Tag: Nokia

Apple Mobile and Music refresh 2012 a.k.a Let-Down of 2012

Last week, Nokia announced its new flagship mobile phones – the Lumia 920 and 820. Although the hype was certainly there, the interest was not and Nokia’s stock continued to drop. Tonight, Apple showed off its newest iPhone and musical device/software refreshes. Hype was certainly there, interest and wow factor…not so much and the really annoying thing is, I predict its stock will still keep rising.

Tim Cook and iPhone 5

Led by new CEO Paul O’Grady…I mean Tim Cook (seriously they really do look like each other), Apple’s September event kicked off as usual with some statistics on how well the fabled glass and metal products are selling around the world. Awesome. A few minutes in and the iPhone 5 was unveiled. The naming of the device is totally logical seeing as it is the sixth iPhone and therefore iPhone 5 is the obvious name for it. To those of you that saw the leaked images and rumored designs of this new device, it is exactly the same. Like with every iDevice launch, there is little to no surprise as with the help of the Internet everyone knows exactly what to expect. The non-surprises don’t end there; the new iPhone has a 8-megapixel camera that improves on the one found in the 4S with some new technologies that make shooting in the dark or finding the nice bokeh background easier; it certainly took me by non-surprise. The new iPhone also has LTE capabilities, meaning a faster 4G antenna. For those of you who aren’t familiar, 3G was like broadband for the mobile phones, 4G/LTE is like fiberoptics allowing a very quick data connection to your mobile when you are in a supported area. The iPhone 5 will also have Bluetooth 4.0 and of course iOS 6, the features which were covered in one of my previous articles. Oh and a quicker A6 processor. All these updates seem a bit dull and expected but wait! There are a few new things the iPhone 5 offers that lift it a step up from dull to mundane.

Insert here.

The new iPhone 5 has a redesigned dock connector. Gone are the days of the nine year old (seriously that long ago?!) 30-pin iPod connector and in is the new “Lightning” connector. The cable still uses USB but one can probably assume that it will be 3.0 with the possibility of there being a Thunderbolt alternative. Given the naming of the new connector, I reckon this is very likely. The new connector is also reversible meaning that it is the same when rotated 180 degrees reducing the possibility of a broken port when fumbling around the charger in the dark after a night out.

One plays basketball...

And finally, the iPhone 5 has the long rumoured and debated larger screen. Measuring in at 4 inches diagonal, it is still one of the smaller screens in the world of touchscreen smart phones. Apple’s reasoning being this is that it wishes to preserve the fact that a phone should still “fit” in ones had. In order to maintain the iPhone 4’s Leica-Camera-like form factor, the iPhone 5’s display is merely longer with 1136 pixels across as opposed to 960. Still shy of the 720p displays that many smartphones are now sporting. Heck the Lumia 920 has a whopping 1280×768 in a 4.5″ display. That’s 35% more pixels. The display is now 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio and many apps are being updated to support this new size. It seems that this time round, Apple was more focused on the form factor because the iPhone 5 has a metal back and is much thinner than the 4/4S but at what cost? Is the 4 inch display really enough to rival the competition?

Simple is better?

After the iPhone 5 came iTunes. iTunes has been updated to version 11 with a redesigned user-interface, a simpler store that is the same across all Apple devices and more social integration. By that I mean there is a “Like” button attached to almost everything. The new iTunes needs to be used rather than described as it is more about the interface rather than features. The only actual new feature seems to be the iCloud integration for those into backing stuff up in the sky and even that isn’t very new as everyone knew it was coming anyway.
Bit of discrimination?
Another non-surprise was the iPod Touch. With every release of an iPhone, the iPod Touch models also get an update to keep up with the apps that will be inevitably developed with the iPhone as a priority over the iPod. This time was no different. The new iPod Touch models are updated with the new 4 inch display and better cameras front and back. The processor has also been updated to the A5, a step down from the A6 in the iPhone 5. And like it’s mobile bigger brother, the iPod Touch sports the new Lightning connector. It comes in various colours and has a pop out bit to tie a strap to much like a pocket camera.

I hate round icons...

Finally, two refreshed products that I genuinely did not see coming. First the iPod Nano. Completely redesigned and now looks like someone nicked an iPod Touch from Tinker Bell. It has a 2.5 inch touch screen and also a home button not dissimilar to the one on the iPod Touch. The display is also multitouch. For the first time, the iPod Nano gets Bluetooth 4.0 which means better handsfree capabilities whether in the car or the gym. Aesthetically, the Nano looks shockingly like the Nokia Lumia range:

Will Nokia sue Apple for copying its design like Apple sued Samsung?
Fit for a stormtrooper

The last product was the Apple earPods. Redesigned earphones that will ship with all new iDevices.

So Apple has announced its new products and every year, my hype and excitement decreased. Probably because the smartphone market is so saturated and innovation is dwindling. It is hard to come up with something new without it being copied or ridiculously useless. The iPhone 5 was everything I expected and nothing more. When the iPhone 4S receives the iOS 6 update, it will be the same phone, just shorter. Frankly the only thing that grabbed anything that resembled my attention today was the iPod Nano getting Bluetooth. The iPhone still lacks NFC, the hardware has not improved to play audio at a remotely acceptable level through the speakers, the recording capabilities have not improved, the camera is much the same except for improved low-light conditions (which was absolutely necessary). Compared to the Nokia Lumia 920, which has PureView, PureMotion HD+ screen that can be used while wearing gloves, and Rich Recording that can record up to 140 dB without losing clarity, it’s clear where the real innovation lies.

People will naturally queue to get their hands on the iPhone 5 but I have a feeling that the numbers will not compare to when the iPhone 4 launched. A month or two ago, I stated that Apple had better pull it out of the bag or my next phone will be something different, thus severing my last tie with Apple. I am due an upgrade in November, guess it won’t be an iPhone anymore.

Nokia Lumia 920 Review: The World’s most Innovative Smartphone

Yesterday Nokia unveiled its latest and greatest at Nokia World. The two devices shown were the Nokia Lumia 820, a successor to the current 800, and, the Nokia and Windows Phone 8 flagship and dubbed The Most Innovative Smartphone in the World, the Lumia 920. Giving a phone such a title is a bold statement, but Nokia has packed a lot of tech into the handset. The main problem with the announcement though is that once again, Nokia demonstrated a remarkable lack of ability in giving one.

CEO Stephen Elop is comfortable on stage – clear, concise, articulate and confident. Quite why he doesn’t do the presentations, like Steve Jobs always did, is a mystery. Instead, he welcomed Jo Harlow, who stuttered and stammered through some impressive features with a tone of voice that suggested they were very ordinary. Then Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, who appeared to tell people what he told them back in June – that WP8 allows resizable tiles. Only this time he appeared on a mission to put everyone to sleep. Thanks Joe. And then Kevin Shields. Actually someone who is excited about the tech, and gives good demonstrations. But you’re unlikely to see someone else as annoying and loud on stage.

Yet, despite the presentation issues, the keynote got attention. Switch to Lumia, Windows Phone 8, Nokia, Lumia 920 and PureView were all trending on Twitter, and there were some remarkable technology features unveiled. What was most refreshing was that some of the features address some of the most common and annoying problems of owning a mobile phone, but which often go overlooked by other manufacturers.

The screen is one such issue. Everyone is familiar with the pain of trying to read something on the screen on a sunny day, especially in direct sunlight. By ‘pain’, I mean ‘impossibility’, especially on a dark background. Samsung’s approach to screens is to make them bigger – which doesn’t help; the Galaxy S II decided to make the default email client a black background with grey text, making it hopeless to read outside. Apple brags about Retina Display (which is nothing but a marketing term for ‘we have many pixels’). Yet Nokia yesterday unveiled its approach. It has long been using ClearBack Display technology to make screens easy to see outdoors, and the Lumia 900 was voted the best readability for such purposes.The 920, though, takes it further. Not only is the screen HD+ (which has more pixels than Retina Display), it has smart polarisers to help you outdoors. What does that mean? It means, much like the eye glasses that do the same thing, that the screen automatically adjusts itself depending on the sunlight to reduce glare. Meaning this is a device you can comfortably read under bright sunlight.

That alone won’t be enough to set the sales rocketing, but it is good to see a company focusing on improving the experience to such an extent that the typically overlooked aspects are still being improved. Perhaps the biggest announcement regarding the screen though was the ability to use the phone while wearing gloves. Nokia calls this Super Sensitive Touch. One of the big debates surrounding capacitive screens vs resistive screens was that the latter registered touch input from anything – styluses, keys, gloves, and so on – whereas capacitive only registered flesh, or special products that were designed to touch capacitive. Super Sensitive Touch for the first time combines the technologies, allowing the smoothness of capacitive with the benefit of being able to touch it with anything. The main area this is a concern of course is in cold weather when wearing gloves – every phone on the market with a capacitive screen requires the gloves to be taken off. Kevin shields demonstrated this working onstage not with thin material, but with heavy-duty ski mittens. This Super Sensitive Touch will end the frustration of tapping a screen at the wrong angle and nothing registering because it was the nail, not the flesh, that made contact.

Nokia also demonstrated its advancements in mapping technology. Google Maps may be the first port of call when you want directions from a computer, but Nokia’s offering provide perhaps the best in the world. With complete offline navigation and free turn-by-turn navigation, you can even be directed indoors. Nokia Drive, its satellite navigation app, has been updated so that it learns your daily commute and even tells you what time you need to leave home to account for traffic. But what got most attention of the location services yesterday was Nokia City Lens, the augmented reality app that offers a more intuitive way to discover the world around you. You can point the camera around and it will show you places to eat, drink, theaters, cinemas and so on. Point it at a building with shops inside and it will even tell you what’s in there. If you find a restaurant, you can simply tap it and see photos, reviews, and call directly to book a table. All by looking through the camera. With the current alternative to this being pulling up the search engine and finding local points of interest, the leap in the ease of exploring a new place is quite remarkable.

So far, this is all good stuff. But Nokia had two particular gems to show off. Wireless charging was one of them. While this feature is already around on the HP Touchpad, Nokia is the first to popularise it on what will be a mass market consumer product. The benefits of it are obvious – no more wires to trip over or lose, no wearing down the USB port on the phone or pulling it loose, and, thanks to certain partnerships, you don’t even need to worry about charging when you’re out and about. Virgin Atlantic’s Heathrow lounge will have recharging pillows, as will Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, large coffee shop franchises in America. Sit down, open the paper, and your phone will charge while sitting on a small fabric on the table too.

As part of this, Nokia spoke about the Lumia’s NFC capabilities, being able to pair up with wireless headphones and speakers by simply tapping them together – but, the NFC speaker they demonstrated featured a wireless charging area on its top, so the phone can charge while playing music. Imagine an iPhone dock, but without plugging it in.

The second big announcement was somewhat expected: the camera. Long revered for its imaging superiority, Nokia was expected to make a big announcement. After the 41MP PureView handset announced earlier this year, and the N8 two years ago, it was clear the Lumia would get some camera enhancements from Nokia.

The Lumia 920 comes packed with PureView, the stunning new optics technology. The 920 has floating lens technology, allowing more light to enter the camera to not only take clearer pictures in low light, but also reduce blur to produce clear photos every time. Not only does the 920 capture between five and ten times the amount of light of any competitor smartphone, it also lets in more light than most DSLRs. The short video below shows the breathtaking capabilities of taking pictures in extreme low light.

Nokia demonstrated some low-light comparisons between the Lumia 920 and a competitor (it wasn’t named directly, but they tended to use the Samsung Galaxy S 3). Competitor’s attempt is the first photo of each set, PureView second:

Also within the camera advancements, Nokia announced two ‘lenses;” Cinemagraph, and Smart Shoot.

Cinemagraph elevates photos to something else, as they allow movement. By selecting a photo then entering Cinemagraph, users can simply rub the area they want, and it will then start to move.:

 

SmartShoot continues the trend of the screen advancements in solving a common problem: people walking past your camera as you want to take a picture. We all know the feeling, and there’s no way around it other than waiting for everyone to get past and take the picture quickly before someone else walks by. Unless you own a Lumia 920, in which case you can use SmartShoot, which analyses the moving sections of a photo, then removes them:

All in all, it was an impressive demonstration. It would have been more impressive still if Nokia could learn how to deliver a truly excellent keynote, but the features largely spoke for themselves. Wireless charging, unparalleled mapping experience and peerless camera technology certainly puts the Lumia 920 amongst the most desirable handsets. And while Apple has been bragging about the ‘resolutionary’ Retina Display, Nokia has not only made it brighter, and packed 2.5 times more pixels than the nearest competitor to offer blurless scrolling, it also packed it with smart polarisers, and allowed any material to touch it and register.

The World’s Most Innovative Smartphone may just live up to its name.

 

Apple vs Samsung. And the winner is…Windows Phone

As of this week, Apple is walking away with a ruling that dictates Samsung copied many aspects of the iPhone. Samsung is set to pay out over $1 billion in what boils down to way over-inflated patent infringement. Now Samsung will of course appeal and attempt to have this decision mitigated as much as possible in order to save a few quid and its own backsides. However over inflated, out of proportion this whole fiasco was, one can be certain that somewhere in the corner of the court room, Microsoft and Nokia look at each other, nod their heads and smile.

What the general public now will “learn” from the past events will be various interpretations of “Android Copied iPhone”. It isn’t just Samsung though, so shouldn’t that also apply to HTC phones as well? The answer is simply yes, however, as the lawsuits Apple and Samsung filed against each other involved hardware as well, this battle was between the Korean Giants and Cupertino Fruits. There are two likely reasons why it was Samsung who were in court, not another Android OEM. The first one is that at any given time, only one Android maker is making profits. That was HTC at one point, but is currently Samsung. That makes it a prime target for Apple, as when Steve Jobs said he was prepared to go nuclear on destroying Android, it’s wise to choose the company with the biggest public perception. Secondly, whereas HTC has its own designs, as do LG and Sony, Samsung was dumb enough to copy the hardware aesthetics of the iPhone:

The main difference is that Samsung’s offering is slightly taller, and the Home button is rectangular rather than a circle. The dock even mimics the colours of the iPhone’s. Worse still, Samsung applied this look to many of its phones.

The mobile industry is heading in a single direction and has been since the first iPhone came out. The large touch screen interface, generally easy to use OSes and UIs, push email and installable apps were bound to emerge on any platform as technology advances. The importance is who gets their stamp on an improved existing idea first; and that person (company) will then become the school child in a playground who thinks he’s reinvented how to build a sand castle and will challenge anyone who says otherwise.

So where does Windows Phone stand then? For the past 18 months, every Windows Phone review has noted the radically different UI and the way things work. However, beneath the surface, all is still the same – easy to navigate UI, touch screen interface, apps. I’m not for a second saying that any of the items on WP are copied from any other company. I’m merely highlighting that the same functions can be integrated well into a phone OS without infringing anything, and Apple noted as such during the courtcase. The simple rule of thumb is just to be original, something many companies, technology or not, seem to be severely lacking these days.

Does Windows Phone have an advantage now? I would say a profound yes. While Apple and Samsung now tread very carefully, which means development will slow, Microsoft has a clean slate to push out as many new and exciting features and devices as it can. Plus for customers like me who do see the similarities in Android and iOS, it may be refreshing to actually change to a new phone OS in Q4 2012. The ruling against Samsung may even make the Korean technology company to spend more time on its Windows Phone 8 offerings; although it has released some Windows Phones already, Android has always been its main focus. However, knowing that Apple isn’t on a witchunt for Windows Phone may be a key incentive for it – but it will have to think up some new hardware designs.

The first round of the battle in the ever-growing smartphone wars has been fought. Apple emerged victorious, Samsung lost in court, but the  true winner to me looks to be Microsoft.

Nokia Purity HD Headset Review

There’s a peculiarity in the technology world. Nokia is, in many ways, the undisputed media king. Dolby Surround Sound, untouchable cameras (HTC’s new flagship One series, boasting its camera, still pales beside the Nokia N8, not to mention the jaw-dropping 808 PureView), TV-Out, HDMI, superior audio output without headphones, and the 808 PureView records sound at such a high quality that it’s like you’re really there. Mass storage mode lets you drag any file onto the phone, and you can plug your USB stick into the phone and play the video, music or photos on a TV, which is great if you’re staying in a hotel. The N900 would wirelessly play media from computers on the Wi-Fi network, and these could then be played on the television via the TV-Out. And, if you were watching a film via TV-Out, you could multitask without interfering with the display on the television, say if you wanted to look up the actor on IMDB. Features such as these made Nokia phones incredibly close to genuine computers, and users were not left thinking “i’ll have to wait until i get back to my laptop”.

Yet, for some reason, Apple is considered the king of media. Apple, whose devices play only the iTunes file format – forget AVI files and click-and-drag here. Apple, who will play media from the phone or tablet to the television only if you own Apple TV. Apple, whose cameras have only just started to take decent photos provided it’s not nighttime, because an LED flash is apparently good enough. Apple, whose audio output through the iPhone’s speakers is so tinny and weak as to be barely listenable. Any sensible person would consider this a slight dichotomy – how could a company whose devices do more, regardless of the file format and output, and take better pictures, and sound better, and interfere less with the user’s actions, be considered inferior to a company whose devices do relatively little, and only if the user follows strict criteria?

The reason is probably because Apple invented the iPod, the go-to portable music player. Portable music is convenient, but it’s always been a trade off because of poor sound quality – audiophiles aside, many people neglect to think of the quality of headphones and consider them all equal. With the iPhone’s speakers so bad as to make music not worth listening to, it’s a sad fact that the supplied headphones aren’t much better. In recent times, though, headphones have received more attention, especially with the Beats headphones accompanying HTC handsets. Nokia has also been paying attention to this entertainment sphere and has now released the Nokia Purity HD Headset, designed to offer the best portable music listening experience ever. For those using them on a Nokia Lumia device, the headphone lead can also be used to pause, skip, forward or rewind tracks, answer calls and talk hands-free.

This is all good on paper, but do the headphones live up to the hype, especially the “High Definition” title?

In a word: Yes. The Purity HD headsets are extremely comfortable, designed for the padding to rest around the ears rather than on them. They come in a range of colours designed to match the colour of the phone, including black, cyan, magenta and white. The quality delivered through the headphones is second to none; few would argue against the fact that typically listening to music on a mobile phone yields a poorer listening experience than on a stereo or through other speakers. The Purity HD headset, however, seems to have finally overcome this. The audio levels sound exactly as they were intended, with a perfect blend of treble, mid and bass. Compared to other headphones, on-ear and in-ear, the difference in quality is noticeable immediately, especially on songs with prominent bass or low-end. Perhaps the ultimate positive result was that they even made the iPhone’s music sound good.

One of the main features of the Nokia Lumia range is the inclusion of music apps, like Nokia Music and Mix Radio. With Mix Radio, users can launch the app and choose a genre, from blues to jazz and pop to disco, then select a decade or a random playlist, with no login required, offline playback and no usage fee. In other words, the Lumia range provide a hefty amount of free music to be listened to at any moment in time even if the user doesn’t transfer any of their own collection to the device. And with top of the range headphones to accompany it, all Lumia owners can enjoy a stellar listening experience as and when they want to.

Apple made a huge marketing campaign over the iPhone containing an iPod. Perhaps now Nokia needs to make a similar campaign informing the public that they can have their own customisable, portable radio wherever they go, so they can break away from their standard playlists. And with the Purity HD headphones, they can finally enjoy listening to the music they enjoy the way it was meant to be listened to, no matter where they are.