Hi guys, I copied this from my blog as I wanted to know everyone's opinion. Please comment
After some reading and listening to Podcasts, I think it is time to say something about Nokia's greatest fair of the year.
From what I hear from the guys at various Symbian blogs, there is little information about Ovi, but even from Nokia's press releases, I can smell that it is going to change the meaning of multimedia in smartphones, something very exciting, sharing videos, music and photos on the internet, on computers and phones, it's like a social networking website with all simplicity and all tools at your hand.
As I said in my latest review (Nokia 5310), S40 are coming very close to S60. Today there is little difference between them, they got the same basic UI, but S40 still lacks of advanced multitasking (only the music player minimizes), and there is no support for many programs and platforms.
Many of us do agree that S40 has a stable OS, not buggy, the phones themselves have a good built, and it's ready to be used, while on S60 we have to install programs here are there, and even though they have everything, on S40 they are altogether.
Another great news was the Comes with Music sign on N81, etc. This is definitely good for artists, as there will be less copyright breaking. Obviously Universal won't leave artists empty handed, and Universal themselves must have profited from the deal. A good thing is DRM, although it can be broken easily, most end-users don't have the knowledge or time to do it, so people will start owning music legally. Of course this won't stop piracy at all as the rest of the people will illegally download music, but it should reduce it, even minimally.
People won't bother as much to transfer music from their computers to music players, etc, but it can make a slight disadvantage as there will be something there that won't work, the same happens with Symbian installation files, you cannot send them from phones. Most people might not care as long as they have the music.
And of course Apple will need to protect themselves, or the sales of iPods will drop drastically, but seriously, what is the use of an iPod anyway, besides the internal hard drive?
Another news is the form factor, N82 is back to candy bar, and I don't really like it. I do like exotic designs, as long as companies don't overdo it, like the N93, which is a marvellous shaped phone, I don't prefer candy bars, but don't have anything against it.
Before I finish, I would like to comment on internal hard drives or memory cards. I think we definitely need a good solid hard drive which is fast and has a few GB of storage, but we also need a removable memory card, we could have one memory card with music, the other for video capture, etc, I think removable memory is always helpful.
Finally, what future S60s should have...From the All About Symbian podcast, I heard some bloggers suggesting better resolution, better build quality, dedicated camera buttons for macros, etc, and Darla Mack even implied that new phones shouldn't be downgraded to a 2 megapixel camera, which I totally agree. But what I think is really important on phones is battery, if we don't have those fuel cell batteries soon, I think our phones won't last long with all the functionality, even though we come from black and white call and sms phones to 5 megapixel 8GB GPS phones, this is not real battery life.
