Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Anthony - pocketnow.com nokia announced Symbian Anna platform refresh a couple of months ago with the occasion of launching the x7 and the e6 the first two smartphones to come out of the box with Symbian data recently Nokia announced in Singapore that Symbian Anna will be shipping on devices such as the flagship n8 and the owners of those smartphones will be able to download Symbian Anna as an over-the-air upgrade for their smartphones we've got the Nokia x7 here which is running Symbian and out of the box and we're going to take a look at the software running on it so this is the main Symbian Ana home screen and the Android users will recognize the pages which you can flip through left or right which are basically your home screens and the widgets each home screen can hold up to six widgets and you can have a total number of three home screens you can flick through with your fingers wiping left or right or you can use the button buttons you flip through them now you can customize the home screens with widgets let's say we want to remove this home screen we just tap and hold and we get the chance to either add three more widgets to the missing slots or tap and select remove to remove the widgets and once the home screen is clear we can then delete it delete the home screen yes and that leaves us with only two home screens of course if you run out of space you can always add it back new home screen and add six number of widgets which it wise there are so many widgets as you would be used to from HTC devices running Android but if you have access to Nokia Ovi Store you can download either free or paid applications which have their own widgets you can add to your home screens basically you have just a handful of widgets coming pre-installed on the Nokia x7 BBC News calendar CNN video e notifications writers news so on and so forth so let's say you want to add the e and you want to add favorites which you can configure later on and let's say we want to add the music player so we've used up three slots out of the six we can always then move them to the top and to the button according to our liking if you notice the home screens have different wallpapers and our last screen which we have created has no wallpaper so we can define a wallpaper just for this home screen let's take an image takes us to the library and it's like this one and there we have it what's really nice is that there is landscape support in Symbian if you turn it to landscape it will automatically rearrange the six widgets so that they fit on screen best and you can of course let's get back lick through them in landscape just like you would in portrait mode let's get back to the home screen number one and back now of course your home screen number one has to have all those widgets which give you the information you are looking for at a glance which is most important to you and in my case I've configured it to have the clock together with the date and the profile we have four shortcuts which can be predefined we have contacts we have internet we have the store and we have maps we have a widget for email we have a widget for calendar we have a widget for social networking which congregates all your social networks into this one widget aggregate I'm sorry and then we have a widget which holds up to four or a favorite persons which you interact with on a common basis let's take a look at the email application what's really nice is that you can collapse groups by date so we have a group for yesterday's email Sunday's email and so on and so forth you can either collapse all and expand one by one or you can expand or landscape support is also present and you have a really nice outlook like display of your emails with the list and the buttons the buttons on the right and what's nice and the new addition to Symbian is that they have finally added a full QWERTY keyboard let's create a new male and here you have it full QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode previous versions of simian had only 89 keyboard and when he's switched to landscape they switched to the full QWERTY keyboard now with Simeon Anna you get the full QWERTY keyboard in your portrait mode so next thing we want to take a look at is the calendar application tapping on the calendar widget brings up the calendar application and by default it displays the agenda view but you can switch to let's say month view and what's really nice is that if you have more appointments for today more than the application can display they are bouncing up and down in order for you to see all of them you can of course switch to another view let's take day view and this is your typical date view on only if your platforms regardless if you're running iOS Android or Windows Phone and we got the week view which displays all of your dates and populates with the appointments to see where you have that certainly spot where you can put or squeeze in another appointment creating the new appointment is easy new entry and you have to enter the subject the hours between which knee band will take place location and so on and so forth next up we have the social widget which aggregates all your social updates from from your social networks currently OB social only supports Facebook and Twitter out of the box so tapping on that widget will bring up OB social and populate the list with the most recent updates from Facebook and Twitter if you want to see this cific service let's say you want to see only Facebook we tap the back button and we go only to Facebook and this goes into the Facebook application which is lacking a little bit in and features but is is quite usable getting back to the home screen we've got the favorite people let's take a look at the dialer what's really nice is that you have a quick dial if let's say you wanna dial Brandon you just might be our a and and that filters by the letters which is really good if you have many many contacts you don't want to scroll through the list up and down and you want to use only one of your hands so going through we have the Shazam application which is installed by default it's the free version and supported the YouTube application is really a shortcut to YouTube mobile so it's nothing out of the ordinary it brings up the mobile page form for YouTube from there you can take a look at a video given that video is available for you on the mobile website and right now we are in the browser and we have Flash disabled but if we enable flash you will be able to playback that flash video here in this in this page let's get back to the home screen like this we have some more shortcuts and these are widgets these two widgets are third-party widgets one is for movie teasers which is an application which let's take a look at it which basically shows you the latest movie thrillers so you stay up to date unfortunately it's not always working as you can see right now let's try it maybe later that geo has an application which has a custom widget yes we want to allow connections here that's the back next up we want to take a look let's say that the Maps application Nokia is well known for offering one of the best free mapping application offerings and these offerings are coming to Windows Phone as part of the Nokia Windows Phone strategic alliance basically you can have turn-by-turn navigation for driving and walking you have access to several maps which are pre-loaded on the smartphone you can check in and it automatically checks you in with Facebook you can update your maps and you can even you check weather for your current location it's really really nice and the application is using vector style maps let's take a look at them these are your zoom buttons and just just look how how fluid the animations are you can also use pinch to zoom but it's a little bit jerky but it works pretty pretty well and it's also voice-guided let's get back and out now that we have launched several applications we can easily multitask and switch between them if we tap and hold the home button we get this small cards like webOS like in the future to be Windows Phone like cards with the preview thumbnails of the applications which are currently running on your smartphone and tapping the small X button will close the application we have no more applications open ok let's take another look at the browsing experience and for that we will use an iPhone to compare the browsing speed and we have pocketnow.com loaded in its mobile version let's try to load the desktop version on both of these and the iPhone is off well even though Symbian Ana says that it brings a faster web browsing experience we haven't noticed such a quick page loading on pages which contain many many pictures like even pocketnow.com and the scrolling is rather sluggish as you will see now the iPhone almost finished it's still loading and the Nokia is still loading too and they are both still loading but on the iPhone you can already start and navigate while the Nokia is rather sluggish unresponsive as you can see we'll leave the iPhone aside because there's no terms of comparison here now it says it finished loading and just take a look at how sluggish the zooming and the scrolling is I mean I find it unusable it doesn't react it's slow it just seems to load forever let's just wait wait for it to settle that's still loading so I wouldn't personally use Symbian to browse the web if I'm looking to the desktop version of the web and on this Symbian on this web browser we have deactivated all flash all animations of all we have this text and images and and it's awful to say the least let's try to zoom back out and it's it's still loading let's maybe try to load the link and believe it loading it let's see how long that takes and it's the loading we are on Wi-Fi right now and imagine using this on your data connection which is sometimes slower than your Wi-Fi and it's still loading and processing now it says it finished no not maybe now let's try to flip to landscape and use it like this zoom out huge checkerboard get bad you just take a look at this growing I mean it's it's not working at all okay let's leave it like that web browsing on the Nokia x7 maybe this is a not final hardware with not final version of Symbian Hana but if this will be the final version of both hardware and software I would not recommend you to use anything beyond the mobile web this was Anton denied taking a look a short look at the software on the Nokia x7 running Symbian Anna stay tuned for our full review of the smartphone and if you enjoyed this video please give us a thumbs up thank you very much for watching this wasn't something odd from pocket knock down you