Tag: firmware

Drivers, hardware, and broken platforms

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James Kendrick takes a look back at the historical bane of computing (keeping your hardware drivers current on your Windows based desktop), and draws contrasts both to Microsoft’s Windows 8.1, but also issues in the Android ecosystem. The mobile space today, with the majority of customers who are not tech-savvy, calls for a change to the ecosystem. Continuing the way it is currently, both in the Windows and Android ecosystem, is a recipe for disaster. The time to change is now, no matter how it upsets hardware partners. Once customers are lost due to the way things are, they will

Symbian Anna arrives for download, shall I risk it?

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Symbian Anna, the first “name” update to Symbian^3 is now in the Over the Air channels for the Nokia N8, E7, C7, C6-01. Should I update, or wait a bit and see what happens to Rafe and Steve’s phones? I’m in the nice position of having more than one, so for a while the E7 will stay on the older, and the C6-01 (the gorgeous little pocket Nokia that I love) gets to be on the shiny new firmware. There’ll be a lot of noise from the geekerati about the timescale of delivery, but will the man or woman on

Where are my applications?

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Over on All About Symbian I’ve been grappling with the issue of why some phones from Nokia don’t come with the same applications as other phones from Nokia – and I’m looking at you, Mr Podcasting Application If your smartphone is all about personalisation, why is it that we are left with the manufacturer’s default choice of applications in the firmware? Years ago you checked the memory size and radio frequencies, now it’s interrogating the firmware load-out. It’s a given that no matter what Symbian OS product comes out, there are caveats in the review as to why application (a)

Mobile Phones Will Always Be Buggy

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Over on All About Symbian, I’ve posted some thoughts about mobile phone firmware. Spurred on by the problems around the Blackberry Storm and its ‘buggy’ software in the first wave of hardware releases, the company CEO said that this was the wave of the future – all phones released will have bugs. The knee jerk reaction that this is bad was always going to happen, but I think that he has a point here: It’s to do with complexity. The modern mobile Operating System is huge, and measured in tens of Megabytes. That’s a far cry from ten years ago