is Nokia's hardware and innovation worth eleven points on my scale here? Maybe. That's for you to decide in your particular situation and is also up for debate below. Please do comment...

Unusually, here's a title which has come across from Blackberry, of all platforms. Hence the name, though the actual gameplay will be somewhat familiar. Berry Buster is perfectly pitched in terms of brain-busting difficulty though, and available in free but ad-supported and paid versions. Well worth a look if you enjoy time-consuming puzzles.

Berry Buster is a little amateurish round the edges, in terms of a Symbian implementation, but don't let that put you off - there's a really addictive, solid game in here, as you'll see below; (right) a typical 'tween levels ad to skip past (or visit)

Yes, yes, thrown together from the existing Blackberry version(!); (right) down to business. Tap to explode adjacent groups of the same berry (new berries fall from the top to help the columns fill) - you have 20 taps available on each level and a target number of berries to 'bust' - this, naturally, rises and rises as you progress, meaning that you've got to start averaging three berries at a time, then four, and so on....

Notice the stick of dynamite in the previous screenshot. Bust 5, 6 or 7 berries in one go and you get a stick that can be exploded when needed to bust all eight berries around it. Bust 8 or more in one go and you get a proper detonator that can bust up to 24 berries around it. This is clearly the way to go on the higher levels. And when, you finally get stuck and run out of moves (right), in my case on level 13, after ten minutes happy tapping, it's 'Game over'.

There are levels of real strategy here, as you work out which berries need to make their way down to other groups, as you plan ahead, and so on. I thought I was doing quite well with a score of 10,000 or so, but the high score tables in the game reveal that others have managed into the hundreds of thousands. Gulp!

A bare bones and quirky port of a Blackberry classic, but one that's worth perserving with.

You can download the free ad-supported version of Berry Buster here, or pay £1 to miss out all the pesky ads here.

More puzzling, this time from 14th century Scandinavia, with a marble-based strategy puzzler. Playing as either fox or geese, you aim to outwit your opponent (or the phone AI). Beautifully illustrated and implemented, Fox and Geese impresses as a colourful and wonderful time waster for all Symbian touchscreen phones.

The animated (note the aircraft towing the 'Loading' message) splash screen sets the colourful tone for Fox and Geese...

A well drawn menu screen too, in keeping with the game's theme.

As the fox, you'll aim to dart around and gradually capture (eat?) the geese by jumping over them, Checkers/Draughts style. If you choose to play as the geese, you can move any marble one space at a time, aiming to surround the fox so that it can't move.

Three levels of AI mean that it's still possible to win as a beginner and then progress to the stage where every move has to be near perfect later on.

In the game itself, with the grid looking familiar from many solitaire variations. Moves are, naturally, made by dragging the piece you want to play to its destination. There's the option to play with a timer on if you really want an intense mental challenge - I prefer a relaxing game without time pressure!

Ah yes, the victorious fox. On 'Easy', anyway. Now to try playing on the 'Hard' level!....

You can pay £1 for Fox and Geese as featured here or download a (presumably ad-supported) free version here.

You'll remember that I highlighted Alien Juggler a few days ago, emulating one of the old 'Game & Watch' titles from thirty years ago? Fruit Lee is very much in the same vein in terms of gameplay, albeit with much more modern graphics. It's all in your reaction time and hand-eye coordination, to hit various sequences of the four control buttons. 

At this point in the well-illustrated casual game, it's not clear what the game will involve, other than there's lots of fruit involved!

As with most modern games, there are in-game shortcuts to the developer's social media pages, plus their game portfolio - handy.

It's a fair cop - my reactions weren't fast enough to get beyond level I and thus get to see what happens in terms of clogs and deer hide! One presumes that when your fruit score is high enough, you're offered the chance to 'upgrade' in this way?

The controls are four on-screen buttons. The left thumb controls jumping high or stooping low to collect oncoming fruit (they're all at these two levels), while the right thumb controls jumping and ducking to avoid incoming spears and boomerangs (oddly the icon for 'jump to prevent' seems wrong).

That's your gameplay lot, then, watching what's oncoming and coordinating your four thumb presses to control Fruit Lee. Get hit too much by dangerous objects and your health is at zero - game over.

In addition to the screens shown above, the free version brings up banner ads, as here, with a five second wait on each. Fair enough, but do note the presence of a paid, ad-free version, linked below.

Whether you enjoy Fruit Lee will depend largely on how good you are at it. If your hand-eye coordination is as lax as mine seems to be then it's a nice diversion that you'll grow out of in half an hour. If you get very good and the button pressing seems child's play then I'm sure there's more longevity!

You can download the free version of Fruit Lee here or pay £3 for an ad-free commercial version.

The 361 Degrees Podcast has returned for a fourth season. In the third episode of the new season, we talk about the tablet market, prompted by the recent arrival of several new entrants. And remember there's a 361 Live event being held in London this coming Friday, with a topic of the "Desktop Internet is Dead: Long Live Mobile Internet".

Episode description:

There you were waiting for someone to come and shake-up the tablet market and then an iPad Mini and a Microsoft Surface both come along at once... The team wonder what (and who) they're all for.

We also chat about Ewan's recent Android rejection, Rafe's enthusiasm for Windows Phone 8 (it's here at last) and EE's terrible launch (see http://lc.tl/eefail - h/t to @AndrewGrill).

361 Degrees also now has an associated newsletter:

Updates on each episode (and bulletins between seasons), 'behind the scenes' news , comment round-ups and personal views from the team. 'Back Chat' also offers a way to respond directly to the team on the topics we discuss each week.

You can sign up for the newsletter here.

About 361 Degrees

361 Degrees is a podcast all about mobile technology. From consumer to enterprise and from fun to industry analysis, we investigate and discuss mobile technology and the mobile industry.

You can follow and subscribe to 361 Degrees on the dedicated mini-site, on Soundcloud, with an RSS reader or podcatcher, via iTunes via Zune or on any of the hosts' sites.

I was taken with some of Marc's test photos here, snapped in extremely low light on the Nokia 808 and Lumia 920, exploring what each phone camera can do in Amsterdam's harbour. The 808's shots are atmospheric and very decent considering how dark it was (and that Marc didn't have time to do any 'Creative' adjustments - a comparison sample is shown below from the 30-million selling Samsung flagship, the Galaxy S III. But it's the Lumia 920's photos that are the most interesting - it's clear that it almost over exposes these night time shots - Marc found himself having to dial back the exposure manually so that the photos were dark enough!

From the PureView Club post:

First a scene that completely blew us away – the only one I have three different shots from. It was very dark. The only light came from the Chinese restaurant about a 100 meters away, and from the other side of the water. In fact, it was hard to focus the camera in the exact same way for three times.

The first is just to show what you can expect from the Galaxy S3 in a situation like this. It’s trying to capture the  boat in the harbour. You can barely see it, but showing the picture serves a purpose.

Next up, the Nokia Lumia 808. Again, no flash, everything on “auto” – yes, I know, of course, you can get much better results when you play with the settings, this is just for comparison, like a snapshot if you don’t have enough time on your hands. As could be expected, the result is already a lot better.

The next one was shot with the Nokia Lumia 920, and was a genuine jawdropper for both of us. Again: no flash, all settings on auto.

We actually didn’t know where the Lumia 920 got all the light from. The sky was much darker than this, hell – everything was much darker than this. I’d like to stress this shot was only resized, I didn’t change anything else (except putting the name of the source in).

As with Rafe's photo comparisons, the super long shutter times on the Lumia 920 are actually showing details that are way beyond what the human eye can see. While fascinating and a demo of what OIS can do in a phone camera, it also raises an issue - shouldn't the camera be trying to replicate what the human eye sees, rather than its own tech-enhanced version? 

Not that the 920's images are unattractive, but I was struck in Marc's piece by him admitting that for subsequent photos in the session, he manually reduced the 920's exposure by a full stop to get a better sense of the lighting in the scene. In one case, he had to go down to two full stops underneath the automatic exposure.

In other words, what the PureView team at Nokia has achieved is remarkable, in its own way, the 'phase 2' tech in the Lumia 920 is as interesting as the 'phase 1' tech in the Nokia 808. Yet I can't help but feel that, for the 920, there's a small software update on its way to fix the fact that the camera's a little too good, a little too greedy for photons of light! 

If FixTheNet's screens (below) look familiar, that's because the game is a port of QtNetWalk, itself a version of the NetWalk arcade puzzler 'for system administrators' (available in numerous forms, including here for playing in a desktop browser). Think Pipemania but for geeks. And the result is a mind mangling success, now brought to Symbian for the first time, with level after level in which your task is to rotate ethernet junctions and terminals in order to 'light up' every screen. OK, ok, so noone in this scenario has heard of Wi-fi, but go with the concept for the game itself is not only tremendous fun but also completely free 'for a limited time' - so best grab it now, just in case!

There are four skill levels available here, each gradually increasing the grid size and, in the highest level, also allowing 'wrap around' connections from each edge of the grid, making the network even harder to visualise.

The gameplay mechanic here is to tap on a tile to rotate its ethernet connections by 90 degrees clockwise - the idea then being to line up all the ethernet wires so that the central server can provide a connection to all the terminals. Sounds easy, but the levels are fiendishly designed and what seems to be the obvious cable routing is rarely the one used in the solution, meaning that you'll be tapping away trying different combinations and applying some very 'Minesweeper-ish' logic to work out what has to go where.

The interface away from the main grid is bare bones, but the levels are all here and the challenge remains intact. There's a timer running, though this seems somewhat academic and is, I suspect, just for your interest in case you wanted to record your own personal best times. The main metric to carry through to the built-in 'High scores' list is the number of taps needed, with a lower score obviously being better.

The core of FixTheNet's gameplay is the notion that every junction, every terminal is only ever one square away from all the adjacent junctions and terminals, and so what looks like an obvious pairing turns out to be a complete red herring because of course that terminal was supposed to be connected to an ethernet cable coming in from the other side (in the real world, round the back of the coffee machine?). So you'll make an assumption and proceed with that until, ten moves down the line, you'll find a terminal that can't now be connected and you'll have to retrace your logic, discard your assumption and try another theory.

Fun stuff - if you love the classic Minesweeper puzzle, then this is along the same lines but harder.

The developer states in the Store description that this is 'free for a limited time' only - and as freeware this comes highly recommended. Given the game's core is all open source, I do think it would be cheeky of the developer to start charging for it - maybe he should acknowledge the game's origins and simply ask for donations instead? But yes, either way, best download it now anyway and save FixTheNet for the next boring train journey or plane ride.

Although I'm not a fan of social photo sharing apps which downsample my lovely originals massively, I'm going to make an exception for FramePic, a tool which is unashamed in the way it mashes JPGs together to create something a little different. Screens and links below. Is there a gotcha? Oh yes.

There's the expected authorisation step to either of Facebook or Twitter, before you're allowed in to play with the app; (right) start by choosing a frame layout - the idea is to then fill the rectangles with fragments of your photos

You then tap on each empty rectangle and (right) pick from the photo gallery proferred. I loved the idea of the interface, in that you can pan around each photo and pinch to zoom out until you get just the fragment you want. However, the gallery interface doesn't remember your thumbnails from session to session or use the Symbian Photo thumbnails, so there's a lot of waiting around while thumbnails build each time you use FramePic.

A completed mashup/FramePic - you can adjust border size and colour using the tools linked at the bottom of the screen

When done, add a caption and upload - all went smoothly for me; (right) one oddity is the photo effect editor, only the bottom slider seemed to do anything on the Nokia 808 - perhaps a Feature Pack 2 incompatibility?

FramePic is a nice idea and has a very workable interface, but is let down by two things. Firstly, the low, low resolution of the final image. 360 pixels square - I know these images are aimed at Facebook, itself notorious for downsampling everything massively, but 0.1 megapixels is just silly. This should be 720 by 720 at least, surely?

Secondly, the photo gallery, in addition to not being amazingly fast, also always presents your photos in chronological order - which is crazy. Assuming you've got 500 photos on your phone, the chances are that you're going to want to select the most recent and, for every single one, you've got to swipe your way past 499 other thumbnails. Madness.

A great idea for an app that needs just a bit more work. The install is free here in the Nokia Store, but there's an enforced in-app purchase for £1.50 if you want to use it beyond the first three times. 

Here's the Store description:

Create amazing frames with 9 frames. Rounded corners, effects and more!
FramePic helps you combine multiple photos into amazing looking frames and share them with your friends on social networks.
Free 3 Try

Features:
- 9 frames with multi-images
- Roundable & Colorizable borders
- Adjust the brightness, contrast and saturation of each photo
- Rotate photos
- Pinch to zoom and drag to move the photos
- Press & Hold on images to change or delete current image
- Share on Facebook & Twitter

We've covered the development of Nokia 3D World Gaze from the beginning, though it never really seemed to shake off the 'beta' tag and always remained a well-programmed, interesting novelty application. Every beta app's time has to come to a close though and it seems that resources have now been pulled from the project in favour of the Windows Phone software teams. Happily, the application 'will remain operational until further notice'.

From the blog post:

Nokia 3D World Gaze grew from a research project about the links between design and user experience, where one of the topics we were examining was mixed reality based interaction. 

That research project has now been finished, and it is time for us to move on. At the same time, Nokia's focus has shifted to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, and we have to reassess where and how we spend our resources.

For these reasons we have decided to conclude the Nokia 3D World Gaze experimental beta trial.  Although we are no longer actively seeking feedback about the app, World Gaze will remain operational until further notice.  

We hope you have enjoyed discovering our planet from a new perspective! Your feedback has validated many of our design decisions and highlighted the challenges with the concept.

Thank you for participating.

- Jaakko

You can read my review of Nokia 3D World Gaze here in case you still want to have a play with this innovative geographical visualisation service - any servers at Nokia's end are likely to stay up for a year or so, I'd guess.

We haven't featured an 808-shot music video for a while, but this one's worth a look, of Anneke van Giersbergen and band, live in Moscow. Skip the first minute of build up and then enjoy, especially when, at about the 3 minute mark, the drums and bass really, really kick in - and the Nokia 808 recording this, from the front row at the gig, close to the speakers, doesn't even flinch. Amazing. I only wish the guy filming it had been a little steadier - but then he was down in the 'mosh pit', so....!

From the description:

It'll be interesting to see if all future Nokia smartphones get the Rich Recording technology - the Lumia 820 and 920 certainly seem to have it, over on the Windows Phone 8 platform.

The 808 remains the only Symbian device to have 'Rich Recording', though as a veteran of numerous Nokia N8 and N86 gig recordings, I can say that these older devices aren't far off - the have the microphone technology, but not the HAAC electronics and software.

We've all thought it at one time or another. Faced with a Symbian smartphone which is coping, but not quite as lightning fast as when we first had it, faced with a system disk (C:) which is edging the wrong side of 50MB free, and feeling guilty for the dozens of freeware and trial applications you installed to try out (and then removed again), the temptation is to think "What would I gain in performance and resources if I were to factory reset and then sync my data back on?". Other valid questions are "Is it more efficient to completely re-lay the firmware rather than simply resetting?". And, most drastically, "if I were to perform (gulp) the emergency hard reset sequence to wipe C: completely, would I zap some kind of swap file and be up the proverbial creek without a paddle?" All of which I, hopefully, answer below, along with a healthy caveat or three!

Normally, the rule for smartphones, or indeed tech of any kind, is that "if it's working, don't 'fix' it". However, there are degrees of working and my trusty N8, after over a hundred pieces of review software had passed through it and after over the air updates to Anna and Belle and then Belle Refresh, was feeling a little 'crufty', as if the sheer number of odd little files and hooks in the OS were weighing it down. The final straw came with a couple of lockups, one of which needed a ten second power button press to resolve.

All of which made the N8 the perfect test vehicle for the questions above. I could give the N8 a sequence of ultimate optimising resets and, for the first time (to my knowledge), log the essential statistics of the device and provide a reference for others who might be asking some of the questions above.

Here's the starting configuration, pretty typical of many peoples' Symbian^3/Anna-generation phones:

Factory settings

Although there's an option to explicitly do this in the Settings menu, I've always used *#7370# from the dialler screen - old habits die hard. I believe the two are equivalent though. There's the usual warning from the OS about this also deleting all data on mass memory (E:) - back in the days of S60, *#7370# would just affect the system disk (C:), but with the Symbian^3 generation onwards there are system files on E: which need re-creating carefully and presumably it's deemed easier to just hard wipe E: and have done with it. Not a problem as long as you've backed up any media etc.

After the reset, which took around five minutes to complete, I had:

The extra RAM is expected because the widgets, wallpapers, theme and installed applications form my starting point will all have gone and each uses up a little RAM when in place, i.e. the Symbian OS knows about them and every pixel, every icon has to be accounted for and remembered.

An extra 29MB of system disk space is welcome, but I'd expected a lot more. Time to proceed to my next experiment...

Full re-install of firmware

The best thing to try if your over-the-air update has failed, and something I like to recommend as an easy operation to fix a multitude of sins, I plugged the N8 into Nokia Suite, went into 'Check for updates' and then opted to 'reinstall' the (v111.040.1511, Belle Refresh) firmware. A 303MB download started and fifteen minutes later, the N8 restarted, though there wasn't any discernible change from after the *#7370# procedure.

Rafe has always asserted that the two procedures should produce the same results and it seems that he's right. The full reinstall is obviously more bombproof, but on a correctly working phone the two operations are indeed equivalent and both leave an awful lot of application installs (Maps, Store, Qt patches and other runtimes) in place, in a protected area of disk C:

The HARD reset

It's at this point that I had to start clutching at straws. What about the truly HARD reset, the one Nokia do NOT recommend, the one a service centre might employ as a last resort? The 'four-finger reset of doom' that completely wipes the system disk (C:) - what would that give me and did I have the courage to try it? 

Of course I had(!) - this is uber-geek territory and I'm an uber-geek, or at least taking the pain so you don't have to (wonder).....

On the N8, the reset sequence is:

1. power off
2. hold down volume-down, camera shutter and menu/home
3. keep holding the three buttons above and then press the power button for a couple of seconds
4. release the power button
5. wait until the logo appears and then release the other three buttons

Following this sequence, the Symbian interface appears really quickly - not surprising as chunks of it have been radically pruned(!) And check out the new metrics:

As you can imagine, I almost fell off my chair when I saw the system disk statistic. The big question though is: what's missing and how much of the extra 140MB of space will be swallowed up when I restore the relevant applications?

Restoring missing core functions?

I'd always thought that Qt was one of the components that got removed when one did a full hard reset, but it seems that Qt 4.8.0 is now baked into the Belle Refresh firmware (and thus loaded in Z:) - I did a Qtinfo check after the hard reset and it reported everything present and correct. In fact, an awful lot was present and correct, including all the stuff normally associated with modern Symbian, including the full array of homescreen widgets.

There were only three major software chunks missing:

• The Nokia Store - back in the day, this could be restored by simply going to store.ovi.mobi - but it's harder now. I sideloaded an archived copy of the Store client from here on AAS and it installed perfectly. When run, it prompted an automatic update to the latest version, of course. The two operations took around 20 minutes to complete.
• Nokia Maps/Drive - thankfully, there are numerous versions of this around, but the best, latest and most foolproof is in the Store itself, which offers the latest variant of v3.9 of Nokia Maps Suite 2.0. As usual, this is a slow install too, but then it's quite large and includes a lot of extra components. Time taken: about fifteen minutes.
• various pre-installed third party software, most of which (though not all) can be installed separately if needed. Quickoffice can be sideloaded or the latest version bought (hey, you probably needed the extra compatibility anyway!) from the Store, ditto Adobe Reader (made by Quickoffice now) or use a third party one like NSR Reader. Vlingo, Shazam etc are all in the Nokia Store too...  Of the bits which can't be added, if needed, are the built-in Gallery-integrated picture and video editors. So be careful not to go down this road if you need those functions.

Checking the main metrics again:

So 40MB of that big C: disk increase has gone, but there's still an awful lot of the gain left. 

Updates

There's one stage left to go through, of course. No, not installing my own choice of third party applications, that's a job for another day (and most of them will install to mass memory, hopefully), I'm talking about official 'Software Updates' from Nokia. Going into SW Update on the N8, I see:

• ColorizIt
• Microsoft Apps 2.01
• Social 1.6.32
• Search 3.2.7

Only the last of these had a component already in the OS, so I'm expecting another big hit on the system disk. I pressed ahead with the updates, which took around twenty minutes (the MS Apps one is by far the slowest). 

By the way, it goes without saying that before assessing any of the metrics in this article, I did the appropriate device restarts - I'm nothing if not methodical! After the Software Updates, we arrive at our final vital stats for our 'ultimate optimised' Nokia N8:

Comparing these figures to the ones I started with, I can discount free RAM - that 5MB increase will soon be taken up by the usual installs and customisations. But I'm proud of the other two metrics. Here's proof of the system disk free space, on my fully configured N8 in working trim:

Around 80MB more system disk space is very definitely not to be sneezed at. Yes, in normal use, with a mailbox syncing in data, and with Web using part of disk C: for its cache, the figure will start going down again, but there's still a healthy increase here, I think.

The boot time will increase slightly too, no doubt, though because I was measuring time until the wallpaper/homescreen first showed, I wouldn't expect it to rise too much. As you add widgets and applications, the actual time until the homescreen becomes properly usable will of course go up further. A saving of eight seconds on boot time isn't significant in the grand scheme of things, but it does give further indication that two years of miscellaneous file and registry 'cruft' has been blasted away and that the Symbian OS is now as efficient as it can possibly be on the N8.

Note that I'm very definitely not advocating most AAS readers go through the same procedures above - in most cases, your Symbian smartphones are working just fine, so you'll be chasing 'diminishing returns', plus there were some items listed above which simply can't be replaced short of reflashing the device with the official sales package software using Pheonix (a tutorial for another day, I feel!). But if you've ever wondered what you'd gain (and what you'd lose) if you did go through any of this - well, now you know!

Comments welcome, as always. Could you face going through this? Do you need to?

Our usual disclaimer applies, of course. If you do play with hard resetting your phone, we take no responsibility for any loss of functionality you might run into! If you're not sure what you're doing then don't do it. Period.

Going by the title, Castle Defender sounds like it would be yet another tower defence game. That class of game entails deploying gun turrets along the route of an enemy march. This is not the case for Castle Defender, but there are some similarities.

In Castle Defender you play a wizard charged with defending a single rampart. From there, you direct blasts from your magical staff that will cut down the oncoming hordes of monsters.

Every vanquished monster gives you gold with which you can purchase upgrades. However, those upgrades only come in the form of attribute upgrades, like attack speed, critical hit chance, etc.

The control interface is not at all intuitive though. For a touchscreen device, one would assume swiping gestures would swing the staff from atop its tower. In trying to do so, I found the thing stuck 90 degrees to normal! Eventually, I discovered that the staff was rotated by tapping on the left or right half of the screen, which in turn swung the staff a discrete amount.

The staff is continually firing, so you don't have to worry about pressing fire. However, those discrete angles means that you have to take more care in lining up your shots as missing is far more likely. Not being able to aim at an arbitrary direction precludes the possibility of the "spray and prey" method of combat!

The monsters come in similarly fixed vectors – i.e. centrally, or to the left or right. Quite often you'll find a full rank, or one on each side. If you can't intercept them before they reach you, they'll stop at the castle walls and begin attacking it. When the wall's health hits zero, it's game over.

Castle Defender is free, so I can't complain too much. However, I felt that the difficulty curve was set too low, and as such the game play became repetitive – I'd have been happy if the hordes of monsters became much denser than they were in the early levels of teh game.

Today, the qooWeather widget app, by qooApps, was updated to version 4.0.1. It was recently taken to version 4, which was a major overhaul of the application; this latest update fixes graphical and power usage bugs.

When qooWeather was updated to version 4, it began using the MSN Weather API as a source for its forecast data. The way in which your location is set within the application settings is by typing a place name. This is unusual as most weather apps usually present a drop-down list of places. You may have to try several versions of your location's name before finding the correct forecast for your location. For example, being based in Hull, I needed to specify "Kingston Upon Hull", the city's full name, to distinguish from other places called Hull around the world.

Once your location and other application settings – such as update period and temperature units – are done, you can tap on the forecast tab to see whether you'll need your umbrella or not!

The forecast view presents a five day forecast with daily summaries. Unfortunately, there's no hourly data available. That's not to say that qooWeather is without merit though. The application comes with two widgets: the 'Now' widget gives a graphical representation of the weather accompanied by temperature, visibility, humidity and wind conditions.

The 'Weather' widget presents the full five day forecast, with graphical representations of each day's weather with minimum and maximum temperatures for each day. This widget is actually much better than the Nokia Belle weather forecast widget which only provides a three day forecast.

You can grab qooWeather in the Nokia Store for £1.00

Although we're still at the boundary of Belle Feature Pack 2 vs 'the rest' compatibility, and thus the commercial theme Fall HD, shown below, doesn't work fully with the latest Symbian version on the Nokia 808 and 701, it's a cracking theme install on every other version of modern Symbian, with immaculate attention to detail (see the keys, below) and perfectly suiting the Autumn feel here in the Northern Hemisphere.

Here's Fall HD installed on my (recently optimised!) Nokia N8:

Lovely atomospheric wallpaper, and matched with subtle highlights throughout the theme; (right) the range of custom icons is immense, I noticed (not shown) that even quickly favourite games like Micropool had been included in the custom icon set.

The virtual keyboard elements are terrific, with lovely autumn-coloured lines and blocks; (right) subtle shading and gradients are shown throughout the interface

You can buy Fall HD from the Nokia Store for £1.50. Pretty good, a premium theme that's worth paying for on a pre-Belle FP2 device.

PS. If the developer's reading this, the issue on Belle FP2 is that the themed keyboard doesn't appear - maybe there could be a FP2-keyboard-compatible version produced?

The Nokia Store servers are, it seems, broken. I've checked on multiple devices and on multiple platforms (i.e. including Meego) and all applications, games and other content are being presented with no description whatsoever. The fault seems to have started over the weekend and is having a significant effect on developer revenues - if noone knows what an application does, why would they buy it? Perhaps someone at Nokia might like to boot up a Symbian or Meego-powered phone, see for themselves and then find out which server is no longer working properly? [update: the power of AAS(!) - Nokia has looked into the problem and fixed it]

Grabbed just now in the Symbian client:

Obviously, freeware items won't be affected as much, since people can grab anyway and delete later if needed. But this fault could have a serious impact on Nokia's professional developer community.

[update] Nokia seems to have identified the faulty server and kicked it - descriptions are now being included again.

It's disappointing that Nokia didn't even spot the issue until I posted here on AAS though, three days after it first manifested - I guess the Symbian-using manpower available inside Nokia is only a fraction of what it used to be?

Nokia today introduced HERE, the new brand for its Location platform, which it says is "the first location cloud to deliver the world's best maps ad location experiences across multiple screens and operating systems". HERE represents a statement of intent by Nokia to become the premier location and mapping platform across multiple device categories and computing platforms.

As part of the announcement Nokia introduced LiveSight, "a technology based on a highly accurate, 3D map of the world". Nokia City Lens on Lumia devices is the first app to provide a LiveSight enabled experience. In addition Nokia announced the planned acqusition of earthmine, a company based in California. earthmine's reality capture and processing technologies will become integral parts of HERE's 3D map making capabilities. earthmine offers a complete solution for collecting, processing, managing, and hosting 3D street level imagery.

A clear strategic imperative of HERE is to be available across multiple host platforms. It's not about any single app, but rather delivering a location platform that will be the backbone for many apps across many platforms. Nokia believe this platform-agnosticism makes HERE stand out from other mapping platforms, but there's a clear commercial imperative.

Nokia believes that the benefits derived from providing a universal location platform is far greater than those that could be derived from using its location assets purely on its own platforms. As part of it commitment to providing HERE across multiple platforms a number of announcements were made.

Firstly Nokia will be launching a HTML 5 based maps application for iOS, which will be available from the Apple App Store for free "in the coming weeks". The app will include offline capabilities, voice-guided walk navigation and public transport directions. The iOS app will be an enhanced version of the experience already available through maps.nokia.com. Secondly, in early 2013, Nokia will make a HERE SDK for Android available in 2013. Thirdly Nokia has signed strategic partnership with Mozilla to bring new location experiences the Firefox OS. The two companies plan to show a mobile version of HERE Maps for the new Firefox OS next year.

Body Mass Index calculators are fairly common in the application world, but this new Qt-written one caught my eye by virtue of being attractive, foolproof and free. BMI Calculator: Ideal weight also graded me in the green, for which I'll be thankful as I head towards the pizza isle in the supermarket....

Here's BMI Calculator: Ideal weight in action:

Now here's an easy question to answer! Note, by the way, that there's no advertising, not even an 'About' Screen or promos - this is simply attractive and free.

Easy entry in either units system...

And a classy graphical depiction of where you are on the BMI scale. It seems I'm in the 'normal' range - phew!

You can grab this for free here in the Nokia Store. About the only downside I spotted was that there's no official way to 'exit' the application. You end up having to press the 'Hangup' key if your phone has one or using the 'close' function in the Symbian multitasking carousel. Ah well.

Frogs don't seem to be the smartest members of the animal kingdom, but that didn't stop some enterprising developers coming up with the game CleverFrog. Maybe they know something the rest of us don't! The game is a logic puzzle - the amphibious aspect is just for aesthetics, so let's forget about the frogs already!

The puzzle that drives CleverFrog isn't new, but it's one that ages extremely well. The object of the game is to clear a pattern of blocks, Lotus leaves in this case, that disappear as you step off them. However, you can only move left, right or forwards; not diagonally or backwards. The novel part of this game, since you play as a frog, is that you can jump across vast gaps between leaves, which make otherwise impossible puzzles solvable.

The trick to the puzzle is finding the right order of loops and cross-overs – in other words, finding the right flow to the pattern of leaves. In my experience, I found the trick was to not over think things, i.e. don't try to work out every single move. As you get used to the idea of what is and isn't allowed in the game, a path just kind of emerges in your mind, as you stare at the screen, well before you make any moves. That's not to say a great degree of trial and error won't be on the menu, though!

The game's graphics are appropriate to the title, and even go so far as to include a little ripple effect in the water as you leap from leaf to leaf. My main graphical complaint was that everything was rather small. So small in fact that trying to accurately touch on the destination leaf was quite challenging, even on a 4 inch Nokia E7-00. The overly small scale graphics seems rather unnecessary when one considers all the empty space around the active area of the game. Why not scale everything up and use the empty space?

Speaking of the Nokia E7-00, I also noted that there was support for cursor keys too, so if you have an Eseries device (e.g. the E6-00) then you can work around the touch input problem by using cursor keys.

Clever Frog is £1.00 in the Nokia Store, and good fun for puzzle buffs.

With light levels going down every day, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it's perhaps only natural to start experimenting with some of the Nokia 808's and Lumia 920's 'Creative' controls for getting better photos despite the absence of strong light. But what effect does fiddling with 'ISO' have? With some photos from Siraj Hassan Mohideen, I have a few pointers...

Introducing ISO

ISO is a common abbreviation (related to the standards body of the name) for referring to camera sensitivity, see here on Wikipedia for the full gen. In the 'old days' it used to refer to the sensitivity of the 35mm film in a camera - these days it's just as applicable, but is all handled in software and electronics, of course.

Essentially, the higher the ISO 'number' (e.g. 100, 200, 400), the more sensitive the film was, and in the modern age, the more data from each individual pixel-site on the sensor 'counts'.

Simplifying it further with a common use case, consider a concert or indoor event. Shoot a photo in the lowish (or at least erratic) light with a normal camera phone and the device has to leave the camera shutter open for longer (perhaps 1/10s rather 1/100s) than than normal in order to gather 'enough' light. The result is blur, both from moving subjects (the people on stage/at the event) and (in the 808's case, it not having Optical Image Stabilisation) blur from camera shake in your hands.

One solution is to set the Nokia 808 or Lumia 920 with a high ISO setting (say, 800). With each received photon of light counting as more significant in the overall auto-exposure calculations, the shutter doesn't have to be open for as long (and that 1/10s might be perhaps 1/40s), with far less scope for blur. The downside is that there's more digital 'noise', in extreme examples even random electronic noise in the sensor gets amplified in importance to become extraneous dots in the final photo.

For a concert photo, such noise is rarely a problem, since there are usually coloured lights and other effects firing off as well, it all adds to the atmosphere, but noise can be more annoying in other settings, which is why ISO isn't kept high all the time when shooting on 'automatic'.

ISO examples

I was going to shoot a series of test photos to illustrate the effect of changing the ISO number on the Nokia 808 and Lumia 920, but happily Siraj Hassan Mohideen has done it for me, shooting with his Nokia 808 on a tripod (for obvious reasons), so I'll include his examples and encourage you to visit his Flickr set for more, perhaps to grab the original 5 megapixel photos, for further inspection?

Here's the set up - a night scene overlooking a city. Very little light around, here's what the 808 sees in 'auto' mode:

This illustrates how dark it was and hopefully sets the scene for what Siraj tried next. If you were there on the roof looking at the same scene, you'd see it as slightly brighter after a while - the human eye has a wonderful 'night vision' adjustment that's very akin to ISO adjustment(!), wherein the 'rods' in your retina shift their sensitivity over a period of many minutes until they too can, in theory, perceive individual photons of light hitting a rod and firing off a neuron in your retina. (In theory. Not all of us have quite such acute night vision!)

What you'd like a photo of the scene to represent, then, would be something close to what you'd see if you were there and your eyes had adjusted to the darkness. With Siraj's help, let's up the ISO number in the 808's settings (this would also work on the Lumia 920, of course) to '400'. (The phone spots that you're adjusting ISO and thus allows more leeway in exposure time, by the way.)

What a difference! Only Siraj could say whether this is now an accurate representation of what his eyes saw, and even then it would depend on how long he'd been outside in the darkness, i.e. on how good his night vision had become. The upping of ISO here is so dramatic that it's tempting to push the technique further. What about using ISO 1600? 

Impressively, the scene almost looks like daylight, albeit with a very odd colour cast, not least because the sky and sources of light are 'all wrong'! I'd say that pushing ISO to 1600 is just too artificial and that '400' was about right, though photos are always subjective in terms of what is 'closest' to perceived reality.

Managing digital noise

Now, the example above is somewhat extreme, in that the original scene was quite dark, but it's also well chosen to try and spot digital noise in that oh-so-clean sky. Bringing up the ISO 200/400/800/1600 photos full size and cropping the top left corner gives us:

In fact, the noise is not as annoying as I thought it might be - there are quite clearly artefacts and noise when looking at this 1:1 level, but they're not obvious when looking at the whole scene.

Then there's the big question of what you want to do with the photo - if you're going to be resampling it anyway, perhaps for posting online, then the 'speckles' of digital noise will mainly be lost anyway.

Why not just 'night mode'?

Why not, indeed. Fiddling with ISO settings is a bit geeky and almost all phone cameras have a 'night' mode. This typically ups the ISO to 200 or 400 and ups the exposure too, giving much the same effect as an expert fiddler above!

In summary

Whether using manual ISO adjustment or the preprogrammed 'night mode', the things to remember are:

• Rest the phone securely on something solid (to stop camera shake during long exposures)* - preferably use one of the many portable phone tripods
    
• Don't go silly with trying to get daylight photos at night - they'll look artificial. Accept that a night shot should look as if it was taken at night
    
• Remember that moving subjects will be blurred. You can use this to artistic effect (as here in a nice piece by Aatif Sumar), mind you!

* This isn't quite so critical on the Lumia 920 because of the OIS, but it's still a good principle to strive for

PS. I also covered getting better low light photos in video form here in the last few minutes of Phones Show 185