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Nokia E7: Does It Compete With The N8 Or The HTC Desire Z?

In many of my posts about the Nokia E7, ever since I received my trial unit, I kept saying that “I don’t get it”. I don’t understand the purpose of the E7 or who will buy it or for what reason. The rationale behind my thought was that in terms of Symbian competition, the Nokia N8 offers a much more complete package, while in terms of QWERTY/Business competition, there are plenty of better options with Android on board.

However, saying something is not like proving it in an objective comparison of specs, so given that I have an N8, E7 and HTC Desire Z in my hands, I set out to take some pictures of all of them for you, and to do a specifications comparison table.

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Protect Your Nokia N8 With Martin Fields and ToughGuard

The Nokia N8 is one of the most solid devices built to date: with an anodized aluminum body that can take some beating and come back victorious and a gorilla glass screen that defeats scratches by nature, it’s hard to find a reason why you would need, nay want, a screen protector or carrying case. However, I have come across a few pictures of tortured N8s with scratched bodies or screens and while I knew that it would take a lot of unfortunate events to get them to that state, I knew that I wanted the best class protection for my lovely orange N8. See, I’m a clumsy person, and it isn’t a rare scenario for me to drop my phone because I was hand gesturing too much or carrying many items with it in one hand. So I turned to MobileFun whom I knew would have the best and most extensive catalog of Nokia N8 screen savers and cases.

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SkullCandy Chops Headphone Review

I love Music: melodies and lyrics speak to me on an emotional state, not a technical one. I’m not an audiophile in any way and you could spend hours explaining to me what Bass or Treble is but I’ll never care or even be able to notice them when listening to a song. One thing though that I do care about is a decent pair of earphones. I just want them to be super comfortable, durable, and to deliver good music to me. 3 years ago, I tried the Sennheiser CX series and I was immediately hooked: I knew I would never buy anything but in-ear headphones.

However, a few months ago, MobileFun proposed I review the SkullCandy Chops. They looked super cool with a nice behind the ear design, that I decided to give them a go and see if that design can work for me.

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Hardware Tour Of The Nokia E7: A True Masterpiece

Very few devices have seriously impressed me in terms of build quality these past years. As mobile phones got larger and more sophisticated, many manufacturers moved to cheaper materials to balance the cost of the phone, and many other manufacturers simply failed to make a solid phone because of the bigger touchscreens that introduced more fragility to designs. For the past months, I’ve looked back at my Nokia E71 and wondered: will we ever see the same grade of heavy duty build with the modern industry requirements?

Thankfully, Nokia, in a time when everyone is questioning their ability to compete, whipped out the big guns and delivered two premium devices: the Nokia N8 and now the Nokia E7. With everyone focused on Symbian’s shortcomings, Nokia keeps proving that they know how to do phones: phones that work well as phones, that don’t creak squeak or rattle, phones that feel fantastic in your hands, phones you are tempted to caress and stare lovingly at for hours, phones that stand true to the legendary saying about Nokias “throw a Nokia at a wall and it’ll come back in your hand, fully working”. The E7 is that and more. Join me for a tour of the E7 in pictures.

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Around The HTC Desire Z In 25 Photos

About a month ago, I decided to take the plunge for a new Android device. My choice boiled down between the HTC Desire Z and the Motorola Milestone 2 that we reviewed earlier, as I want or more accurately need, a physical QWERTY keyboard on my phone. I eventually went for the Desire Z as the Milestone 2 wasn’t yet available in Lebanon, and I have always wanted to own an HTC device.

Here is a hardware tour gallery of my HTC Desire Z’s Super-LCD touchscreen, metallic clad and Qwerty goodness.

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Nokia E7 Griefs Shed A Light On Some Important Symbian Glitches

Over the past 4 years and more than 40 review and trial phones that have passed in my hands, there are barely a few experiences I can count as terrible. One of the most recent ones though occurred just a couple of weeks ago and it made me see things in a different perspective. See, my luck had it that I received a faulty Nokia E7 unit, which had software glitches from the first time I turned it on and then hardware issues as well. While this was bound to happen, as there will always be that one unit that runs away from quality control in production plants, it isn’t the problems that arose that annoyed me, but the fact that Symbian’s only way of fixing them was Restoring and starting from scratch.

Here is a recount of my adventures with the Nokia E7 and the glitches I started noticing as I went along battling it to get it to a working state.

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Samsung Galaxy 5 Review: The Small Android Your Non-Geeky Friends Will Love

The story with Android has been quite similar these last few years: manufacturers seem to always be on the run to deliver bigger, faster, better, devices with more specs inside than anyone can humanly memorize. Dual-Core processors, 4.3″ screens, 3D displays, HD video recording… are all interesting, except they target what? maybe 5-10% of the users. The rest, well, they get very confused and somewhat overwhelmed with these features. They want a phone, that’s it. Maybe they want Facebook in there, a camera of sorts, and email would be a nice plus. For those, the Samsung Galaxy 5 is perfect.

The Galaxy 5 is the smartphone brother of the iconic Samsung Corby, a device with a simple design, dedicated keys for calls, quite limited features in terms of camera and other hardware, but it packs Android Eclair 2.1 instead of Samsung’s dumbphone OS. But the question is does this mix work?

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Audioboo Comes To The Ovi Store Worldwide

Almost a year ago, I discovered the joys of using Audioboo for covering live events on Twitter. See, Audioboo is kind of the audio version of Twitpic for Twitter. You get 5 minutes of audio recording, and you can set that to be automatically sent to Twitter with a link to listen to the Boo. Quite simple, and when you want to get live impressions of people, it works wonderfully well. Except that there wasn’t a version for Symbian before and I had to use my iPod Touch and wait until I had WiFi around to upload my Boos, which defeated the purpose of its instantaneous approach.

Well, that problem is now solved as Audioboo has recently been launched in the Ovi Store, and after a few days of being limited to the UK only, is now available worldwide.

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Nimbuzz Releases Premium Version In The Ovi Store

I switch mobile phones quite often and whenever I get a new Symbian phone, I have a specific routine of 30 minutes, including removing the useless stuff away from the Main Menu, changing some settings and installing Whatsapp, Gravity and Nimbuzz. You can be certain that if any of these 3 applications aren’t there, I won’t be using the phone at all.

Nimbuzz has easily become the default Instant Messaging applications for Symbian, thanks to its one-login that imports all IM accounts instead of having to setup each one separately. Lately, it also added compression which made the app snappier for all tasks and decreased its data usage. But for the past few versions, Nimbuzz has been trying to get some revenue out of its free service by displaying ads in its chat window, which are non-intrusive but may annoy some people nonetheless. Enter the premium Ad-Free version of Nimbuzz, now available in the Ovi Store for about 2.29$. This new Ad-Free version of Nimbuzz currently offers 3 advantages over the free version.

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Get The Promised Symbian Overhauled Look Right Now

One thing Symbian has never had a lack of is excellent theme designers. Ever since the S60 2nd Edition days, you would simply have to hit up a small search on the internet to find hundreds upon hundreds of theme overhauls to help you personalize your device and always keep it feeling fresh. If fresh is what you’re aching for, then we’ve got just the thing for you.

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Gallery: Frosty Metal Nokia C7 vs Silver Nokia N8

The Nokia N8 and C7 have been available for quite a while in the market, and we’ve already brought you reviews of the N8, many photo galleries of it, and a separate gallery of the Frosty Metal Nokia C7. I happened to have both the silver N8 and the Frosty Metal C7 in my hands at the same time, so I thought I’d share a hardware tour comparison with you, explaining the key design differences between these otherwise slightly similar Symbian^3 devices. Continue reading “Gallery: Frosty Metal Nokia C7 vs Silver Nokia N8”

IntoNow Is Like Shazam For TV – Incredible!

Announced a few weeks earlier, IntoNow has easily become one of the most amazing and awe-inspiring applications I have on my iPod Touch. “Why?” I hear you wonder. Because it has managed to bring the incredible sound recognition technology that we all marveled at with Shazam, beyond music, to TV. And it didn’t stop there, it also added similar sharing features as Miso and GetGlue, to offer a complete TV-watching experience.

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The Magic Pill For Connectivity Problems On Symbian: NetQin

Connectivity settings on Symbian have been Achilles heel for the platform ever since EDGE and then 3G and WiFi were introduced to mobile phones. At first, it was each app that wanted to connect and kept nagging you with a popup. Then Destinations were ushered in S60 3rd FP2, making it possible to seamlessly switch between a data connection and WiFi, but you still had to approve connectivity and pick a Destination for each app. Then, on Symbian^1 and 3, something awesome was introduced to help with that: a default “Internet” destination and connections could happen without your approval. Except, like I said in my N8 review, it ended up being an absolute nightmare.

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Nokia C7: Buy It Or Go For The N8?

A lot has been said already about the Nokia N8 and the C7, the first two Symbian^3 devices that started shipping a few weeks apart from each other; a lot of comparisons have been made, a lot of opinions voiced. I was lucky enough to have used both handsets for a couple of months each, separately, to form my own impression of them, and to have a real world feel of how they compare to each other and how they fit in a daily use scenario. In this post, I will try to answer the dilemma of any buyer who is torn between both handsets.

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Nokia C7 Frosty Metal Picture Gallery – It’s Icy Cool

After announcing it during Nokia World 2010, the Nokia C7 gathered a lot of fans, thanks to its slim profile, elegant looks and impressive features. However, I have to admit that I wasn’t charmed personally. So when I got the first C7 in my hands, the Charcoal Black one, I was anxious to see how the press release picture would translate into a real device, and it simply left me annoyed. The whole device looked like a black rock that has been squished and smoothed, or a Nokia E66 (which I like) that has been thinned by a rolling pin (which I don’t). Plus, the all-black look was so bland with no charm and no character. It’s safe to say that I wasn’t a fan.

But as luck has it, I got to exchange my review unit and the second one ended up being the Frosty Metal version of the C7. And boy does a simple color change make a difference! I love the “white” C7, absolutely love it. It’s classy in all the right ways, and the silver/white mix gives it an incredible icy cool feel. The photo gallery here is to share with you all the beauty of this awesomely crafted device.

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