Yes, yes, this is Google's mapping product and imagery and this isn't an Android site, but thanks to the rather useful Google Maps clients on both Symbian and Windows Phone, everybody can benefit from today's massive Google Street View update, bringing coverage of Hungary and Lesotho (I had to look it up too) and a whopping 350,000 miles of new or updated street imagery. And, as usual, all for free, so thanks Google.

From the Google blog:

Today, we’ve reached 50 countries with the launch of Street View in Hungary and Lesotho and are significantly expanding our coverage in Poland and Romania, among other locations around the world. This is also the largest single update of Street View imagery we’ve ever pushed, including new and updated imagery for nearly 350,000 miles of roads across 14 countries.

Now you can take a virtual stroll through the historic center of Budapest, right along the Danube (the river that carves the city in two). See the Hungarian Parliament building or the famous Chain bridge.

View Larger Map

Budapest, Lánchíd (Chain bridge)

...We’re also refreshing and expanding existing Street View coverage in France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore and Thailand. And, we’ve added new special collections of a host of picturesque spots—using our Street View Trike technology -- that include Portugal’s Pena National Palace, or the Sha Tin Che Kung Temple in Hong Kong or the Kilkenny Castle in Ireland.

View Larger Map

Kilkenny Castle, Ireland

 

Great stuff and all easily accessible and enjoyable using the free Google Maps client for Symbian (out of date in terms of UI but still fully working and downloadable (again, after a brief hiatus) from m.google.com in your web browser (or from here):

On Windows Phone, you can use the gMaps Pro client (recently updated for full Street View navigation) to achieve the same browsing of our planet:

Oops, looks like the Street View car caught the castle during a period of maintenance!

Well done to Google for all the work mapping and photographing the planet, and well done as well for maintaining all of this with an open API that software can hook into, in this case on both Symbian and Windows Phone.

I'm someone who is fascinated by numbers and data points, in this case stats from a well known Symbian developer, Hugo van Kemenade, author of Mobbler, which has been around for all varieties and interfaces of Symbian for years. Meaning that looking at his download numbers and breakdown is very interesting indeed. I wonder if a few other developers might share their numbers too? In the meantime, a little extrapolation brings up charts and stats which will be surprising to many.

Firstly, here's Hugo's own report, based on the device names of app purchasers:

With a second year's worth of download data, it's interesting to see S60 3rd Edition is still going strong.

Figures for the last full month (March 2013):

=============================
11 Symbian Belle models:        28.7%
3 Symbian Anna models:  1.1%
5 Symbian^3 models:     4.6%
12 Symbian^1 models:    30.5%
38 S60 3rd ed. models:  36%
-----------------------------
22 S60 3.2 models:      17.5%
12 S60 3.1 models:      14.9%
4 S60 3.0 models:       3.1%
=============================

Let those figures sink in for a moment. April 2013, well over two years since Symbian itself was effectively canned, almost two thirds of downloads from the Nokia Store are still coming from pre-N8 devices, i.e. resistive touchscreens, stylii, d-pad and keypad-driven candybars, etc.

When I look at the installed base of smartphones, grouped by OS, as I do regularly, I've experimented with charts assuming that sales from just the last three (or two) years should count towards the 'active installed base', i.e. those phones and their users still contributing to the platform and ecosystem by, for example, downloading applications. But, given Hugo's figures, maybe I should even be looking at a four year rolling summation at least? The charts for two and three year summations are in the link above, but for completeness, re-doing my usual spreadsheets but taking this four year rolling summation, gives us:

For the purposes of the 'active installed base' chart above, I think we have to assume that three and four year old iPhones and Android devices are just as likely to still be in use (somewhere). In practice, the Android figures should be significantly less since older Android hardware is physically no longer capable of running newer versions of Google applications (etc) that get pushed out via the Android Play Store. Go on, try using a 2009 or 2010 Android phone now - it'll get filled with app updates from Google and the phone will physically stop working. Whereas using a 2009 or 2010 S60 phone is quite practical, at least for its core functions. So, if anything, the chart above is too generous to Android by up to a couple of hundred million. The platform would still be the most numerous, but by a much smaller margin.

We do, however, based on this prospective four year rolling summation, arrive at interesting conclusions further down the chart:

• As of the start of 2013, there are still as many active Symbian users on the planet as there are iPhone users
    
• There are still ten times as many active Symbian users on the planet as there are Windows Phone users

Of course, I'm not blind to market trends. As always, looking at the installed base doesn't take into account momentum - there are clearly huge numbers of iPhones and Android devices being sold each year and so the trends in the curves above will continue - Windows Phone, Nokia's adopted new 'future proof' platform, will also continue to grow, though active Symbian devices on Planet Earth will continue to be more numerous than active Windows Phones until at least 2015.

The median of Hugo's download numbers seems to be placed somewhere in the S60 5th Edition range, so we're talking 2009-ish - so getting on for four years ago. In fact, if we extrapolate his platform breakdown to the overall Symbian installed base (just over 250 million devices), we might conclude that there are still around 80 million S60 3rd Edition smartphones in active use, many well over three years old and some as old as seven years), plus another 70 million or so active S60 5th Edition devices.

There's a big caveat on all this, of course, in that I'm assuming that Hugo's Mobbler downloads are typical of the whole Symbian application scene. It's entirely possible that his application appealed more to users of older phones, skewing the results. Which is why I'd love to hear from other developers here.

One other very interesting conclusion from Hugo's chart is that it seems that Symbian Anna is almost non-existent now and Symbian^3 showing slight numbers compared to Symbian Belle, showing that Nokia's over-the-air (and Nokia Suite) programme to upgrade all the N8/C7/E7/E6 generation devices to Belle has been a huge success. Many people argue that it's only really geeks that upgrade their device's firmware, but the stats here show that 80% of the total Symbian^3 generation now has Belle installed.

Given how precarious firmware updates were only a few years ago, it seems as if in-place updates really have now matured. Certainly for the N8 or E7 or C7 owner, having now had around four major firmware updates pushed to their devices, for free, with a virtual 100% success rate, their initial investment in their smartphone must seem extremely worthwhile, in terms of sheer value for money.

Ah yes, any excuse to put more bikinis on AAS.... The appallingly cheesily named 'SuperSexyPuzzle' turns out to have slightly more merit than I thought it would, plus you can rest assured that all the ladies pictured do in fact keep their clothes well and truly on. Worth £1? Yes, if you like the classic sliding tile puzzles, and you'll have more fun assembling these than pictures of flower pots or bicycles...

Here's the game in action:

Left and right nudge arrows switch between the 80 or so images, all work and family-safe(ish) - some seem to be scanned in and the issue of copyright did cross my mind once or twice. Still, here we are... The 'Photo Gallery' option lets you browse the original images full-screen, should you want to.

Once underway, the selected photo is scrambled in typical 'Puzzle 15' style (and it really is random, it'll be different every time) and then it's tap to slide in the usual way. And yes, these puzzles are harder than they look. A good ten minutes or so for each one, I'd think. The number of moves taken is shown on the left, but not actually recorded by the game, which is something of a missed opportunity.

The Help icon ('?') brings up the original image, side by side, in case you're not sure what goes where. As usual with these puzzles, the tricky bit is getting the last few bits of the background into place!

As you'll see from the example above, many of the images are resampled at play-time into the square format, resulting in some rather squished ladies. More care should have been taken by the developer to start with squarish images...

And if all the glamour is too much for you, there's a simple numeric version to calm you down...

All sex and no substance? Not quite, though there's plenty more the developer could do here to apply gameplay polish as opposed to nail polish (ahem, I'll get my coat...)

You can buy (again, shame about the name, though it is at least descriptive!) SuperSexyPuzzle for £1 here in the Nokia Store.

Definitely a casual game for the 'Brain Training' fan, Find It Fast sees you scanning an ever changing grid of two digit numbers, trying to pick out the one shown at the top of the screen before your ten second timer runs out. Seems easy at first, but after a few minutes when your eyes are glazing over with the mass of numbers, when your brain hurts and your fingers are complaining as well, you'll find that ten second limit becomes tougher - much tougher...

Here's Find It Fast in action:

Colourful, note the 'Migital' branding, there are prompts when starting to sign into a Migital account and try other games, plus a few Symbian dialogs which are a little offputting (e.g. "Allow access to user data"); still, on with the game, I suggest 'Medium' or 'Hard' if you actually want a challenge.

The number to find is flashed up at the top of the screen and you then have to tap on it within 10 seconds - harder than it looks once your concentration starts to waver... On the 'Hard' level, each grid is completely filled with numbers

Sound effects are minimal and vibration effects are non-existent, leading me to suspect Migital of re-using code from other games here; somewhat annoyingly, the high score table doesn't distinguish between scores at the three difficulty levels, so 255 on Easy is worth as much as 255 on Hard, which doesn't seem fair...

It's fast, cheap and casual, but it will appeal to some, I'm sure. And hey, it's Fun Friday.... You can grab the free version here (presumably with ads) or buy the full game for £1 here in the Nokia Store.

Useful widgets are always popular on AAS and this range of colourful nHomeCalendar widgets should be no exception. Offering a full month's calendar in a single homescreen widget 'slot' does require you to have pretty good eyesight, but it's a nice idea and, of course, tapping the widget brings up the full Calendar, ready for your usual activities. Choose between black, red, green (as shown below) or blue.

Here I'm adding nHomeCalendar Green to my E7 homescreen:

Days which have entries (in any supported calendar) are shown in a red highlight here, so it's easy to see how busy you are. One possible request for a future version would be to have small nudge arrows (or hotspots) at left and right, to nudge the calendar on month by month, but the widget is still very useful as-is. And value for money, of course!

Only one particular nHomeCalendar can be added to each phone, so you can't have it on multiple homescreens unless you go for a different colour for each!

You can download the various nHomeCalendar widgets here (they're all free):

• Green
• Black
• Red (obviously, days with entries have to be marked in a different colour here - green!)
• Blue

IDC has released its traditional quarterly stats on the smartphone world, showing that 216 million devices were sold between January and March 2013, growing by 41.6% from the 152.7 million smartphones shipped a year ago in Q1 2012. Furthermore, for the first time the number of smartphones shipped exceeded the 202 million feature phones shipped in the same quarter.

Samsung, Apple, LG, Huawei, and ZTE make up to the top five smartphone manufacturers, with some of the traditional manufacturers pushed down to lower rankings, as they go through transformation strategies: Sony (6th), BlackBerry (7th), Nokia (8th), HTC (9th). LG's better than expected figures are a result of strong sales of the Nexus 4 and L series product line. The Chinese manufacturers enjoyed strong growth as they expanded outside of their home markets.

From the press release:

"Phone users want computers in their pockets. The days where phones are used primarily to make phone calls and send text messages are quickly fading away," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. "As a result, the balance of smartphone power has shifted to phone makers that are most dependent on smartphones."

"In addition to smartphones displacing feature phones, the other major trend in the industry is the emergence of Chinese companies among the leading smartphone vendors," noted Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC's Mobile Phone team. "A year ago, it was common to see previous market leaders Nokia, BlackBerry (then Research In Motion), and HTC among the top five. While those companies have been in various stages of transformation since, Chinese vendors, including Huawei and ZTE as well as Coolpad and Lenovo, have made significant strides to capture new users with their respective Android smartphones."

Top Five Smartphone Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, Q2 2012 (Units in Millions) 

Smartphone shipments and market share over time

The chart below, based on IDC data, information from manufacturers and our own research, shows smartphone shipments over the last two and half years. The key trend over the last year has been the continued dominance of Samung, the rise of the Chinese manufactuerers, and the broadening of the smartphone manufacturer base (i.e. more companies producing smartphones).

Samsung and Apple are clearly the dominant players in the smartphone space, combined they account for one out of every two smartphones shipped in the last quarter. Samsung alone ships more smartphones that the next four biggest manufacturers combined.

The chart also offers an illustration of the fall in shipments of Nokia, RIM, and HTC. All three were in the top five smartphone manufacturers a year ago, but have since been displaced by Huawei, ZTE, and LG.

The chart below shows the same data, but expressed as smartphone market share, which makes it easier to see relative performance over time.

We're almost exactly a year on from our first hands-on with the Nokia 808 PureView, hailed by me, somewhat tongue in cheek, as Nokia's custom design for me, from my own personal checklist. Insane camera, Xenon flash, replaceable battery, FM transmitter, large OLED screen, deafening speaker, and so on. All present and correct. One year on and, thanks to a brace of updates and third party additions, I find myself just as in love with the 808 now as when I first popped my microSIM card in... 

When the Nokia 808 PureView was first unleashed upon the world, it's fair to say that some parts of its software loadout were missing in action. No, not a better web browser or Social utility, though the faster processor and greater RAM in the 808 did ameliorate these previous annoyances to some degree. I'm talking about the appallingly stripped down Gallery, the absence of Skype, missing music player album art, etc.

In typical Nokia fashion though, and despite the drastic manpower cuts on the Symbian side of the company, we've had a stream of major and minor firmware updates to the device, plus last minute additions to the third party scene that continue to persuade me, even in the face of new smartphones in my world that really impress, like the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, that the Nokia 808 still does everything I need better than anything else in the world. And, judging from some of the comments in recent AAS articles, it does seem as though I'm not alone.

Here then is a rough summary of 12 months of updates and additions to the Nokia 808, as chronicled in these very (web) pages:

• Firmware update rolling in urgent bug fixes
• CuteTube received many updates (e.g. here), bringing a sumptuous YouTube browsing and downloading experience
• Skype re-available for the 808 (though no video calling - sob)
• Big Screen update and more hits
• Firmware update: Belle Feature Pack 2 (a huge update, including a new staggered keyboard with word prediction, a new version of Web, a new lock screen shade system, new widgets, new Music player UI, and much more). Plus associated (separate) updates to Calendar, Nokia Social and Nokia Music
• Twitter and Flickr sharing options arrive for Gallery
• A big Gallery and Camera update (so adding multiselect for sending, deleting and sharing, plus easier settings resets in Camera)
• A number of Dropbox clients appear, summarised here
• Updated world maps and public transport databases made available
• Telephony update
• Evernote client (NoteKeeper) updates, keeping the 808 current with your cloud-based notes
• Several updates to Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, e.g. here, bringing better web browsing
• CoverUp reappears, bringing fixed album art for all local music
• Wifi stability update (apparently some 808s didn't like certain older routers)
• Swype didn't get developed further, but its certificates did get updated, meaning that I for one have started using it in preference to the FP2 keyboard, which I didn't like(!)
• QuasarMX appears, offering gapless playback of music
• Massive updates to Gravity, with more Twitter image previews, Facebook and YouTube module overhauls, compatibility fixes, and more... (link to latest beta)
• New homescreen widgets (Mirror, timer, Webview, etc.)
• 3G networking 'workaround' fix

The list isn't definitive, but I've tried to pick out some highlights. Taken as a whole, on top of the excellent Nokia 808 hardware, the updates present a fairly compelling case for the Nokia 808 PureView as a 2013 smartphone. 

Gravity, the all purpose Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, Foursquare (and more) client; the revamped Gallery

It's true that the screen resolution of Symbian's UI, 360 x 640, is looking low compared to the other top end 2013 flagships and this is perhaps a showstopper for some. It's also true that Web isn't as slick or fast as Chrome, Safari (etc) on iOS and Android. Finally, it's true that there isn't the same choice of games or applications on Symbian - there are apps to do almost anything, but in some cases you haven't got much choice of title.

Three caveats that don't bother me at all. I heard Nokia 808 fan Mark Peters say on a podcast recently that, despite him loving the 808's hardware, Symbian was a "dog's dinner", which I contend is too harsh. It's a mobile operating system from a different age that has been patched up an awful lot, which is fair enough, but it's certainly still very usable in the right hands, as is evidenced by my testimony above and the long list of updates and feature enhancements above.

Of course, at least half the updates above have come from third parties, but this is, if anything, a healthy sign, that there are still developers keen on the platform. The Nokia 808's monster hardware, at least from the perspective of humbler Symbian smartphones, really has been taken on to new heights in the last year, and credit must also go to the few remaining Symbian-facing folk at Nokia and Accenture, keeping the core updates going.

Will the same pace of updates continue throughout 2013? Unlikely, though I don't think we've seen the last of them as yet. Will the Nokia 808 PureView fall out of favour if Nokia puts the same camera technology into a Windows Phone 8 device? I think we might see a few more Symbian die-hards jumping ship at that point.

In the meantime, my 808 takes the best photos and videos, plays the loudest podcasts over the widest range of audio options, runs the best all round social client in the world, in Gravity, and, yes, even lets me browse the web almost as fast as on Android, thanks to Opera Mobile.

A sneak peek at an early PureView testbed - spot the 808 in the making?(!)

Nokia may have designed the 808 as a showcase for the PureView technology. Or it may have designed the phone specifically for me (flattering!) More likely, it was developed as the ultimate Symbian smartphone for everyone reading this. The best of all worlds, as future proof as was possible (given the OS), no compromises. That it made it out the door, given the political climate inside Nokia, was surprising and extremely welcome.

Here's to the ultimate Symbian smartphone then, one year on and better than ever.

With the 'last' new Symbian smartphone now a year old and with Symbian-powered hardware now no longer being sold in shops, Nokia has started simplifying its online support for the platform. Only a small step, but new themes (from the vast majority of creators) won't be published through the Nokia Store after July 1st 2013, we've quoted the official Nokia Publisher email below. Is this a big deal in the grand scheme of things? Not really, though it will annoy independent commercial theme developers, of course, who liked the direct payment system through the Store.

Here's the email that went out to existing theme publishers this morning:

Dear Theme Publishers,

With Nokia's family of Asha and Lumia devices gaining momentum, we have reviewed all developer partner programs at Nokia. Our aim is to ensure sufficient investment and support is being provided to help developers and publishers leverage the growing business opportunity in the Series 40 and Windows Phone platforms. To ensure the highest quality Theme content, we are implementing a Publisher Partner Program from 1st July 2013. Candidates for inclusion in this program are chosen by Nokia and have already been notified. After 1st July only these select partners can publish new Theme content to Nokia Store.

We regret any inconvenience these changes to our content programs may cause and we welcome developers and publishers to work with Nokia to take advantage of the growing opportunity represented by the Series 40 and Windows Phone platforms. Best regards,
Nokia Developer Experience

Themes FAQs:
Is the move to a Publisher Partner Program a sign of a bigger ramp down?
It is the result of an ongoing review or our current programs designed to ensure the best personalization content reaches partners. We have not announced any further changes to our programs.

What will happen to existing content?
All existing content will continue to be available for download and developers and publishers will continue to receive download and revenue reports as well as payouts for
downloads.

Who qualifies for Publisher Partner Program for Themes?
Access to this program will be selective and based on the discretion of Nokia. The goal of program is to ensure wide selection of good quality personalization content for consumers.

If I am not selected to the Publisher Partner Program, can I update my Themes content in Nokia Publish after 1st July 2013?
No. You cannot make any changes to your current content submission. You are welcome to unpublish your content from Nokia Store.

It's perhaps not surprising that small parts of the Symbian ecosystem would start to be pulled down, though do note that there are thousands of themes already in the Store and that all of these (including commercial items) will remain fully available after July 1st. Plus there may be some new themes from big companies that Nokia has selected (though I wouldn't hold my breath here...)

It's also worth noting, of course, that just as in the early days of Symbian, there's far more to add-on software than just the on-device store, it's trivial to download and sideload themes from .sis files sourced from the wider Internet. For newly created free themes after July 1st, users will simply have to look at existing theme download sites. Commercial themes are more complicated, of course, since the Nokia Store made it easy for users to 'pay' - maybe we'll start to see 'donation-ware' themes later this year.

For what it's worth, here's my favourite free Symbian theme, Belly Jean (modelled on the E6!), and (as a good example of what I just said) it sits outside the Nokia Store:

Belly Jean (direct download link)

Never mind our story on how new commercial themes like this won't be possible after July 1st - theme makers will no doubt make hay in the intervening two months, getting some great theme designs into the Nokia Store before the deadline. In this case, Magic Glowry, looking rather resplendent in my screenshots and gorgeous on an AMOLED-screened Symbian Belle device...

From the developer's announcement page:

After a Long Gap,ARX Designs Once Again Proudly Presents a Totally Redefined New Theme for Nokia/Symbian Belle Phones  i.e. “Magic Glowry”

A Theme Which is Redefined to Maximum Possibility to give a New and Fresh look to your Smartphone….
Theme Powered by Classy Transparency,Bright and Vibrant Colors to give a Fresh UI ,Fully Vector Theme(Doesn’t Affect your Phone’s Performance), enriched with Supernova Icon Set-which is totally new and unique,Contains Numerous of 3rd Party Apps Icons to Theme the UI Max. & Much more 

Indeed. Cough. Here's Magic Glowry in place on my Nokia E7. As promised, the elements do rather 'glow', on the AMOLED screen:

Installed and setting as my theme - beautiful, both backdrop and icons!

The artwork is nearly all vector (so speedy), plus there are loads of third party icons included, giving almost all of your app menu a new look...

Music player and Calendar inheriting a slightly new look in terms of gradients, backdrops and elements...

The keyboard is very understated, which is odd, but at least it emphasises the distance between the virtual keys; (right) a beautiful vector shade to the norifications pane....

I only feature themes periodically as a rule, but this one's quite special. Plus I'm going to be doing more theme features as we head up to that July 1st deadline...

You can buy Magic Glowry here in the Nokia Store for £1.50 (in the UK). Not bad at all. 

In the first (seemingly) of a new series over at My Nokia Blog, 'deaconclgi' has highlighted a long unsung hero of Symbian: its file system and File manager ('Files' on newer phones). With iPhones and Windows Phones not having any user accessible file system, and with many Android phones not coming with a file manager at all, it's a timely reminder of how good Symbian/S60 users have had it over the last ten years. Quotes below.

From deaconclgi's piece:

Symbian. A lot of us have been using Symbian for years now and have become accustomed to its features and while some of those features have been duplicated on other platforms, their implementation may be different from on Symbian. For this article, I would like to talk about Symbian’s standard file manager called Files.

File managers are not exclusive to Symbian and have been and are present in some form on other mobile OSes such as Android, Windows MOBILE, Maemo, Meego and the like. The main difference is that the availability of a file manager may vary from device to device using the SAME OS. For example, on Android, manufacturers (Samsung, HTC..)have picked up the slack and now include a file manager in their custom builds of Android but to my knowledge*, (*correct me if Google has now included a file manager in stock Android) Android still lacks a default, built-in, user accessible file manager.

What that means for users of other OSes is that there isn’t a guarantee that they will have a file manager on every device that they buy. The user may have to search and download any of the free or paid file managers. Some people know how to do this and are willing to do this, others are not, while others see no use for a file manager on a phone in the first place. The other scenario is that an OS (iOS, Windows Phone, others) may not have a file manager in the OS at all or have one with so many restrictions that it barely allows you to manage your files. This brings us back to Files, the standard built-in Symbian file manager:

 

Read on in the full article.

Also interesting was the hundreds of comments posted on the article, with a number of people asking the question "Why on earth would you want a file manager in 2013?" In other words, surely each application will pull in the data it needs without any manual intervention? It's a valid point, not least because iOS and Windows Phone manage without a file system at all.

I'd reply with two points:

• every smartphone HAS a file system, that's how computers work - even if the OS hides its inner workings from the user.
• if someone has to ask the question at all then a file manager isn't for them. On the other hand, anyone with any ambitious needs (emulators/utilities/side-loaded apps/extensions, etc.) will be looking for a file manager first and foremost. Two completely different classes of user.

It's also worth noting that, for the really technical user, you can go further and install the freeware X-plore, which allows access to a number of parts of the Symbian file system that 'Files' hides (from novice users).

Bloomberg reports that Nokia Growth Partners, the venture capital and investment arm, has made an investment in Pelican Imaging, a company which is developing array camera technology solutions for smartphones. This technology, which recently came to wider public attention through the Lytro camera, uses a microlens array to create a light-field camera, also called a 'plenoptic' camera, that can capture 4D light field information about a scene.

This light field information effectively records extra data about the light hitting the camera and allows for additional processing techniques to be applied. For example, depth information can be obtained for every pixel, allowing the focus of an image to be changed after it has been captured (i.e. refocus a photo after capture). It also allows for multiple focus points, scaling and segmenting of images, easier and more sophisticated post-capture manipulation (change backgrounds, apply filters), glare reduction, 3D model creation, and more.

Pelican Imaging's computational array camera system, which has been in development for 5 years, was first discussed in a 2009 press release. In 2011, the company announced it had developed the first prototype, which used an array of 25 lenses. The technology has been refined further and reduced in size, such that the current version is 50% thinner than existing mobile cameras. This characteristic of the camera makes it particularly well suited to smartphones, where the camera module is frequently one of the key determinants in the thickness of a device.

Nokia has a long history of imaging innovation, most recently apparent in its Pureview devices, the 'Nokia 808 Pureview' and 'Nokia Lumia 920', and the investment in Pelican Imaging should be seen as the latest step in a deliberate strategy to focus on imaging as one of Nokia's key innovation pillars, which the company believes will help it differentiate its devices from its competitors.

Nokia has its own in-house imaging experts and has made a number of imaging related acquisitions, most recently picking up Scalado last year, but it also has a long history of external partnerships and investments. The most high profile partnership has been with lens designer Carl Zeiss, but nearly all of Nokia's major imaging innovations have been created as a result of joint projects between Nokia and its suppliers (e.g. EDoF camera modules, Carl Zeiss Optics, N95 sensor, N8 sensor, PureView 808 sensor, HAAC microphones).

While it is still relatively early days for light-field cameras it is clear they do hold considerable promise and Pelican Imaging looks set to be a pioneer. In the Bloomberg article, Nokia Growth Partners' Bo Ilsoe is quoted as saying that array cameras are "on the cusp of being commercialized and Pelican does software for that", before going on to add that "it’s very complicated to do this algorithmically and Pelican is one of the companies that has mastered this technology".
   

Array camera in a Lumia smartphone?

Nokia Growth Partner's investment does not necessarily mean the imminent arrival of a Nokia device with such camera technology included, but does provide a strong hint about the future directions in which Nokia is thinking. In the past, Nokia Growth Partners has invested in other imaging related technology companies, such as Heptagon, which have later gone on to become suppliers for Nokia. While Nokia Growth Partners is run with the goal of achieving positive returns on investments, a strong secondary aim is the support the creation of products and technologies that may have applications in future mobile devices or products (i.e. helping seed new mobile innovations). 

The challenges facing array camera in smartphones are around the processing power requirements for a high number of pixels, the development of the necessary processing algorithms, and the production of any hardware, most notably the optics, in high volumes.

Array cameras require additional processing power because many more pixels are involved than in a single-lens camera and because additional software processing is required. Devices such as Nokia's 808 Pureview, although taking a different approach, do show that it is possible to deal with one billion+ pixels per second with current smartphone processor technology. The challenge around processing software is the key area in which Pelican Imaging has been placing most of its efforts, such that most of the broad scale technical challenges have been solved. The production of hardware in high volumes may be more difficult, but it is notable that this is an area with which Nokia has a great deal of experience, having partnered with multiple companies in the development and production of new mass market hardware components.

I've moaned about Nokia Store issues before - sometimes things gets fixed, sometimes they don't. But it all leaves the average user with a frustrating experience and, often, something that's simply 'stuck' downloading. Is there a recommended way to proceed? Well, not an official way, but see my workarounds below.

There's definitely something unstable about the server software used by the Nokia Store, at least in terms of how it communicates with the on-device client - as someone who does a lot of downloading and installing in my activities for All About Symbian, I'd estimate that 30% of all my downloads/installs fail in some way. Armed with a few strategies, everything installs in the end, but if I were an average user than I'd be tearing my hair out. Let's see if we can save some of that hair...

Download stalls

This is common and seems due to a communications (flow control) bug between the client and Nokia's downloads server. An application starts downloading and then just.... stops. You can tap on the pause control all you like. You may even tap through and get to see a 'resume' button. It rarely does any good though. The install is frozen and, worse, any other application downloads/installs you have queued up behind it will stay queued (as shown below).

1. tap the 'home' icon
2. tap the 'X' icon to exit the Nokia Store client
3. wait 10 seconds (so that the Store client really has been fully unloaded from RAM)
4. start Nokia Store again
5. go to the right hand 'My stuff' tab

That's usually enough for the Nokia Store client to attempt to restart the download process from scratch and (usually) succeed, as shown above. If not, rinse and repeat all this.

Download failed

This happens for around 10% of all app downloads. There's a prompt to 'download file again', which can get annoying after the fifth or tenth attempt...

1. tap 'Download' again.

If this doesn't work then try again in half an hour - one possible cause of this error is due to heavy demand at Nokia's end. Another cause is a flow control problem when downloading large files - the 100MB+ games in the Store have often taken half a dozen attempts to download successfully.

Qt Smart Installer fails

Just as common, for Qt apps, is that the so-called 'Smart Installer' fails (eventually) with a pop-up message saying to find and tap on 'Smart Installer' in the app menu, in order to continue the install process.

1. tap Smart Installer - sometimes this does work
2. if not, look in the Nokia Store for another Qt app you wanted to download anyway and install that (instead)
3. assuming that this then goes OK, you'll almost certainly find that the state of Qt's Smart Installer has been reset sufficiently for your original install to then finish. Start the download/install process again.

Acceptable?

If all this seems like a huge amount of hassle to simply download and install an application, something that would happen on iOS or Android in under ten seconds, then you'd be right. It's not clear whether most of the blame should be assigned to the QML-written Store client, to Nokia's servers, to Qt or to Nokia itself, generally.

The situation is quite clearly unacceptable, though now that Nokia don't sell Symbian smartphones any more, it's perhaps unrealistic to expect any great manpower to be thrown at the problems. And even then, you have to wonder how many Symbian-literate programmers are still available to work on the multiple issues.

However, Nokia did promise support 'until 2016' and, to my mind, running an application store and managing things so that it works at a basic level quite clearly comes under the umbrella term of 'support'. If any Nokians, especially from the Store team, are reading this then I'd welcome some official comment or action.

Well spotted deaconclgi - two very nice 808-specific videos, embedded below, are from the last few months on CameraCheckChannel on YouTube, and demonstrate what's possible with time lapse on the device, plus there's a great demo of the lossless zoom capability.

The videos are nicely done, though do forgive the occasional English slips by the presenter and in the captions (e.g. "limelapse"). They're almost pitched as promos for the Nokia 808, so I wouldn't be surprised if the company had something to do with funding their creation.

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

See also the Camera Check Channel on YouTube, in the hope that the folk there put up more 808-specific content. You may also remember my own 'jaw dropping' lossless zoom demo here?

Topology-aware puzzle fans will love this: Flow XXL sees you taking on 360 puzzles in which all you've got to do is join the coloured dots by tracing out paths. Sound easy? Well, the paths mustn't cross and every square in each grid must also be filled with part of a path. So you've managed this with a 5x5 grid? Now do the same with a 6x6, 7x7 and (gulp) 8x8 grid, 90 of each. So that's about 300 man hours of puzzling. For £1 in the Nokia Store. Now tell me that's not good value....

Here's Flow XXL in action:

Three level packs, each with 120 puzzles split across four grid sizes, should be enough for anyone!

As an example, here's an easy 5x5 grid. As you can see, it's fairly straightforward to deduce where all the trace paths have to go (and fill the grid in the process)

On 7x7 (left) and 8x8 (right), things get a lot trickier, but rest assured that there's a solution for every level - in theory!

Interestingly, and thankfully, you can try any puzzle at any time, without restriction. Which means that you can bypass any puzzle that you find impossible to solve and that you'll never get stuck, as sometimes happens in other level-based puzzles.

You can buy Flow XXL for £1 here in the Nokia Store.

(If you really must, there are some free levels in the 'Free' version [shown below] and a lot of ads, including Tequila Planet in-app purchase system that works out a lot more expensive than just buying the game in the first place. So go straight to the full £1 game.)

Tumblr seems to have taken off as a photo-centric social network in much the same way as Instagram and, of course, there's no official client for Symbian - the service is just too new for that. Happily, there's Bumblr, a third party client for Tumbr and its public APIs, letting you post, reblog, edit, tag, and more... It was first released late in 2012, but this is a brand new version, details below. Being a Qt app and with the developer also being a Meego fan, note that this is also available for the Nokia N9.

From the developer's description:

Bumblr is a Qt/QML based Tumblr app for Symbian and MeeGo devices.

It supports almost all the features that are provided by current Tumblr public v2 API i.e., posting, reblog, editing, like, unlike follow, unfollow, user followings, blogs, tag search, etc.

It is aimed to be a fully featured Tumblr client for Symbian and MeeGo platform.

Features:

• View dashboard.
• Create, edit posts.
• Reblog posts.
• View user following blogs.
• Like/unlike posts.
• Follow/Unfollow blogs.
• View published, drafts, queued posts of all user blogs.
• View posts of a particular user.
• Search tags.

Bumblr is built using Tumblr’s v2 APIs with custom Qt/C++ wrapper written to access all API methods. Due to this reason, new features can be easily added in it in future.

This seems pretty comprehensive, though I'll confess to never having used Tumblr in my life (am I out of touch?), other than to sign up today in order to see what the fuss is about!

New for Bumblr v2.3.0 are:

• Tag and type filtering options for posts
• Settings option to display unlimited posts
• Tag search to show more than 20 posts
• Fix for bug related unchanged like/unlike value in single post view
• Fix photo post display when count of photos is 9
• Fix for bug crashing app on refreshing a non-existent blog
• Performance improvements

Here's Bumblr in action:

Signing in for the first time, OAuth is used for access; (right) the home view of popular blog posts

Looking at a post - scrolling down reveal all the reblogs and likes; (right) searching for specific tags and drilling into Tumblr categories

Keeping track of your own Tumblr blog posts and their status; (right) the Tumblr blogs that you follow

You can buy Bumblr here in the Nokia Store for £1.50. There's a free/trial version, but I wouldn't recommend it since it's an older version and also has numerous functional limitations.

Comments welcome if you're a Tumblr user - does this fulfil all your micro-blogging needs? Apologies that I haven't been able to exercise all Tumblr's functions, I'm sure you'll push the software far more. So, are there any mobile showstoppers for you?

From the same developer that brought you Belle Extra Buttons comes the somewhat cumbersomely named Belle Extra Taskbars/StartMenu, though at least the title gives you some idea of what the utility does. In practice, it's a useful always-around shortcuts pane, plus a healthy (or should that be unhealthy?) dose of Windows XP Start menu. See below for screens and comments.

Here's Belle Extra Taskbars/StartMenu in action on my E7, first looking at the extensive set-up dialog...

Best start with the defaults, though not everything seemed to work as advertised - try as I might, I couldn't get the utility to work on the Belle Refresh lockscreen; (right) setting the four main shortcuts are probably first order of the day - all installed apps are up for grabs here.

In use, a swipe up from the bottom of the screen (Meego/Blackberry 10-style) gives you the basic bar with Windows-like Start button and four shortcuts - tapping the button then gives you this Windows XP-like app selector and control options; (right) if music is playing you can also toggle on this 'Music view', wherein the toolbar icons change to playback controls.

Toggling between Music view and the normal shortcuts view is done by tapping on the user icon or the musical note - the photo thumbnail switches to the music's album art, which is quite neat.

What would be really useful here would be if the utility could log which applications I used most and presented them, Windows Vista/7-like, at the top of the scrolling list - as it is, the list remains staunchly full and resolutely alphabetical, so it's not much use on a fully loaded smartphone.

Comments welcome, though. You can buy Belle Extra Taskbars/StartMenu for £1 here in the Nokia Store.

Following the news of Nokia Growth Partner's investment in array camera firm Pelican Imaging, Engadget followed up with the company, reporting that the CEO, Chris Picket says his product is currently being trialed by device manufacturers and is scheduled to be part of at least one new smartphone launching in 2014. Unsurprisingly he would not disclose details of any of the manufacturers involved, but given their respective commitment to imaging innovation Nokia and HTC are both possible candidates.

Endgadet also offers a few more details of Pelican Imaging's prototype product, noting that it uses 16 distinct lenses and imaging channels in a 4x4 grid, and that each sub-camera captures only one colour (red, green, blue), which helps reduce noise. The associated software processing, which is where Pelican Imaging's expertise lies, will produced a single JPEG file from the multiple sub-cameras, one that is about 20% larger than that from a standard camera because it contains additional depth information.

This capture of depth information is possible because there are small distance differences between the sub-cameras making up the camera array. It is this information makes it possible for an array camera to carrying out most of its "tricks", including refocusing an image after it has been captured. As Engadget point out it also means there's no need for traditional focusing elements in the camera, which is what makes Pelican Imaging's solution camera module thinner than traditional solutions.

Example of output from Pelican Imaging prototype - with the ability to refocus scene after capture. Credit: Pelican Imaging.

Engadget also wanted to know whether Pelican Imaging's technology could be combined with Nokia's PureView technology (41MP sensor in the Nokia 808 PureView and OIS in Nokia Lumia 920). Engadget quote the company's CTO, Kartik Venkataraman, as saying:

"Our technology is not mutually exclusive with Nokia's. We can take elements of what they're doing and improve what we can do. There are some synergies that will lead to some pretty exciting possibilities that we're actually beginning to work on today, although I can't talk about it yet."

It's worth reiterating that Pelican Imaging did not say anything about its relationship with Nokia, or even whether such a relationship exists, outside the investment partnership disclosed earlier this week. Nonetheless it's clear array camera technology could provide an exciting avenue for imaging innovation in smartphones in 2014.

Read the full Engadget article here.

Rolling out now for Symbian Belle FP1/FP2 devices (Nokia 808/700/701) is the same 'Fix for Messaging' that the Belle Refresh generation got a month or two ago. This is presumably to fix a number of annoying bugs in Symbian Belle's Messaging application, including one where the message store would get corrupted and snippets of old messages to other people would be sent out along with the current message you were typing. Comments welcome on whether this fixes any other issues that have been annoying you, perhaps on the Nokia 808?

As usual, you can get the patch by going into SW Update on your device, from the main app menu:

Accenture are still, it seems, very much on the case in terms of fixing up longstanding quirks in Symbian and its applications, though I have to wonder why it took over a month to roll out exactly the same bug fix (in terms of app version and build number, v10.1[28]) to the parallel platform. 

Anyone remember the bad old days when critical fixes would get delayed and then addressed  as part of new firmware builds, adding more delays while operators approved every build for every phone variant? Great to see fixes able to be deployed so easily these days.

Norwegian Anders Øvergaard is a man with a passion - filmmaking, and in the video below he attempts to use both the Nokia 808 PureView and Lumia 920 to shoot a cinematic sequence. He certainly seems to have all the right mounts and seems to know what he's doing and ends up both praising and critiquing each device - it seems that both the 808 and 920 have their place.

Covered in the video are:

• Intro
• Demo of the Nokia 808's camera interface, demonstrating some of the advanced 'Creative' settings
• Demo of the Nokia Lumia 920's camera interface
• Demo footage from each phone
• Setting up a low light cinematic shot in a forest(!)
• Example 'cinema' footage from both phones (finished/edited versions)
• Focussing and daylight test footage, more examples
• Summarising the pros and cons of each smartphone video camera

I was a bit disappointed that Anders fiddled so much with the contrast for the 808's footage, since this ended up being one of the most obvious differences - I'd have preferred he left both phones on 'default' throughout. This would have been better for the end user to compare, I feel.

Anyway, here's Anders's video, up the quality if your bandwidth can stand it:

The comment about video compression was interesting and I found myself wishing that the Nokia 808 allowed less aggressive compression, along the lines of the footage from the Lumia 920.

Comments welcome!

In All About Symbian Insight number 237, Steve and Rafe start by talking about the recent 3G network fix for Belle FP2 devices, the rolling out of another homescreen widget update for Belle FP1 and 2 devices, and the end of new Symbian theme uploads to the Nokia Store. In the second half of the podcast we turn our attention to apps with mentions for the Erudite ebook reader (Amazon Kindle), Swype (keyboard input), CoverUp (album art), and X-plore (file manager).

This podcast was recorded on Friday 3rd May 2013.

In this podcast we cover:

• New homescreen widgets roll out to Belle FP1/FP2 smartphones
     
• Wi-fi and YouTube updates rolling out to Symbian Belle FP1/FP2
     
• One year on and the 808, the 'ultimate' Symbian smartphone is... even better
     
• No more new Symbian themes in the Nokia Store after July 1st
     
• Swype for Symbian (beta) gets reissued, with new certs, still a bit broken
     
• Erudite Book Reader brings Amazon Kindle ebooks to Symbian
     
• CoverUp is back and working, all your music covers restored!
     
• X-plore for Symbian goes freeware
     
• Symbian platform breakdown and new 'active installed base' chart
     

You can listen to earlier episodes of the AAS Insight Podcast in our media section.