Never lost anyone's data? I think you're being a little optimistic ...

Besides, as you say, Android is different ... the cloud backups are unavoidable, and with them come a completely different set of issues.

This isn't exactly confined to just Palm. Data backups for mobiles are notoriously unreliable, as I've found to my cost several times :-(

It's a good idea to periodically back up all your contacts in Thunderbird / Outlook / which-ever-other-email-client-you-use. Then if restoring the data directly doesn't work, you still have your backup.

*still live with

Wife????????


I can hear the stampede to the piercing salon of overweight, socially inept young men who still with their parents from here!

I've been using an E71 for a week or so now, and would have to concur. I've used Blackberries before and never really liked them. The O/S is really clunky, the camera is absolutely awful and they feel like really cheap toys. The E71, on the other hand, shares none of those traits and has about 10x the battery life!

Unless your life revolves around Blackberry Messenger, I don't see why anyone would use a Blackberry.

Yup, it should be the first SE phone to run Symbian Foundation.

Really looking forward to it.

All the people who say Symbian is dead are clueless muppets. It's still by far the most capable smartphone O/S, it just needs its API updated and to be fully optimised for touchscreens. The former will happen next year when Qt becomes its default API (something it will share with the next release of Maemo), and the latter is happening incrementally.

As stated by another poster, that's simply part of 3DMark's Mobile GPU benchmark.

From everything I've heard, Mali is a hell of a lot more powerful than PowerVR's current generation (in OMAP3xx and Snapdragon platforms) or the GPU in Tegra Mark 1.

Oliver,

"I think you've misunderstood the situation - it's Microsoft who are limiting the hardware specs, not the hardware manufacturers."

NVIDIA are not guilty of *wanting* to do this, they just have to play by M$ AND Intel's game. Intel are a hardware manufacturer and they do actively collude with M$ on this front. They've no desire to put anything other than the very cheapest, most crippled hardware in notebooks, either! You think they like selling fewer and fewer expensive laptop and desktop stuff?

I know they'll probably never get prosecuted in the US, but the way in which M$ and Intel (and now Apple to a certain extent) collude, effectively as a cartel, is so obviously anticompetitive and an abuse of market power. They need to be fined billions more by the EU, tens of billions, this time, so that they don't reoffend.

Also, I'm still waiting for some enterprising hackers to port DX10 / DX11 to XP. Or, preferably, now that OpenGL has finally caught up to DX again, with the latest release, for developers to stop taking the cash that M$ waves in their face and use the open source API instead! It's in their interests, as it makes ports to Linux / Apple / PS3 / PSP / mobile phones / Wii / DS a formality (performance requirements / hardware optimisation allowing).

Byrd,

I can almost guarantee that your HP Mini is faster under 7 because you didn't reinstall all the bloatware / crapware that came preinstalled by HP on XP. XP is much, much faster on low-spec machines than 7. On high spec desktops (really high spec laptops), 7 is indeed faster than XP - this is purely because 7 (and Vista) are much better for multithreading ... both are far more bloated than XP and require a far higher base level of RAM / processor work, though - hence why they're not a good idea on low spec machines.

The reason the E-series is so good (build quality and aesthetics aside) is precisely because of Symbian. No other O/S has anywhere near the level of smartphone functionality that S60 does, and certainly nowhere near the stability or speed.

The e71 is a brilliant phone. The e72, with a slightly better processor is ridiculously fast. One of the brilliant things about Symbian is that it has a tiny and extremely efficient kernel.

However, there are 2 issues with it.

1) Some people want more eye-candy. This is slowly being addressed in Nokia's multimedia smartphones and what you see in the N900 (Maemo) is broadly representative of the kind of aesthetic style of the UI you'll see in the upcoming release of the first Symbian Foundation build.

2) Applications are difficult to write. Some of the ways of coding are rather antiquated and overly complex. However, by the end of next year it will have been completely overhauled and Qt will be the main API framework - something it will have in common with Maemo 6 (Maemo 5 has it as a secondary optional API). So applications will be much easier to write, and one application will work on both Maemo and Symbian Foundation with no recompiling.

Personally, I think the future is very bright for Symbian. I just wish the move to Qt would come sooner!!