Finally after a long wait and a lot of fiddling with s60v5/s60v3 devices, I had a Symbian^3 running Nokia phone to play with! It was the recently released Nokia E7 mobile running Symbian^3 OS. Now as the title says, this article is about those Nokia phone users who have used or are using previous version of symbian viz. s60v5/s60v3 and those who have ditched Nokia complaining about buggy OS et al.
As an answer to all the bashing from mobile community Nokia released Symbian^3 version of their popular symbian series. Read on to know how I felt after using a Symbian^3 phone, the OS with which users have a lot of expectations. I have spread this article into various aspects of a mobile device to which a users looks for, in turn hopefully making it easier for you to judge this new OS from Nokia.
User Interface (U.I)
One of the biggest reason why symbian was ditched by a lot of users was it’s age old User Interface. Nokia has addressed this in Symbian^3 release beautifully. Starting with home-screen, functionality of multiple home-screen with ‘live’ widgets has been included. Moving from s60v5 running N97, I thoroughly enjoyed this inclusion in Symbian^3 running E7. Android scored on this point and Nokia, although a bit too late, did follow up and added support for multiple home-screens! Though additions of home-screens widgets is limited by grid lines but I felt comfortable placing widgets. Better than android in my opinion.
Accessing the menu will make you realize that you’re still using Symbian per se. Reason being, the menu style is the same as was in s60v5, new set of icons replace the old clunked icons which are easy on eyes. Rounded edges make them look good. Nothing fancy in this department.
Next up are some other worth discussing U.I changes. The music player now boasts a album/artist layout mode in landscape mode which make browsing music library a breeze and looks sexy indeed 😉 The other notable improvement is animations when exiting screen, switching windows, etc, they have been improved a lot from what was delivered in s60v5 devices. Bundled with a 680 Mhz processor it does please you with animation effects. Not much of a usability improvement but it surely makes you feel good after using the phone.
Hardware Performance
This may vary for different handsets but all the Symbian^3 running mobile phones have at-least 680 Mhz of processor, going up to 1 Ghz. Such powerful processors compliment to new OS well. You’ll be in for surprise in many area’s. If you are switching from a Symbian^1 device to a Symbian^3 phone then you’ll notice huge improvements in:
- Phone boot time – It is almost instant now!
- Speedy thumbnail generation for pictures as well as videos.
- Less time taken to swap between photos.
- Theme effects. More powerful processors compliment the users with beautiful theme transition effects. Application switching, exit’s, etc are treat to the eyes.
- More powerful battery. It means you’ll be able to enjoy more time on your phone!
- Attractive Standby Screen. Not exactly related to hardware :p
Software Performance
Again, as a user (Read a NON-TECHNICAL User), you are more interested in how your mobile’s phone’s home-screen appears, menu and other things that appear on the screen. As discussed in “User Interface” section above, everything has been revamped. Call it a face lift but it still works and especially for those who have been using Nokia handsets. Apart from that, the issues like frequent “hanging” of Nokia phones, becoming slow after installing bunch of applications, un-reliable OS, etc have also been addressed in the new OS. Besides booting insanely fast, you’ll notice that the phone barely hangs, in-fact for me It didn’t hang once! Installing applications didn’t affect the device performance at all. All this and RAM of 256 MB work just well.If you have a different view point and/or want to share something with me then please do leave a comment below. I would love to see your comment 🙂
very good article. I think its compatibility to applications is poor.
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