Symbian 3 + Nokia N8 = WOW!

Psycho Sonny said:
could you give some specifics on what you think is wrong with it?
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The GUI. Its just antiquated, its non intuitive, its confusing to navigate to settings and it looks out of date. Now in terms of function there are plenty of functions (but apps, well rather lacking). Believe you me I am still quite a Nokia fanboy, I was prepared to buy this phone, but after trying it I was so surprised at how far it was behind. I prefer my N900, and even that is a bit of a dog.

Let me say, the camera is simply awesome, I wish other phones had this. HTC cameras are just crap, Samsung, a little better. Nokia is the imaging mobile phone company, lets all pray for the N9 (with Meego).
 
Christo said:
This is good news for the N8 - there will be no Symbian 4, ie the N8 will continue to be upgraded and will get all of the new features that were going in to Symbian 4, its actually great news for any new Symbian phones.:)
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Yeah, that was indeed a very decent move on Nokia's part, don't think they'll get back all the Maemo fans whom they abandoned and left to starve though :p
 
Well, I'm still hoping the N9 will rock. I'm confident it will in fact - even if it's not perfect on release I think Nokia are committed enough to Meego that they'll keep improving and iterating regularly. Although now it's slipped to next year I probably won't wait around for it, my phone's falling apart so I'll go for the Desire Z.
 
Christo said:
The GUI. Its just antiquated, its non intuitive, its confusing to navigate to settings and it looks out of date
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your telling me, that you get confused when, pressing the menu button and settings pops up in the bottom left hand corner of the screen?

it takes me all of 0.5 seconds from unlocking the phone to get into settings.

as for looks out of date, why change a menu system if it ain't broke? just to make it look new? it certainly isn't out of date its just not been changed in a couple of years.

much like the iphone/ipod touch, its menu system hasn't changed in 4 years, does that make that out of date also?

seriously come up with some better criticism.

i used the sat nav today, downloaded the maps onto the ovi suite on pc then transferred them to phone. messed around with nav settings so it only used integrated gps and nothing else, otherwise you get annoying pop ups. the sat nav worked flawlessly it is also amazing for speed cameras and shows you nearby useful locations such as petrol stations, etc.

sat nav software alone of this calibre costs £50+, so i see it as an amazing addition to the phone. the gps was extremely accurate. i did find it had some problems with roundabouts. sometimes it would say exit roundabout at the 3rd exit, when it was the 2nd exit you are supposed to get off at, so long as you quickly glance at it or have someone else holding it, you should be fine and be able to correct this. this only happened at 2 roundabouts though, and my journey had at least 20 roundabouts. so its a minor issue.
 
Psycho Sonny, you seem to be missing the point here.

I'm sure that nearly everyone on this forum would be able to operate a Nokia N8 with absolutely no trouble at all, and I'm sure they would be able to do things just about as fast as they can on an iPhone or Android phone.

However, that does not change the fact it has weak app support, which like it or not is the main selling point of the vast majority of phones at the moment.

That also does not change the fact people dont find it as pleasing to use as the other phones, obviously. Otherwise everyone would have one/be getting one?

Symbian and the way it works has been around for quite a while now, it is fast going out of fashion and this phone will do nothing to change that.

Add the fact that Nokia will most likely abandon it too and get to work on Meego and the N9, its not a worthy trade off just to get a better camera (for most people it would seem anyway).

As long as you are happy with it though (and the other people who got one), that is fantastic. There is no need to get insulted on the phones behalf! :p

I personally think that if I wanted a good camera and decent sat nav (if its as good as you say), the slightly rubbish software and app support wouldn't be enough to put me off, but I just dont use the camera on my phone a great deal, otherwise I'd be considering one most likely.
 
There's nothing INHERENTLY wrong with Symbian guys, nothing that affects the UI anyway: OS interfaces are just a lightweight skin on top of the shell, if Nokia's choices for the S^3 UI are less than optimal it doesn't mean they made them because they were somehow limited by the underlying kernel, so let's drop this inane line of argument. I'm sure they could've just been lazy and copied one of their competitors' UIs if they wanted to, Symbian is a pretty open and capable OS.

I had a chance to play around with someone's N8 yesterday and yes, it did seem a slightly less smooth experience than the competitors - screen transitions weren't _quite_ as smooth, for instance, but I don't think that's a limitation of either the hardware or the OS, it probably just needs a patch or two to get silky smooth. Other things I wasn't crazy about were the fact that you can't seem to get a keyboard in portrait mode, just a keypad (I may be wrong about this, only got to play with it for 5', but I couldn't find a way to switch to full qwerty). But that's a DELIBERATE design choice by Nokia obviously intended to make it easier for one-handed operation - some of us may not like it cause we're not used to it, but it does do what they intended, you can't argue with that. You CAN say, what a stupid choice, everyone's used to portrait-mode qwerty, but that's not true really, only iOS and Android users are - the huge masses of feature-phone users used to keypads and thinking of upgrading to smartphones might find this much easier and more approachable.

Sure, there are other UI choices which I DON'T see the sense of, like the fact that the landscape keyboard and text input box take up the whole screen. I don't like it cause I tried to check my emails on that thing, I tap on the "username" field and the whole webpage disappears and I can only see the keyboard+input box. After typing a couple of letters I think "wait a minute, I didn't tap on the password field by accident, did I?" It was a little annoying cause the only way to check was to finish typing so the keyboard closed, but not quite a gamebreaker. Maybe they did it cause it's computationally less expensive to have a separate keyboard window that completely covers the screen, so they don't have to keep visually updating the underlying application while you're typing. Or maybe just because it's a narrow screen and they figured you wouldn't be able to see much of the underlying app anyway, I don't know. I don't personally like it, but there's something that annoys me in every OS.

I think S^3 WILL succeed commercially, but only because of Nokia's huge brand power. Nokia is a household name, and there are lots of pretty huge markets like Asia where neither iOS nor Android have achieved huge market penetration yet, so S^3 won't have to fight an uphill battle. I don't think it's anywhere NEAR the same league as its competitors yet (maybe after a year of patching it will be), but the popularity of the brand will help with that, and Qt will help with 3rd party developer support, if it works and they bend over backwards to support the devs (who wouldn't want to be able to tap an installed base of phones bigger than Android, BB and iOS COMBINED?)
 
Psycho Sonny said:
your telling me, that you get confused when, pressing the menu button and settings pops up in the bottom left hand corner of the screen?

it takes me all of 0.5 seconds from unlocking the phone to get into settings.

as for looks out of date, why change a menu system if it ain't broke? just to make it look new? it certainly isn't out of date its just not been changed in a couple of years.

much like the iphone/ipod touch, its menu system hasn't changed in 4 years, does that make that out of date also?

seriously come up with some better criticism.

i used the sat nav today, downloaded the maps onto the ovi suite on pc then transferred them to phone. messed around with nav settings so it only used integrated gps and nothing else, otherwise you get annoying pop ups. the sat nav worked flawlessly it is also amazing for speed cameras and shows you nearby useful locations such as petrol stations, etc.

sat nav software alone of this calibre costs £50+, so i see it as an amazing addition to the phone. the gps was extremely accurate. i did find it had some problems with roundabouts. sometimes it would say exit roundabout at the 3rd exit, when it was the 2nd exit you are supposed to get off at, so long as you quickly glance at it or have someone else holding it, you should be fine and be able to correct this. this only happened at 2 roundabouts though, and my journey had at least 20 roundabouts. so its a minor issue.
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An N8 owner defending the N8 I wonder why?;)
Look Psycho Sonny like I mentioned, after a years hiatus from Symbian (I have used Symbian phones for years), I was shocked. Talking about it not changing, Symbian pretty much hasnt changed since its non touchscreen days - unbelievable. Its just been modified to work on a touchscreen. When Symbian touch first came out Nokia said it was their first step to compete with the iphone (I was in the queue for the first release of the 5800..) it turns out it was their only step.
You refer to the N8's function, I didnt knock its function or hardware at all. If the N8 had a different OS, maybe meego, Android or even Palm, id be all over it. As it stands Symbian massively behind. Meego is its only hope.


manveruppd said:
There's nothing INHERENTLY wrong with Symbian guys, nothing that affects the UI anyway: OS interfaces are just a lightweight skin on top of the shell, if Nokia's choices for the S^3 UI are less than optimal it doesn't mean they made them because they were somehow limited by the underlying kernel, so let's drop this inane line of argument. I'm sure they could've just been lazy and copied one of their competitors' UIs if they wanted to, Symbian is a pretty open and capable OS.
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Theres no argument, people are just expressing their opinions on Symbian. Theres been nothing 'inherently wrong' with Symbian touch for years;).. when the hell are they going to fix the GUI then!? (The Symbian 4 images, ie the direction Symbian seems to be going, are far from promising).
 
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Sho said:
Yes i use to like my noia phones. But now that i own a htc phone, android os. I wont go back now.

Nokia need to ditch the symbian os. Yes it was very good back then when there wasn't any other os to compete with it. But at this rate they are gona go bust if they dont improve.
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I agree,i recently bought a 5230 (although for a friend) and having used it for a couple of days i really don't like symbian os6v5 (the touch screen version) im sure they have fix a lot of the woe's with the ^3 but symbian hasn't really developed since OS6V2 with V3 just adding the hugely annoying signed requirement for apps to install and v5 a few touch screen parts and thats about it.

They should go with Andrioid to be honest as i highly doubt the new mego platform that they are working on with intel is going to beat android in anything,it might come near close in terms of usuability and speed but even if it manages that it won't have hardly any developer support and will have a near empty app stoe (much live ovi is now),nokia is either going to have to make the switch to android or cope with losing being the no.1 mobile phone manufacter in the world in a few years.

I understand diversity is important in terms of mobile operating system's but having too many OS'S will ultimatley hurt developers and consumers,fragmentation and diversity need's to be balanced and not one or the other.

I mean if you think about it,if someone doe'snt have some dominating power in the OS sphere we would all be using different versions of linux now and incompatibility would be a major issue on the desktop scene,also we wouldn't have a unified gaming development platform (direct x),someone having large marketshare and influence on standards is actually a good thing,rather than everyone at roughly same market share and each with different idea's of what they want the pc system to work/look like.
 
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A work friend got one of these on Friday and have to say its terrible.

I had a good 45 mins of playing around with and its absolutely no different to my old Samsung I8910.

The scrolling simply did not feel 'connected' to my finger at all, it was slow, the browser is laughable & the homescreen widgets pointless.

Worst of all though were:

The in-built e-mail client - OMFG it looks the same as my old SE P990i client did about 10 years ago. No thanks.

On-Screen Keyboard - No portrait Qwerty......with everything Nokia have apparently changed in S3 (& and don't much that has.!) surely sticking the most basic of sodding portrait Qwerty's would have been easy and surely a no brainer.!

Ok they have stuck an industry leading camera on there & there is no doubt it is the best on the market but its nowhere enough to rescue it from the god awful software controlling it..
 
Question for the people who have this.

Just how good is the browser on it?

I'm not too bothered abouts apps and email, I mainly Web Browse > Message > Call > Camera > Music, im convinced it has all of those bases covered well, except the web browser.

How well does it perform compared to the iPhone/Android ones?
 
MrLOL said:
on another note How Awesome would this phone be on Android


Get it done Nokia !
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I would have one already without question.

In fairness, having read about 15 reviews of it today, it pretty much does everything an Android phone will do, and you can have your home screen set up sort of like you would on your Android phone, however...

It takes considerably longer to setup, which I dont think is too big of an issue unless you change it all the time, and the browser is a bit suspect, which is why I've asked about it.

Other than that, its camera is mind blowing, its feature list for media is very extensive and works well and the battery is fantastic, the only thing holding me back really is the browser potentially being poor. It doesn't seem too bad though in videos.

The only thing that slightly baffles me is why they haven't put a Portrait Qwerty keyboard on it..... :confused:
 
Robboftw said:
I would have one already without question.

In fairness, having read about 15 reviews of it today, it pretty much does everything an Android phone will do, and you can have your home screen set up sort of like you would on your Android phone, however...

It takes considerably longer to setup, which I dont think is too big of an issue unless you change it all the time, and the browser is a bit suspect, which is why I've asked about it.

Other than that, its camera is mind blowing, its feature list for media is very extensive and works well and the battery is fantastic, the only thing holding me back really is the browser potentially being poor. It doesn't seem too bad though in videos.

The only thing that slightly baffles me is why they haven't put a Portrait Qwerty keyboard on it..... :confused:
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if you dont like the in built browser, you can get opera or mini opera off of the ovi store for free.

i am running opera i think its version 10 or 10.1 or something like that.

have zero problems with it what so ever, but i dont use the internet on my phone very much.
 
Yeah, I just read that the Opera browser is very decent incase you cant get on with the built in one, so thats a plus at least :p
 
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