It is with great pleasure that I announce Nahid, one of Symbians premier and world class themers.

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Well, it certainly took me a little while but I finally got him. Xavier has been one of my favorite themer and I’ve showcased a lot of his work previously so its with great honor that I present you Xavier one of Symbian premiere themers without a doubt.

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Scalado is one of my favorites Symbian software houses. They are the “mobile imaging experts” and tech like CAPS prove it. When Ovi Store was launched, one of the first surprises was to see a new Scalado product there. It’s called Autorama and it will help you to capture panoramic images with your Nokia phone. Read more

Its with great pleasure that I introduce to you Joost de Moel, Nimbuzz’s lead developer for Symbian. As many of you know Nimbuzz is my favorite Instant Messaging client. Read more

Myself and the rest of the NMT team wanted to formally ‘thank’ all our readers and supporters for showing much love to us, Nokia Mobile Talk is a little over a month and we already have 3,600+ unique visits and 10,000+ page views, 86 RSS subscribers and 91 Tweeter followers. Simply stated “Thank you”.
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Today is a special day, NMT is happy to have had a chance to interview one of the premier Nokia/Symbian Bloggers, his name Ricky Cadden aka the Symbian-Guru.

Tell us a little about your background and what lead you to start blogging about Nokia and Symbian?

I have a background in Business Marketing and Management, but have been blogging about Nokia/Symbian for over 2 years. I started as a commenter on PhoneScoop.com, and was pointed towards HowardForums, where I became an active member of the community. I launched Symbian-Guru.com in November 2006, after Symella was ported to S60v3 and I found myself emailing my favorite blogs with the news – I realized I might as well have my own blog.
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Share your Adventures with friends, Shoot n Share, its that simple, is the motto of Mobypicture who is headed by Mathys van Abbe. Nokia Mobile Talk is privileged to be interviewing this great visionary who has taken time from his busy schedule to answer a few questions to share with our readers without further ado, here is Mathys van Abbe.

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Just a quick news flash because my favorite email client Profimail by Lonely Cat Games has been updated to version 3.11
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Just wanted to formally welcome OscarB to the Nokia Mobile Talk team, he hails from “la madre patria”(the mother land) of Spain. OscarB will be covering the Nokia and Symbian news in Spain which is very popular. OscarB comes from a programming background and he was actually the person responsible for translating one of our favorite Twitter clients for s60 Twittix to the Spanish language. Oscar has a great Nokia collection presently using the N95 8gb, the Nokia 5800, and his trusty E61. So stay tuned for some very cool and interesting post from our friend from Spain. Que viva Espana, Ole.

First, I would like to confess the fact that I’m utterly in love with the screen. The resolution of the 3.2 inch TFT screen is a gobsmacking 340×640, which is great for a mobile of this price bracket (all the other near/better than VGA resolution screens are found in mobiles that are vastly more expansive). The colours are great and are comparable to the PSP that I own, and viewing angles are great for a mobile screen of this size.

Granted, the screen on the iPhone has more vivid colour and is more responsive, but that’ll be comparing apples (pardon the pun) to oranges now, wouldn’t it? The Resistive TFT found on the 5800 is generally inferior to the iPhone’s Capacitive screen, although - as a bonus – the 5800’s screen is not limited to finger input only (like every other Resistive screen, you can tap on it with ANYTHING).

Compared to other Resistive screens, the 5800’s screen fairs well, with sufficient sensitivity. Although the fact its Resistive nature of the screen means that you will have to physically push in slightly for any finger input to register. Even then, I haven’t had much in terms of problems using my fingers. The screen gets extremely fingerprint ridden after a day of use though, and the fact that the screen is only encased in thick plastic (rather the mineral glass found on some pricier alternatives) makes one worry about its durability.

In terms of Navigation, it’s mostly standard S60 fair, although everything has been slightly reworked to more effectively support contextual touch-based navigation. This is primarily noticeable on the home screen, where a tap to the clock would lead you to the Clock application, a tap on the date/time opening up a list of profiles/link to the calendar, a tap on the space that houses the connection/activity indicators opening up a small window that lists down the indicated activity with a link to the Connectivity app.

Also, conveniently enough, a tap on the Media Bar button next to the XpressMusic branding will bring up the ever useful Media Bar no matter where you are.

There is also an option to replace the standard S60 Shortcut Bar with the new Contacts Bar interface. This contacts-centric interface lists down all communicative activities with 4 contacts that you have chosen. I personally find this option irrelevant to how I use my 5800, so I prefer to stick to the traditional Shortcut Bar (mind the low quality contact Images. They COULD look much better, I just never bothered to replace them with better ones).

The recent S60 voice recognition navigation is also included, doing quite well in places with acceptable levels of ambient noise. The fact that it is non-speaker dependent (works well with anybody’s voice) is also great.

Other than that, S60 main menu is still typical S60, with optimization in size of fonts and icons to facilitate finger navigation; arguably at the cost of efficiency as the icons are far too big. This results in more wasted space then I would have liked within the Symbian menu. The default, from the box arrangement of the menu makes no apparent sense as well, as could be seen from how I’ve re-arranged everything for more efficient navigation.

There is also a slightly exasperating inconsistency with single- and double-taps found throughout the interface, with little or no rationality behind it. I finally gave up trying to make sense of this after a few days.

The lack of proper multi-selection in any form is also a maddening minus, thankfully enough third-party apps exist to alleviate this problem but why is such a core process such as multiple file selections so hard to implement within the core OS?

Another popular question that I’ve been asked is the smoothness and speed of the interface itself. As a Symbian based device, it impresses. The 5800 has one of the fastest and smoothest that I have come across – most of the time. Sometimes, though, particularly when the background apps start heaping up and/or available memory start dwindling; the entire system crawls to a halt until you close the offending apps (or restart).

But I do have to say that the amount of programs that has to run for this to happen is quite admirable for a Symbian system with a (relatively) puny 369MHz processor (with NO 3D hardware of any kind) and only 128MBs of RAM. Thus, generally, if one takes that into account (and run applications accordingly), the 5800 won’t disappoint.

On some rare occasions, there are also split-seconds of lag that happens for no apparent reason. These are hoped to be smoothened out by the firmware people at Nokia within the next couple of months.

As for the OS, while Symbian S60 is a relatively mature platform, Symbian 9.4/S60v5 is not quite there yet. The relative newness of this variant of S60 would mean that there will be some programs that will not run as well (or run at all) on the 5800. But this is a problem that we will see being addressed by developers progressively throughout the next few months leading up to the launch of the next, S60v5 powered Nokia Flagship, the N97.

THREE MONTHS LATER: Still in love with the screen, especially how it can be so huge on a mobile so compact. In terms of beauty though, the Omnia HD’s huge Capacitive AMOLED screen has already trumped even the iPhone 3G IMHO, more so the lowly 5800. Nonetheless, things are shaping up to be better than expected on other fronts. Ever since the V20 firmware rolled out, the 5800 is noticeably faster and more stable. More S60v5 compatible programs are also being released, much to my delight. The release of Gravity AND Nokia’s own Image Browser unleashed the potential of kinetic scrolling, which really needs to be utilized everywhere!

Next: The Camera and other Media Capabilities of the 5800.

In terms of design, the responses of all that I showed the 5800 to varied from “Wow, nice phone” to “What a brick”, but I personally find that the 5800’s minimalist looks and angular tubbiness to be pleasant to the eyes.  Slightly thinner and wider than the W810i, the 5800 is a joy to hold in my small sized hands, although slightly harder to pocket when used with a silicone protector.

The keypad layout of the 5800 is notable for its near total absence, except maybe for the Call / Menu / Hang Up trio on the bottom of the fascia and the touch sensitive Shortcut Bar button next to the Xpressmusic branding.
So, how DO you type or dial on the 5800? Nokia has (thankfully) provided a whole set of virtual input methods for the Symbian 9.4 / S60 version 5 that runs on the 5800, including:

• Alphanumeric Keypad (the normal pad you find on most mobiles; best for one handed use).

• Full-screen QWERTY (a full screen, landscaped mini-keyboard; best for two handed use.

• Mini-QWERTY (small floating QWERTY keyboard; use with stylus, nearly useless in actual use)

• Input Recognition (a handwriting recognition pad; usable for Chinese and – if I figure how to do this out later – Japanese input).

Coupled with its vibrating haptic feedback system, touch based input on the 5800 is a joy. It does lag slightly from time to time (one of the major hurdles of software based input), but it’s otherwise acceptable enough for blind one handed typing at my “normal-average” speeds.

What else do we have on the fascia? There’s the earpiece hole up top , next to which we have the iPhone-esque contact sensor (blanks out the screen to any touch when you put the phone to your ear) and 3G secondary camera (with the Media Bar button – yes, that’s a button – right below it).

Now, moving on to the left side of the 5800, we find the plastic covered access slots for the microSD card and also the SIM card, and the hole for the lanyard.

On the right side, we have the volume controls (sadly bound to control VOLUME ONLY, could’ve done well as scroll buttons OR track change on hold like on the W810i), the camera button and – in what is probably Nokia’s few “true” strokes of genius – the wonderful keyguard switch nestled right in between.

The keyguard switch (I like to call it the ”lock-slider”) brings new meaning to the phrase “slide to unlock”, and even though it’s not without its flaws (sometimes I have to slide it a few times to unlock the screen), the action of picking up your phone while sliding the lock has quickly become an automatic reflex.

Bye bye, “press menu key and then press * to unlock” or the variations thereof.

The top of the 5800 is occupied by the power button, the AC charger port, and 3.5 inch (a standard port, thank you Nokia!) audio jack cum TV-Out connector and the microUSB port (that doesn’t charge, boo).

On the very sparse bottom is the mic opening and… not really anything else.

On the backside of the 5800, we have the camera module up top: a Carl Zeiss optic equipped 3.2MP module with Auto Focus – the normal fare, nothing exceptional (more on that later). Down on the bottom we have the plastic stylus snug in its silo.

Ergonomically, everything is where it’s supposed to be, even if the left side could be more properly used up (Scroll key? Gallery key? Anything I can map later to something else). But other than that, I have found that the 5800 is generally sound in terms of ergonomics.

Build quality wise, this ain’t no E-series, so it’s a full on plastic fantastic and nearly everything is made out of ABS plastic. Even so, it is built well with only a few creaks or gaps, and it generally feels solid in my hands.

Of the parts that do creak, there is one creaking section on the front fascia (left bottom side) that drives me mad. Sadly, this seems to be a common enough occurrence amongst 5800 users (in Malaysia at least, as observed from the Lowyat.net Forum’s 5800 thread). Some users have also reported light leakages on the front fascia (particularly around the Trio buttons on the bottom of the fascia), but in my particular sample everything’s fine. There is also the famous problem with the earpiece, where the earpiece volume fluctuates from low to inaudible randomly; again, my own sample seems free of this problem and it will also be readily repaired at your nearest Nokia Care Centre if it ever happens to you.

In retrospect, the 5800 is as well built (even better in some aspects) as my old W810i, although the generally smooth plastic used on the 5800 is far inferior to the textured plastic used on the W810i in terms of slippage and tactile feel.

In my old W810i review, I did mention how a “drop test” would be the paramount test of build quality? Well, the 5800 definitely passes this, as my friend dropped his the other day and it survived the ordeal fine. There are even more torturous tests done on the 5800 (which it survived, generally), which a quick Google search would easily uncover.

THREE MONTHS LATER: This thing is better built then it feels like in the beginning. It has survived more drops (covered in a case of some sort most of the time) then I would have liked to count, although the screen (particularly on the lower left side) has developed some creaking tendencies when pressed. The Full Screen QWERTY keyboard is much less useful then first anticipated, much more so with the lack of predictive input of any kind. Alphanumeric + T9 is far slicker in comparison. The lack of hardware keys are still noticeable and the creaks less so. I sent the 5800 for repairs on the earpiece out of paranoia (without it ever going crazy in the first place) and it’s now working fine, no problem.

Next: The vast Screen, Navigation and OS

Go Back: The Introduction