Motorola XT720 photo quality vs Samsung i8910

I use both phones in parallel during the trip to Crimea, Ukraine, and even took some comparative shots.

Only XT720 photos

Notice in the left side of the photos below, this is my finger. Happens to often with XT720, due to placement of the camera on the very edge of the phone, too close to the point, where you naturally keep your fingers.

Using flash in the poorly lit museum, during daytime. No nighttime pics yet.

Motorola XT720 on the left, Samsung Omnia i8910 on the right

My overall verdict stays the same, photo quality of XT720 is quite average, hopefully this will change in the next firmwares.

Google Maps for Symbian update, Opera Mobile 10 Beta 2

Google Maps 3.3 now supports syncing of Nokia Landmarks and Google Maps favourites between handset and the mighty google cloud. Looks like another nail into the coffin of Nokia Maps?

Opera Mobile 10 Beta 2 for symbian has got Opera Sync and Download manager, but the sweetest thing comes from the fixes to memory management and rendering speed. It was quick on Omnia HD i8910, and it is (subjectively) twice faster now.

Opera Mobile 10 Beta for Symbian

This is important. This is hilarious if you have got fast symbian phone with lots of RAM. Opera Mobile 10 is here. Installed it on my Omnia HD i8910 and immediately  tweaked RAM cache to some 50MB. Running well and not getting any “low memory” erros, like poor N97 guys. :)

It’s fast. It’s fucking Ajax compliant.

Gmail. It opened gmail in “standard view” and works fast.

Google Reader also opened in “standard ajaxy” mode. Wow.

Google Wave opened with errors. Not usable.

Youtube. Hmm, it doesn’t play youtube yet, but I have heard it from Opera some time ago, that Flash will be supported.

Friendfeed  works, as does Facebook.

i8910 as real Samsung flagship in 2009

Today comes confirmation from Eldar Murtazin (russian language), the mobile industry analyst and avid phone reviewer, that sales of Samsung Omnia HD i8910 have overtaken sales of Nokia N97 in Russia. Despite the fact that N97’s advertising budget is 3 mUSD and Omnia’s only 300 kUSD.

More than ever, I am happy with my choice of the phone this year. i8910 is good.

Custom ROMs for symbian devices?

 

As far as I knowб this is the first custom ROM (similarly to custom ROMs for WinMo devices, made popular by xda-developers) for Symbian phones. This one is adaptation of HK Rom for Italian languages, plus some customizations, and Kastor effects enabled out of the box.

Btw, I have Omnia HD i8910 since middle of July, enjoy its speed and capacious RAM. New firmwares are coming out of Samsung soon to enable 3d task manager and to fix some bugs. This thing rocks. I also hope to see it updated to Symbian^2 next year. We’ll see. :)

Evolution of mobile phones since 1985

Truly amazing, nostalgic, and mouth watering video. Must see.

Samsung P9 UMPC - Wow!

Via CTitanic. Well, not to be outdone by HP, Samsung leaks a teaser of their own. This looks waaay more interesting than HP device. As a matter of fact, I would second CTitanic' s opinion that this is the most amazing concept I have seen in two years. Bingo. Have a look at this video. A double slider umpc/gaming pad with detachable screen (if I see that correctly). Yummy.