Anybody using the Nokia 808?

You don't even need to sit for an hour on the train to London to see what most smartphones get used for.

It's multimedia consumption, messaging, and the odd phone call.

Apple opened up the "media consumption" market with their Iphones and their very slick "finger" interfaces.

Now everybody in the business is doing it.

I think WP does it OK. Symbian led the market before Apple redefined it, it has missed that boat, and while the latest version works fine (I use the phone for all the usual stuff too) Nokia never made it run smooth and the app developers deserted that platform c. 2010 when it became apparent that the fast buck was to be made on IOS, especially as it made piracy difficult.

Not many people are running more complex apps (FTP, VPN, etc) on their phones.

Symbian is history now, but everything is "history" at some stage.

It looks like they did what everybody expected: they put the 808's camera into a WP phone.

It will sell.

WP is "OK", for dumb "Iphone-style" use (I've had a play in shops) but you don't get the great flexibility of Symbian, the latest touch-screen incarnation of which is very good.

Update: Nokia seems to have quietly fixed the HSPA bug, under the guise of an update to the picture gallery app.

The phone doesn't crash anymore.

It still suffers from the occassional failure to register properly on the network (Vodafone), so you can make calls and send texts etc but can't receive any. However all modern phones sometimes do that; Justine's Iphone 4 (T-Mobile) does it quite often. I usually catch it because I have a bit of kit we make at work set up to send me an SMS (with the temperature in the office - no kidding) every morning at 9am.

Just an update on this...

Nokia have not fixed the HSPA bug. One has to use the phone with HSPA disabled, which limits the downlink speed to c. 300kbits/sec (in the UK, 3G) versus 10x that on HSPA. It's not bad... not when you are old enough to remember 300baud modem access to Compu$erve

One also has to drive (satnav) with power connected, otherwise the phone crashes every few minutes as it downloads traffic info etc over 3G. But one normally would have the power cable in for that anyway because the screen is on all the time. I don't think any smartphone on the market manages more than a few hours of GPS and 3G and the screen on.

In all, the symtoms are of internal power distribution issues, for which there is a known hardware repair, if somebody can be bothered to harrass some Nokia service centres who don't want to do it, and who will send it to the Czech Republic for repair for a few weeks...

Otherwise, it's an awesome phone+camera. It is not as good as a £1500 DSLR, which is just as well otherwise there would be a lot of sick people around.

Denigrating Symbian is a rite of passage nowadays, but in reality it works superbly. Even down to little things like direct drag/drop to a PC (via ftp or direct network share browsing). Compared to an Iphone/Ipad it is amazing in flexibility and functionality.

For flying, apart from always having a really good camera, it is good enough to show PDF approach plates (Jepp, not the AIP ones which generally need a much better/bigger screen) and any enroute charts which you can print to a PDF.

I look forward to getting wifi connectivity from a satphone, for tafs/metars etc, but I understand Achim's Thuraya XT tests on Thuraya's "GMPRS" have been less than encouraging - much as I found in 2009.

Some cracking reading material there too.

Yeah; it used to be de rigueur to harrass a visiting sales rep from a semiconductor company for as many data books as he could bring with him - or her, in the case of the famous Macro Marketing with its all-female sales force

Nowadays, they are out of fashion because the data is online, and also any design engineer with a brain (or any interest in the financial well-being of his company) is sticking to a very small range of cheap and readily available commodity components. The whole market has moved towards specialised chips which are single sourced and very expensive, offering a neat solution which might cost 10x more.

I don't think there is a decent solution to the prop effect - other than a slow shutter, around 1/120 sec or slower.

The only way I know to get that is a semi-pro video camera, The manual settings for shutter speed (and also stuff like audio level so an external mike can be used effectively) tend to be used to mark off the top of the cheap stuff and the bottom of the "pro consumer" stuff.

It will be interesting if the 808 movie mode can do anything useful there (there is no shutter speed config) otherwise that's a reason to keep the big old Canon movie camera.