While going through this post on Nokia Power User, I realised it was very biased towards Symbian and the one who wrote it seemed like he never used an Android device. Its clearly evident he’s a fanboy who wishes to live under a rock and not the least know anything outside his little world.
#1 Better Widgets: LOL where? Symbian Belle has better Widgets than Android? Man, free form widget functionality was copied from Android and put into Belle. Belle Widgets take lesser space? C’mon despite you have free form Widgets, most app developers provide only one 2×1 widget. Android apps on the other hand have 1×1, 2×1, 2×2…. till 5×5 widget sizes, so its pretty clear why 4×2 is default: best readability.
Talking about scrolling Widgets? Many apps on Android have scrolling ability in widgets, especially FriendCaster. Also devices running HTC Sense or Sony Timescape UI have stock Widgets for SMS, Contacts, Calendar, Facebook and Twitter, that allows you to scroll, swipe and even post a message from the widget itself. SO ITS CLEAR THAT THIS GUY HASN’T EVEN TESTED ANDROID WIDGET FUNCTIONALITY.
#2 Dolby Digital Plus: The author says this audio enhancement is specific to Nokia. But devices like HTC Sensation and Sensation XE also possess it along with Beats Audio. And other devices that run CyanogenMod have the famous DSPManager. SO THE POINT THAT NOKIAS HAVE BETTER AUDIO QUALITY IS AGAIN MOOT.
#3 Power consumption and processing: Android reportedly consumes more power to run. This is true. But Symbian Belle does lag while running certain apps. Plus, Symbian lacks most true push features and always-on services, which says that no processes = no power consumed. Add to that Nokia has forced it to stay backward rather than letting it evolve.
Take my HTC Tattoo as an example. It runs Android 2.3.7 as smooth as butter.
#4 RAM usage: Probably the author who wrote that article never read or understood Android memory management. Android only terminates or freezes those apps that are not worth running. Take an example, if you run a download, Gtalk active, torrent running, music playing etc and you launch a HD game, then they won’t get interrupted. On the other hand, if you pause a HD game and do some other work, the game is frozen and taken off the memory as it is a big memory hog keeping it active. One can later launch it and the app resumes from the frozen state. That way multitasking is intelligent and in most cases Android doesn’t need an app killer. Also when more memory is free, Android caches the most used services in memory for better performance. So its interesting to note that the amount of free RAM necessarily does not determine the health of the system. Compare this to Windows Phone and iOS, where only the OS core apps are allowed to run in background.
Other areas where Symbian fails miserably but fanboys don’t accept it:
#1 Improper Push services: Symbian lacks most of cloud integration and true push mail and notifications. Nokia Mail is extremely horrid and slow in receiving or sending mails. Android on the other hand always has a push channel to Google open (C2DM) to receive push notifications without having to sync continuously. Probably that very much explains the reason why Symbian battery life is usually better. If you set up Nokia mail to sync every minute and keep data connection enabled on your Symbian phone, it’ll run out of power faster than an Android device (<8 hours).
#2 Fail Nokia store: Nokia/Symbian fanboys praise the Nokia store like anything. It is bug free, malware free, good quality apps, blah blah.. Probably they never saw Play Store or explored it ever. Android apps offer far more functionality than Symbian apps and more of them are free as well. The best quality apps usually get very good ratings and appear on the homescreen or the featured page. Plus, different developers developing similar apps give a very good choice to the end user. It improves healthy competition and encourages making of better and better apps with faster updates. Compare this to the Nokia store where Nokia keeps bossing the devs around with their petty policies like having a long processing time before release. Funnily, silly apps like promotional ADs, mobile versions of websites appear in the home or featured section while the gems usually stay deep hidden. As if that isn't enough, an RSS reader for only a single website costs $2. EPIC! 😀 I won't even pay for that.
#3 Shitty web browser: Must say the Symbian web browser is a total shit in front of the Android browser. It always runs out of memory while loading desktop websites. Plus the HTML5 support is so horrid that the browser lags in loading http://touch.facebook.com/. Even a 528 MHz Android device (like my HTC Tattoo) loads desktop websites like a boss while my 680 MHz Symbian (Nokia C7) has a tough time coping with desktop websites.
'Nuff said. I won't continue further as I might be branded an Android fanboy (which isn't what I am). I love Symbian MORE than Android. But I'm very disheartened to see some websites spreading misinformation to people.
What I wanna suggest is: Don't go by what everyone says. Choose the device that you feel happy with. Happiness is everything.
At this stage, do not make the mistake of buying a Symbian device as already near End of Life.
Finally before I go, here's a thing I want to say: If Symbian is so great, then why is Samsung mobile the best selling brand now? And what platform makes them so popular? Think over it.
This post is intended to be a message to all the Nokia fanboys out there. Better learn before you bark nonsense.
Thank you.
Cheers!
