Nokia Conversations

Usability. I strongly disagree that Android has much of that, and I suspect that a great many Android users simply don't know any better. Windows Phone really is that much better.

Rant: My first smartphone was a Lumia, and then when it broke i went to a Sony Xperia (with a rather clean Android 4.3 on it).

I never even realized how well-designed WP was until I went to Android. Examples:

- Operation. Nearly all of WP is easy to operate with just a thumb, single-handed. All important controls are either near the bottom or reachable by swiping. On Android, I have to reach to the top for all kinds of stuff. It's simply, apparently, an Android design pattern to put a bar with buttons on the top, as far away from my hand as possible. This is plainly ridiculous. On WP, there's a clear relationship between "how important is this action" and "how close is it to the bottom". As it should be.

- Consistency. All well-designed WP apps work the same. Swipe left/right for different screens/tabs, touch the left-side of an item for select-boxes, operations on the bottom and more operations by selecting "...". This is the same nearly everywhere, both for built-in apps and for most well-designed apps from the store.

- Cleanliness and clarity. The Xperia forced me to choose a home screen background picture, making it very difficult to read text and icons. I google-image-searched a "black.png" to work around this, but still, it's cluttered by default, and you need to do work to clean it up.…

I won't comment on Symbian, I don't know enough about it and it's been covered by others.

The Maemo project was going in a nice direction for a while, but Nokia missed the mark when it released the N900. I was one of those chomping at the bit waiting for it to finally be released... then it was, with a screen that is too small for the phenomenal resolution, and with a UI that is geared toward (finger input) touchscreen and a touchscreen geared toward the precision of pen input.

I'm one of the oddballs that loves the precision of pen input. People I meet are still amazed when they see my aged N800! They are disappointed when I tell them it's not a phone, and even more disappointed when I tell them it hasn't been made in years. Nokia was relying on word-of-mouth advertising for their Internet Tablet platform, but then they changed the platform to something it's not. When I tell these people there's a newer, much more powerful version that adds a phone - called the N900, they get excited! When I tell them that it has the same resolution, but compressed into a smaller 3.5" screen, they are disappointed. When I tell them that it is not subsidized by any carrier, and that you have to pay full price (or if discounted, is still $550), it doesn't matter that it's "unlocked" (never locked in the 1st place), as: 1, the price is too high and 2, GSM limits you to only 2 carriers in the US.

I hope the new direction (MeeGo) helps, but I'm not holding my breath.

Nokia had a "design by…

Ah of course, Nokia, should have guessed. Interesting video on their stabilisation technology - on the 925 it doesn't seem to add that much thickness, that one is only 8.8mm thick, vs 7.7mm for iPhone 5. They should have licensed their camera tech to all manufacturers. Wonder how much of it will pop up in iPhone 6 now that they snagged one of the main PureView engineers.

http://conversations.nokia.com/2013/09/25/how-nokia-lumia-optical-image-stabilisation-is-revolutionising-imaging/

I think the earlier 1020 etc were thick because of huge sensor size.

I have OIS dSLR lenses but none of them are quite as good as that Sony's Optical Steady Shot linked above - it's almost as good as some brushless gimbals I'm using on drones, which are rock steady. Sony claim it's 13 times more effective than their previous stabilisation.

The whitepaper on an older version of the technology is here.

http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/849564/data/2/-/Download1.pdf

The Xenon flash eliminates the blur in standard flash. Comparison pictures against the S4 and iPhone 5.

http://i.imgur.com/fUe8rLC.png

The optical image stabilization is cool, with ball bearings replacing the coils on the Lumia 920. Sample video comparison against the S4(Edit: S3, my bad).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuLlAa4zDbU&t=0m55s

More details here.

http://conversations.nokia.com/2013/07/11/nokia-lumia-1020-the-smartphone-camera-revolution-begins/

Android: http://www.war-worlds.com/blog/2012/06/on-android-garbage-collection-can-kill-you

C#: http://conversations.nokia.com/2012/06/01/interview-with-matthieu-laban-infinite-flight-ceo/

Ruby: https://blog.twitter.com/2011/building-faster-ruby-garbage-collector
(It was not good enough, they dumped Ruby)

Accepted answer? "Manual tracking of objects"
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2484079/how-can-i-avoid-garbage-collection-delays-in-java-games-best-practices

Google has 14 million web pages about Garbage Collector issues...