Anyone who has ever played with a remote-control car has dreamed of this moment. Forget about those tiny 1/18 scale models. What if you could drive a real deal BMW down the road using nothing but your smartphone? That’s the dream that has been realized by a couple of keeners.

An Jiaxuan teamed up with one of his buddies to outfit a brand new BMW (yes, the real car) with the ability to be remotely controlled using a specially designed app for the Nokia C7 smartphone. Remember that the C7 uses the same Symbian^3 platform as the Nokia N8, so you could likely do the same thing with that device too. You know, if you had the same kind of hackery skills as An Jiaxuan.

What’s crazy is that they were able to achieve this feat in just 20 days of programming and testing. They started out with trying to remotely control a little toy, then an air conditioner, then the room lights, then a DSLR camera, and ultimately the full-sized BMW.

Better still, they were able to confuse the heck out of a traffic cop trying to write the “driver” of the red BMW a ticket… only to see that there was no one in the driver’s seat at all.

[My Nokia Blog via Symbian World]

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At the International Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing earlier today, Nokia senior manager Gunther Kottzieper says that the first Symbian update (due in Q1) will bring over 50 features. It’s still Symbian in there, but owners of devices like the Nokia N8 will get a more intuitive browser.

In the second and third quarter, Nokia expects to push out more updates with a “new look and feel for the user interface, a more flexible home screen, an updatable HTML5 browser and an easier software update experience.” I’d say that the home screen on Symbian^3 is already reasonably flexible, but a “new look and feel” might be exactly what Nokia needs to attract some users back into its fold.

On the hardware side, they’re expecting to start pushing out some dual core phones in Q2/Q3, as well as 1GHz devices with more graphics memory. The other kicker? They’re working on phones with a “true zoom camera,” which we can only assume refers to optical zoom rather than the digital zoom we already see on just about every cameraphone. With optical zoom and a suitable UI, would that be enough to replace your point and shoot altogether?

[ComputerWorld]

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They say that imitation is one of the greatest forms of flattery. If that’s the case, there’s probably a few guys in Finland blushing right about now. Amidst all the iPhone clones that populate the streets of China, you’ll also find this clever little devil. It may look like a real Nokia N8, but it’s not. For starters, it runs on Google Android 2.1.

Many people have long since said that Nokia should be adopting Google’s smartphone platform if it hopes to regain some of the ground it has lost to its competitors. Nokia itself might not be listening, but its Chinese knockoff counterparts appear to be. What’s more, this Nokia N8 clone comes powered with a dual core processor to boot.

To be fair, it’s only a 600MHz Rockchips ARM 9 chip under the hood (I’ve never even heard of Rockchips). By comparison, the real N8 is rocking an ARM 11 680MHz processor. With the slightly upgraded hardware, the knockoff is said to play 720p HD video without a hitch. It also has dual-LED flash, microSD slot, WiFi, GPS, and a G-sensor.

Aside from the obvious concerns over reliability and quality, some other shortcomings befall the clone. The 12MP Carl Zeiss shooter has been replaced with just a 5.0 megapixel camera. The 3.5-inch display stays the same size, but the AMOLED capacitive tech has been swapped out for some resisitive touchscreen action.

No exact price has been announced, but the flyer is indicating something in the 1XXX RMB (Chinese Yuan or Renminbi) range. If it is 1000 RMB, that’d peg it at US$150.

[Mic Gadget via Yesky]

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Nokia is still the largest cell phone maker in the world, but it’s quickly losing market share to Android devices, the Apple iPhone, and other suitable alternatives. The company needs to innovate and come up with something new and exciting. Their apparent answer? The Nokia N8.

Features and Highlights

On paper, this smartphone certainly has a lot going for it. The 3.5-inch multitouch display is an AMOLED, making for some brilliantly vibrant colors. The embedded camera is an impressive 12-megapixels, including 720p HD video recording, autofocus, Carl Zeiss optics, and xenon flash. It’s got HDMI-out, a secondary VGA camera, and five-band HSDPA. That all sounds really good.

The overall design and build quality is quite good too. You get a cool aluminum shell and the construction feels really solid in your hands. The unibody design means that there is no user-replaceable battery, much like the iPhone, but you can tell right away that you are holding a premium device.

Much like other Nokia smartphones these days, it also has a spring-loaded slider switch on the side for locking and unlocking the screen. The SIM and microSD card slots along the left side offer an interesting design too, since the SIM slot is spring-loaded.

A Little Behind the Times

That’s all good stuff, but the Nokia N8 is certainly not without its shortcomings. For starters, it’s still rocking the Symbian^3 operating system. From what I understand, this is pretty much the swan song for the platform as Nokia moves ahead with MeeGo and other options. Compared to the innovations offered by Android and iOS, though, Symbian^3 feels decidedly dated in its approach. It’s close, but not close enough.

Even though this phone only has a 680MHz processor, especially since we’re in an era of 1GHz smartphone, I never really felt like the performance was terribly lacking. Webpages loaded quite quickly and I was able to make good use of the “Social” app for my Facebook and Twitter updates. It’s surprisingly snappy for what it is, but it would have been nice to see a faster processor. Even at the lower clock speed, I was barely able to eek one full day of moderate use on a single charge of the internal battery.

A Real Digital Camera (Almost)

The real star of this phone, however, is the 12-megapixel camera. We’re not just talking about resolution here either, as the picture quality was quite impressive… so long as you don’t use the flash. An outdoor shot on a slightly cloudy day came out pretty great, but an indoor photo with flash ends up looking washed out and almost “hazy” by comparison.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, I can’t say that the Nokia N8 is a bad phone. It’s actually quite good. The AMOLED display is brilliant, the haptic feedback and on-screen keyboard are quite usable, and the 12MP camera is quite impressive (under the right conditions). The OS still needs some work to be friendlier to regular consumers and the web browser isn’t the best, though. I’m also not a fan of how the camera sticks out from the back of the phone. Couldn’t they make it flush?

I don’t think that I can recommend an outright purchase for an unlocked Nokia N8 direct from Nokia (like the sample device used for this review). That said, the version being sold through Rogers is less than $100 on contract. You get a lot of phone for your money, but just know that you’ll feel kind of dated (with the OS) right off the get-go even though it is the first Symbian^3 device to be released. In the US it’s not subsidized by a carrier, so you’re looking at $529 for the N8, but it’s yours outright.

The post Nokia N8 Symbian^3 smartphone review appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

A couple of months ago, the Nokia E7 made its first official appearance. Now, it seems that the Finnish phonemaker is almost ready to start selling the Symbian^3 smartphone.  Of all places, the announcement of a release date came by way of the official Nokia Twitter account. In it, it was revealed that the Nokia E7 would start shipping “from Dec10.” People who jumped on the tweet initially thought this meant December 10th, but it was later clarified that this meant December 2010.

In this way, we still don’t have an exact launch date for the sliding smartphone, but we can pin it down to next month some time. As a quick refresher, the Symbian^3-powered Nokia E7 has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 4-inch CBD capacitive touchscreen, and 8MP camera.

You can probably expect it to find it through the Nokia corporate store as an unlocked device. It may or may not show up with a carrier subsidy any time soon, but with the Nokia N8 selling through Rogers, that could be a possible destination for the E7 too. [Nokia Blog]

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When Angry Birds hit iOS devices, it became one of the fastest selling mobile games of all time. People were playing it on their iPhones and going bigger with their iPads. Then, they gave the game away for free on Android. Well, those winged heroes have flown the coop over to another field: Symbian.

More specifically, Angry Birds is now available through the Ovi Store for Symbian^3 smartphones. This includes the increasingly popular Nokia N8, as well as the newer Nokia C7. The non-touchscreen Nokias out there are still out of luck for now, but based on this growing empire, I wouldn’t be surprised if yet another port was in the works.

The Android version is free since it’s ad-supported, but the developers have gone back to a more conventional monetization strategy for Symbian. The game sells for 3 Euro, which is less than five bucks.

SOURCE: All About Symbian via IntoMobile

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You may have already seen some European variants on this phone, but this is the first time that the phone is going to be offered in Canada with a complete carrier subsidy. Much like the iPhone, it boasts a high-resolution touchscreen, but it goes with AMOLED tech instead. The “industrial” design is a nice touch too.

A quick refresher shows us a 680MHz processor, Symbian^3, 16GB memory, WiFi, 12MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens, and 720p video recording capability. On paper, it outshines a lot of phones, particularly when it comes to that camera.

There’s no word on a release date or proposed pricing, but it is selling for 370 Euro on that other continent, which would convert to an outright price of $530. If that’s the case, a contract price of under $200 could be very possible.

SOURCE: Mobile Syrup

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You could say that the Nokia N8 is the new flagship smartphone for the Finnish phonemaker, trying to recapture some of the market share that it has lost to iDevices and Android handhelds. We already know about the specs, but what do the guts look like?

Well, you can always rely on the crazy kooks at ifixit to break out the screwdrivers and crowbars to rip our favorite electronics apart and, well, the Nokia N8 isn’t exactly immune to these exploits. Perhaps one of the more noteworthy findings in the teardown is that while the battery isn’t user-accessible in the traditional sense, it’s actually pretty easy to get at if you want to. I’ve always said that the lack of a user-replaceable battery is a sore spot for the iPhone, so I found it strange that Nokia would take that route. What’s curious is that, upon tearing the N8 apart, you find that they’re using a pretty standard-issue Nokia battery for the N8. Why couldn’t they just use a regular old battery cover, then?

You’ll also notice that the AMOLED display and the cover glass can be separated, so you can replace those independently. Overall, ifixit gives the phone an 8 out of 10 for overall “repairability”… assuming you’re brave enough to tear the thing apart in the first place.

[iFixiT]

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Nokia C6-01 Symbian S^3 Smartphone

The good news is that Nokia is still the number one smartphone company in the world. The bad news is that it is steadily losing market share. Hoping to reverse that trend, Nokia announced three new Symbian^3 smartphones today: the Nokia E7, Nokia C6-01, and Nokia C7.

Nokia E7 Symbian S^3 Smartphone

Let’s start with the most exciting of the three. The Nokia E7 features a 4-inch touchscreen display with “ClearBlack technology” for improved outdoor visibility, as well as a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support. For the business-minded, the E7 also comes with an 8MP camera, 16GB internal memory, HDMI-out, Dolby Digital Plus, 720p video recording, and a mere 13.6mm profile. It’s set to launch for 495 Euro during Q4 2010.

Nokia C7 Symbian S^3 Smartphone

Moving further down the scale, we find the Nokia C6 (currently listed as the C6-01) and the Nokia C7. Both come with Symbian^3 and touchscreens, but no hardware keyboards. The C7 has a 3.5-inch AMOLED screen, 8MP camera, 8GB memory, 720p video, and a 325 Euro price point. Look for it before the end of the year.

The cheapest of the bunch at 260 Euro before taxes, the Nokia C6-01 rocks a 3.2-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 8MP camera, ClearBlack technology, microSD slot, and up to 17 days of standby. It’s set to ship before the end of the year too.

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Nokia N8 smartphone with Symbian S^3 platform

As a quick refresher, the Nokia N8 comes powered by Symbian ^3 and an ARM 11 680MHz processor. The spec sheet is certainly drool-worthy with the 3.5-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16GB internal storage, 12MP camera with 720p HD video, secondary VGA videocall camera, microSD expansion slot, HSDPA 10.2Mbps, HSUPA 2.0Mbps, WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, stereo FM radio with RDS, HDMI-out, Dolby Digital Plus, digital compass, video/photo editor, and Flash Lite 4.0.

As an added bonus, you get free turn-by-turn navigation using Ovi Maps, the same free service you can get with something like the Nokia N97 mini.

Delivery of the device won’t happen until the end of September, but you can hit up the official page on the Nokia website to place your preorder. It will set you back $549, with either standard ($3.99) or express ($9.99) shipping options.

What do you think? The Nokia N8 beats a lot of devices on paper, but is it good enough to stand up in a marketplace populated by high-end Droids and retina displays?

Nokia N8 [Nokia]

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