Guide to Smartphones: Part 3

As promised, after Camp WinMo, Camp Blackberry and Camp iPhone, it’s time to look into another part of the smartphone market – Camp Symbian.

Nokia N95 8GB

Symbian, which caters to a lot of mobile phone manufacturers, is almost a synonym for the largest one today, Nokia. That being said, let’s straightaway jump to the flagship Nokias – the N95 8GB and N96. Why two phones? Now N96 is Nokia’s official flagship phone, boasting so many features I can’t even memorize them. But did you know that the N95 8GB (the black one) is still the best performer? N95 8GB actually has a faster processor and better battery, and I don’t know why Nokia didn’t use them for the N96….probably reserving it for a better version of the N96. N96 32GB maybe? Anyway, even if you prefer SEs or any other phones, chances are you’ve played around with a Nokia phone and you’ll agree with me that the Symbian operating system is indeed very good. Coupled with the powerful hardware of N95 8GB and N96, those are, in my opinion, the best combination for a phone today. And that’s before accounting their excellent camera. Symbian S60, being easy and functional as it as, could use a better looking interface, something along the lines of TouchFLO 3D or X-Panel would be a big plus if Nokia decides to do so, but of course, both phones mentioned does not have a touchscreen. Nokia had just launched their XpressMusic 5800 which sports their first touchscreen, so it’s still too new for me to discuss here. But nonetheless it’s not meant to beat the N95 8GB or N96… it’s not even an N-series. I guess we’ll need to see how Nokia’s touchscreen technology will trickle up to the N-series later, but believe me, when it does, it’s gonna be good.

UPDATE: The upcoming N97 will be indeed a touchscreen phone after all And Nokia plans to throw every tech they have to it (still a 5-megapixel camera but with 32GB memory!) for this specific reason: To kill the iPhone once and for all.

Nokia N97 (possibly)

Of course Nokia isn’t the only one playing with Symbian. Another Symbian S60 phone that I’m particular interested with is the Samsung INNOV8. The first 8-megapixel cameraphone (Samsung actually has a 10MP phone, but not for GSM) seems like a serious competitor to N95 8GB and N96. I’ve always liked the build on Samsung phones…try go to your nearest mobile shop and play around with the INNOV8 or U900 Soul. They just shout ‘classy’ . While you’re at it, try to listen some tunes. The INNOV8 features a surround sound technology called DNSe, and from my experience, it is just impressive. Nokia might be the biggest handset maker, but don’t forget that Samsung is the biggest electronics company in the world. What electronic device that Samsung does not make?

Samsung INNOV8

So congratulations to Symbian But as promised in Part 2, the new mobile processor that you’ll start to see planted in phones of 2009 onwards is from the company…. wait for it…. Nvidia.

Nvidia Tegra chip

Remember how I stated earlier about Nvidia aims to push the whole computing world to another new level? Kids, they don’t only mean desktops and laptops. A smartphone is essentially a tiny computer itself. As of now, the only Tegra you should know about is the APX 2500 so let me list down a few features it has. Up to 12 megapixel camera support. High Definition video encoding (720p H.264). Sure you would ask, why would someone watch a HD video on a freaking mobile phone?! Well the answer to that is that the Tegra APX 2500 can output video through VGA (think projectors), composite and S-video (think television), USB and, well, HDMI (think really big televisions)! Also in the package is support for GeForce ULV, OpenGL ES and Direct3D Mobile.

But what exactly is Tegra? It’s basically an all-in-one chip that does almost everything a smartphone needs. It’s a combination of a CPU, GPU, northbridge, southbridge and memory controls. Now the CPU part isn’t really that new…the Tegra is still based on the ARM11 processor. ARM processors are the processors used in possibly all phones today, including the Nokia N96 and iPhone. Of course it’s not as powerful as an Intel chip (fastest ARM runs at 800 Mhz, half of the Intel Atom’s 1.6 Ghz), but the huge advantage of ARM is that it consumes very low power. That’s why phones can last for days while the smallest notebooks (they call these netbooks) only a few hours. Speaking of that, unlike Intel, ARM is not even a company. ARM is actually a processor design type which licenses are sold to other companies for manufacturing. Thus, in Tegra’s case, Nvidia will be that manufacturing company, implementing the ARM processor design into the APX 2500, and more in the future.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the ARM design is also widely used in MP3 players (iPods, Walkmans, etc) and other multimedia device, but of course it’s a different version of the phones’ ARM chip. There’s also another version for GPS equipment. The Tegra has models for MP3 players and GPS equipment as well, but we don’t have to go into that.

So that’s the end of my Smartphone article. I hope it gives you a clear view of what’s going on in the market right now. Let’s recap: WinMo sucks, Blackberry/iPhone not really complete, Symbian good. And things to look out for in 2009 will be the development of Android into a (hopefully) great OS, and how would it fare with the new Blackberries, iPhones, Symbian systems and WinMoes of next year. Maybe you’d think the scene won’t be much different, but actually there’s one thing I left out from the previous paragraph……

The Nvidia Tegra is mainly developed for Windows Mobile 7.