Nokia N8 and 808 - Battery and Symbian thoughts

Question

Hi!
I spent a lot of time lately reading about 808. While it seems fantastic at first, it has the same battery as Nokia N8 while having bigger screen and being more chunky overall. I understand if you want to use smartphone you have to realize it eats battery and mostly will last you for a full days usage. Well, I wish!
I own N8 more than a year, recently I switched everything to offline, lowest brightness and so on, to save battery. It helps quite a lot in standby mode, but when I'm using it it's no good:
- browsing web - less than 3 hours on 3G (I was once in a bus from Kilkenny to Dublin, battery was drained before reaching destination),
- reading e-book - around 2 hours (I was in a park lately, reading Steve Jobs biography and was surprised how fast the battery drained).
I wouldn't call it even heavy usage, just one app running, no multitasking. Since Nokia 808 has bigger energy consumption, I expect it to have worse battery life. That's why I'm thinking about switching to Samsung or Apple. There aren't any good or new apps for Symbian like there are on Android or iOS. I just wish we could have all in one device - perfect compact camera, phone, good battery and game console. But that's wishful thinking.
Also what I like about N8 - it has Sim Card and Memory Card slots beside each other on the side, extremely easy to access, the best I've seen. Now 808 has them all hidden behind the cover under the battery. If somebody is using phone as external hard drive, it's easy to remove Micro SD and copy files to a laptop via SD Card adapter. Pitty they revamped design so much it doesn't have such a good solution.

Answer 1

@graceboy9
Please have a look at some information about common problems and techniques of modern digital photography. You will find, that image stacking is used for two main reasons: increase DOF (depth of field) and NR (noise reduction).
The standard approach for NR is to take more than 1 photo of the same scenery and combine these (lets say 7 images). As digital noise is kinda random, chances are good, that only some of the 7 images have a noise pixel at a given point, where the other images show the true color/brightness.
Taking several images in a row is easy if you have a static scene with no moving objects and the same lighting conditions etc. - but it's very hard if not impossible to use it for everyday shots of people, sports etc. - and this is, what a camera handy will do: everyday photography. So if you can't take 7*5mp images in a row fast enough (like in a 1/250s, all together), what else can you do?
Nokia's approach is, to take one 35mp image and split it in 7 "grid-images" holding 5mp of data each. THIS can be done in 1/250s. Chances are, that only a few "neighbor" pixels will be noisy and the others show the true color/brightness. Combine the 7 "grid-images" and you get an image with less noise and more accurate color information.
So YOU don't have to pay for a 41mp sensor. Choose another phone with a 5mp sensor and blame it for taking noisy images. However, IF image quality is important for you, then Nokias approach might be a reason to consider buying the 808.
As for your argument, that images and videos only have to be as big as the output device (i.e. the screen of the mobile phone): well, that depends. IF you only want to show images/video on the phone, you are right. If you plan on printing your photos or postprocess them and show these and the videos on a TV screen, you are wrong.
Just give it a thought: why do dSLR cameras take high resolution images bigger than their rather small monitor on the back can show?
As for having a download manager or not in Symbian... I don't need one for my TV, fridge, car or other devices that have their own special purposes, including my dSLR camera, my phone and my car GPS navigation device. IF you need a mobile phone for heavy internet usage, the 808 might not be the one for you - it's that easy. To my mind it's a good ide to do things right and not only so-so. If the 808 can do the phone/navigation/photo job all in one device, what's wrong with it?
As for having my mobile phone flying around and taking photos automatically... I like that idea. Why don't you launch a company to build and sell such devices? Maybe as add-ons to existing mobile phones?
Have a nice weekend.