Weekend Watch: Multitasking with Belle FP1, demoed on Nokia 700
Here’s a video that shows off some multitasking on the Nokia 700 with Belle FP1. Multitasking is not just about doing multiple things at the same time, but also being able to quickly switch between what you’re doing. Furthermore the main activity’s performance must not be compromised and the battery should not significantly suffer. Belle FP1 seems to do quite a sterling job on this. Multitasking tons of apps is all fine and good but it gets annoying when you have to manage memory to keep it usable. The 512mb RAM vs 256 in the N8 is obviously helping quite a bit, as well as the optimisations brought in FP1.
Three games (Incredible Circus, Dungeon Hunter 2 HD and Sparkle), two browsers (Symbian 8.2 and Opera Mini 6.5), one video player app (Nokia Trailers), facebook app (fMobi), PDF viewer (Smart Office), CNN App, WRC App, all running at the same time
by danchiriac
Cheers Jill for the tip!
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Hey, thanks for reading my post. My name is Jay and I'm a medical student at the University of Manchester. When I can, I blog here at mynokiablog.com and tweet now and again @jaymontano. We also have a twitter and facebook accounts @mynokiablog and Facebook.com/mynokiablog. Check out the tips, guides and rules for commenting >>click<< Contact us at tips(@)mynokiablog.com or email me directly on jay[at]mynokiablog.comSubscribe
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- Video: Belle FP1 multitasking na Nokiji 700 | NokiaMob | May 6, 2012
Remove that video immediately!
People should never know how good Symbian is as an OS.
So yeah, Symbian is dead guys, nothing to see here, move along, long live WP…
Please let go off the rivalry .. complement whats good & expect for the back-drops to be cleared. There’s no point in bashing WP or Symbian .. both are good & both has its cons & now both is what represents Nokia.
We want Nokia to succeed & to be at the top again. So we the fans shall support both of them.
Thanks Jill.
Please NeNoRmAl, calm your self. I would appreciate it if you did not try to antagonise other readers and make every comment ground a place to fight.
Well, it hurts to see videos like that and with time it will start to hurt even more seeing how another great company is disappearing…
There are mature ways to present that same reaction. It is not an excuse to try and wreck the comments section by antagonising other users.
Please don’t talk to me like your’re talking to a regular spammer or troll..
At some point, comments like mine should indicate to you that something is not right.
Erm. That’s why I said in the comment below that I did not expect this immaturity from you.
http://mynokiablog.com/2012/05/06/weekend-watch-multitasking-with-belle-fp1-demoed-on-nokia-700/comment-page-1/#comment-567518
Well Jay, he does have a point. Symbian has been bad-mouthed by the CEO of Nokia, obviously killing any theoretical credibility it had, even though it is miles ahead of the other operating systems in the market, in terms of resource management and battery life. A 1.3ghz single core BelleFP1 can provide as smooth an experience, if not more, as a dual core android.. And can definitely DO much more than WP7.
I still hope to see the day where they recant their statements and ensure Symbian’s future stays intact past the 2016 “deadline”, but that’s probably just my wishful thinking. Still, 8o8 is the device of 2012, and possibly the last big symbian flagship, and i shall own it on day one!
Well Nokia tried to manage the burning platform memo in a way by stating that they will support Symbian till AT LEAST 2016 so there may still be a chance that support for Symbian may be extended after its end of life date. I guess that all depends on how well the platfom performs. I just wish that Nokia would put a little bit more effort in promoting belle fp1 and its features and improvements to the platform.
dear mr Jay Montano
i’m from indonesia,my phone nokia 700
i instaled nokia pc suite,(i want to upgrade to belle fp1)
but why there no update for my phone,after refresh and rfresh at sohtware update only this word
your phone has the software version 111.030.0609
why i didn;t get belle fp1 for my 700
thank you
You have to wait for the update a few days more, in each country the operators take time to approve and release the new updates, be patient and keep lookin for the new FP1 to your Nokia 700, and feel proud taht you have a Nokia device.
Of course it’s good to see both OS’s doing good, but the reality is that, for Nokia there is only one OS and that is WP.
For Nokia and M$ WP strategy must succeed(or at least look like it is) at any cost and the cost till now is Symbian+MeeGo…
And you decide to bring in WP in an article that didn’t have WP in the first place? Bad form, bad form…
That does NOT excuse your bitter, immature, antagonistic comment. I did not expect this behaviour from you.
I urge everyone to stop fighting. If you feel the need to be bitter, quarrel, fight, be antagonistic, go outside and get some fresh air. Get a stress ball.
+1
You are right. Symbian nowadays is faster with true multitasking than any WP with its one app at a time “feature”.
android cant do that, my xperia pro s***s bigtime on multi tasking, it closes home screen everytime you load a heavy program and all program, why do their OS load an MB of RAM?!? Symbian here is so smooth my Nokia E7 gets envy…
Haaaaaaaaaaaa! Was about to sell my SAM GT-S5830 for a SE/SM MK16i! Good thing you mentioned the FC on the HS. So now it seems my other option is the SE/SM LT28i and the NOK RM-807.
That’s really awesome!
Yeah .. all these phones are underdogs.
Less known but very reliable. Kind of does the job super perfectly. Belle FP1 has got such good reviews from users.
Just improve the keyboard, apps installation process and the browser, withdraw the burning platform memo to attract some developers, and you already have a well established and competent OS! What’s wrong with having two OSes instead of throwing all your eggs into one basket?
I agree with all the 3 points.
I hope Belle FP2 will definitely bring improvements to a few of these points.
+1
Symbian needs another two major overdue hardware upgrade. Bump up the screen resolution and put dual core inside. Now watch the money come in.
ditto
They also need to just have one Symbian phone, not ten different phones.
It is too confusing for the customer, and stops carriers from carrying the phones, and makes development too expensive and complicated. It also makes it too complicated for third party developers to bother to program for it.
Nokia should just have one, single Symbian phone and market it.
And yes, they should double the resolution and put a modern processor and GPU in it.
none will buy it.when its says symbian people still thinks of old s60 and why should one need to spend a lot of money to buy a dualcore symbian phone which dont have any good apps or hd games.better be of with an android.
how do you know exactly that “none” would buy it I for one would buy it if i had the money that is
Wow that looks so smooth, got me interested in getting the N808 again.
Was on the fence whether to get a 808 but this cleared it
Yeah Belle has that charm.
I hope Belle FP2 brings something new to the table on the UX front.
Can anybody help me on the Pixel Density front ?
How much of an impact will it have on the display of Nokia 808 PureView .. with it just being 184 ppi (if we look at competition they are above 300 ppi) ?
& what all areas will be affected by it .. like Video Playback, Browsing etc ?
Well because of it’s screen size and resolution the PPI would be the same as the Nokia E7 and X7 so if you want an idea just take a look at the phone.
It is exactly like an E7. Same size, same resolution.
Agreed its the same as X7 & E7 .. but hows the experience on the above points ?
I’ve tried it out in retail stores. Pitting the screen side-by-side to a HTC One X and similar high res screens, you’re gonna be slightly disappointed. It doesn’t pop out and look as sharp, but looking at the screen individually, it does a decent job. Colors are bright, clear black is really clear and deep black, and the 4″ size is exactly there at Not-too-big-nor-too-small size. Typing is perfect especially for big hands like mine. Yes it’s kind of ancient to use a 2009 screen resolution in a 2012 phone, but it does the job! Plus, the lower resolution means less power usage = more battery life!
does it affect the resolution of a video ?
What do you mean? If you shoot 720p (or 1080p with pureview
, the video is 720p (or 1080p). So if you look video via HDMi with your tv, its what is supposed to be.
If you look that video on your mobile phones screen, the resolution is what your display is capable of. So yes, it affects the video at that point.
Since most apps are developed with the Gen I 256MB RAM in mind to ensure compatibility, 512MB RAM is actually quite a generous offering and should be more than enough! The only apps I can think of that may use more than 256MB of RAM are the web browsers with many tabs opened. I guess this can sort of compensate for the app launch time by leaving them running in the background?
This is something we’ve been saying for a long while. Although there are intrinsic issues in Symbian, beefier hardware obviously helps it out. We don’t care about the excuses that ‘it does fine on 128mb, 256mb”. They shouldn’t focus on balancing the books to the level of ‘fine’ but to the point where it’s more than fine in the majority of tasks.
Can’t wait to try the 808.
Do you think the Gen 1 Symbian devices are holding back development? What if some developers want to port some ambitious 3D game (Adventures of Tintin HD?), should they be confined to the hardware requirements of the Gen 1 devices, or take advantage of the better GPU and higher RAM of the newer Belle phones? Sigh, fragmentation…
Honestly, as a developer, I try my best to make apps run on 1st Generation Symbian^3 devices, but if I’m unable to do feature X after trying very hard to make it work with the hardware constraints on the older phones, I’ll just do it anyway and warn “feature X only works on new phones”, but ship the app with feature X even for old phones.
If there’s something I really dislike about software, it is apps that block the user from trying to do something (even if it fails) just because the phone supposedly “can’t do it”, whereas new phones can. Because I believe somehow, someone might make it work and share how he did it with everyone else. I’ve seen this happen more often than not so I think that’s how it should be done.
I haven’t published anything yet though but plan to do this year… I just need to learn more about some APIs and as this is a hobby, my time is somewhat very short.
Wholeheartedly agree.
The 808 should be released with 1GB of RAM.
I remember the days of the N95… I was very lucky to purchase the N95-3, which had 128MB of RAM when most other Nokia phones had 64MB of RAM. Back then I couldn’t understand when people said their phone was out of memory after doing X because I could do X, Y, Z, A, B, C and D with still half the RAM free.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11481788/Internet/Screenshots/Screenshot0246.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11481788/Internet/Screenshots/Screenshot0261.png
Great times were those: I was able to open most of my installed, heavy 3D games and switch between all of them without anything getting closed…
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11481788/Internet/Screenshots/Screenshot0262.png
Having a phone with 128MB of RAM at a time when most (complex!) apps wouldn’t use more than 2MB was a huge pleasure.
Nowadays people just go into this “hey, use Qt!” thing that consume more than 1MB of RAM for a extremely simple tasklist with only 1 feature: a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) of tasks.
Now look at X-Plore: made using native code (Symbian C++), compacts/extracts files, reads HEX, has CRUD for everything, even protected and system files, image/music/video players, file transfer, multiple themes support, advanced settings and so much more, and it doesn’t even scratch the RAM counter after opened. If I recall correctly from my N95 times, it usually uses 200-400KB of RAM.
The thing is, I’ve used a 701 for 2 weeks, winning the NokiaTSN trial contest. During that time, i did a lot of HEAVY testing, running many many apps, longest was around 20 at the same time! These included games like angry birds, fruit ninja, dungeon hunter 2, and apps such as fmobi, mail, gravity, opera mobile 12 having some 6 tabs open and all, even after all that and more, jbak taskman showed me as STILL 110mb ram free.
Symbian does a fantastic job with ram management, and 512mb is more than sufficient. 1GB ram would’ve been meaningful on the iphone 4s, which REALLY needs that extra memory, but i digress.
Yes, it does a fantastic job with RAM management, let’s put 128MB of RAM on it and hope for the better.
On a less sarcastic note, yes, I know it does a fantastic job, I had 45 apps open on my Nokia N8 (still showing 30MB of RAM free) including all heavy apps I could open, also playing back non-stop music on the background, when using one of the leaked Belle firmwares last year (one of the two first leaks, if I remember correctly it was the first).
It wasn’t even too slow, it was coping better than I expected, but when I opened the 46th app the whole phone crashed and rebooted, though…
However you do need to keep in mind Symbian phones have two kinds of necessary RAM. The video memory and the general memory. The video one is what kills older phones, because the phone is usually taking 13MB of the 32MB total to render the general phone UI (and all Qt apps run their UI on this too using separate instances, which is not smart at all when you have such hardware constraint), leaving the developer with less than 18MB of graphics RAM, and this is a huge problem when multitasking Qt apps because all of them want a slice that’s usually 17% of this small pie!
Plus, there’s one thing that breaks the “fantastic job” argument: some tasks do require a huge amount of RAM to be used at one time. It doesn’t matter how well you do the RAM management; unless you use virtual paging (which Symbian did very well on the first leak, but was later supposedly decreased a lot for compatibility problems), it will fill everything and give errors. Try to read a huge PDF. The app code may be optimized and use few MBs of RAM, but the PDF by itself might want to grab a good 50MB of the RAM. What if you had 15 apps open, always switching between them and you decide you want to open a PDF? If you had 1GB of RAM, there would be no problem, but if you want to go the route “it does not need more RAM, let’s put just 256MB/512MB in it” you get problems.
New Symbian phones have 128MB of GRAM but I still feel this is not enough. If I had designed this phone it would have 256MB of GRAM and 768MB or 1GB of RAM, using realistic values. 256MB + 768MB would be a pleasure to have on Symbian and enough in my opinion.
Come on, am I the only person who purchases a phone to last some 5 years of continous use?
I am pondering whether to purchase the N9 or the 808 as my next phone: the N9 dual boots Android and MeeGo (the latter which is true linux with all capabilities!), with 1GB of RAM (thank you Nokia!) and is now very cheap, because the 808 has a risk of not fitting my expectations…
Don’t get me wrong, I do agree and I am impressed with Symbian memory management, it is wonderful, uses virtual paging and a lot of other smart tricks, but if you do all of this optimizing and have few RAM, it will do “fine” some/most of the time and on the remaining it may (probably will) have problems.
However, if you do all this optimizing and have a considerable amount of RAM above the “fine” level, it will do very well on most tasks and fine at the remaining ones that could go wrong.
Hmm, for a very long term device, these wouldn’t cut it i guess. especially with the “burning platform” that symbian is supposedly…
But one thing’s for sure, even after 5 years, 808′s camera would still be comparable to the flagships of that time.
I’m only using Symbian because I really like its foundation, features and basically everything about it. All my friends are impressed because there’s basically nothing you can’t do with the phone (coffee doesn’t count).
I got used to hearing jokes like “you know that satellite that crashed to Earth? It was Antonio, he pressed the wrong button on his phone when he drank a bit too much”.
I once had to make a presentation for college, I did it on the phone and presented it on the phone connected to the projector and controlled by those wireless (usb) presentation devices. I could do with a keyboard/mouse/wiimote if I really wanted. I don’t have a physical notes book anymore, everything’s on the N8. It is also better than all other cameras that people threw at me, it is easy to see that on the photos we took.
When I still had an Nokia N95 I had to make a documentary about a play that was going to take place in the city; I took photos, recorded videos, edited and presented the documentary on the phone. No computer needed. It was not a 2 minutes video, it was a short documentary (10 minutes video, about 200MB final footage), at incredible (for the time) 640×480 @ 30fps.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11481788/Internet/Screenshots/Screenshot0101.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11481788/Internet/Screenshots/Screenshot0104%20%282%29.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11481788/Internet/Screenshots/Screenshot0104%20%282%29.png
After the presentation, I uploaded it to YouTube from the phone.
If I could find another OS that does everything Symbian does, with some added bonus, it’ll be my next phone…
Sorry but no Android is able to do it right now (don’t even get me started about the Galaxy S3), and maybe (still to be seen) iOS on the iPhone 5 will be up to the task with a bigger screen and better camera… but only time will tell.
Until then I’ll probably (I hope so!) get tired of tweaking smartphones and trying to get everything out of it.
The thing is: I just want a computer that does everything and is pocketable. Nokia seemed to be in this business before Windows Phone 7 came out…
Approved! A million Symbian devices for you! Unfortunately, it’s been axed.
that is awesome
Get both, I am
N9 I already have, & 808 I’m getting around Xmas.
Few other phones before then too, yipee!
They’ll both be the last of their kind.
I have a feeling the N9 will be totally gone by the end of Q3 anyway.
Ofc that’ll have little to do with it being shit-house…
“Now look at X-Plore: made using native code (Symbian C++), compacts/extracts files, reads HEX, has CRUD for everything, even protected and system files, image/music/video players, file transfer, multiple themes support, advanced settings and so much more, and it doesn’t even scratch the RAM counter after opened. If I recall correctly from my N95 times, it usually uses 200-400KB of RAM.”
And now I’m thinking it could have been even better had they used assembly instead of C++. I’m going to go ahead and say that the ease of Qt makes up for the small overhead it has.
I agree with you about the added ease, but on Symbian the overheads are actually not so small:
The libraries are huge, the current version for 1st Gen phones does not support all functions of the phone, which you still have to write in C++ anyway in order to accomplish.
Since libraries are so huge there are s60v5 phones which, even though are supported, can’t install them because of lack of internal memory.
Plus, the installation even for 1st Gen Symbian^3 phones is very troublesome, requires an internet connection and disables all phone activity while installing: you can’t call, read messages, browse the web or do anything.
If installation was fast (like 15 seconds fast) it wouldn’t be a problem, but some Qt apps take up to 15 minutes to install on my Nokia N8; that is, when it succeeds. This has been reduced considerably to this day but still happens more than anyone would like to. Even cancelling the installation takes a ridiculous amount of time, and after reading the .sis script of the “SmartInstaller” it does not look smart at all: more than 70 checks before actually installing anything, and it doesn’t even tell the user how it’s going: just a looping progress bar. The actual app is only installed when it gets to “Finishing installation…”. Plus, it must be bundled with the app by each developer.
In my opinion, the Qt package should be provided via software updates and developers should not need to care about this at all: app installation would be just like before Qt: quick, smooth, informative and discrete, hidden from the user experience because it’s doing its work on the background.
“What if someone who hasn’t updated the phone downloads the app?”
A warning pops up when he tries to open the app telling him to update the software… problem solved.
“In my opinion, the Qt package should be provided via software updates and developers should not need to care about this at all: app installation would be just like before Qt: quick, smooth, informative and discrete, hidden from the user experience because it’s doing its work on the background.”
Umm… Belle and up? Although I agree completely that it sucks for older devices ( which is most of the devices out there ).
I haven’t tried installing a Qt app on a 3rd gen (Belle and up) device yet so I don’t know if that’s currently the case; Is it? Well that’s great.
I just hope the 808 doesn’t get too expensive when it arrives in my coyntry…
I don’t know what the “under the covers” situation is with Belle, but
1) installing an app takes aaaages, and
2) it blocks you from doing anything else, and that’s not actually what I remember from earlier, where you could multitask away and do something else instead (if I remember right)
Also, Qt works just like an abstraction on the system: it is not “part” of the system, like native apps are.
If you wrote a native app back in 2007 for S60v3 and decided to run it on the Nokia N8 with Anna it will definitely work, and if you want to run it on the Nokia 808 it will highly likely work (not “definitely work” just because of memory optimizations done on Belle), and it will not look like an old app: the System interface has changed, and so does the app’s because it is native.
It will look like you wrote it in 2011 and with few interface tweaks (like a squircle icon) it will look like a brand new app.
See SymTorrent for live example: originally written for S60v3, still works perfectly on s60v3, s60v5, Symbian^3, Symbian Anna and (with few fixes required because of memory optimizations) on Symbian Belle.
The same goes for the aforementioned x-plore… written in 2006, works on any Symbian version (s60v3 and beyond, until Belle) and one quick fix later it also works on Symbian Belle FP1.
How do you get SymTorrent to work on Belle? I’ve haven’t had any luck getting it to work on my N8 under Belle or Anna.
AFAIK it works on (up to) Anna, however getting it to work on Belle is pretty much hit and miss. I managed only once after giving up for a while, I was just being around the phone, opened it, chose a torrent I didn’t want to download and it started the download, I stopped, removed the torrent but after that I couldn’t make it work again and selecting a second torrent made it crash.
That’s why I mentioned it needs some fixes.
SymTorrent is open source, for those interested in helping fix it.
Thank you Antonio on the developer’s insight.
+1 Jay.
Symbian with some undated processors would be super fast. Add some ram and the consumer gets better experience. All these piggy pinching cost did cost Nokia dearly.
Really awesome product, between our N900, C7 and N8 which served us well for years I’m looking forward to getting a new Nokia. I’m just torn between N9 (5 years of dev experience in Qt weighing on this) and 808 (so we can shoot great photos even in low light).
http://www.intomobile.com/2012/05/04/class-action-lawsuit-filed-against-nokia-because-windows-phone-plan-failing/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/04/nokia_class_action/
Another phone that can’t be bought from retail in Canada (with proper warranty). First the Nokia N9, then the Samsung Focus S and now this.
Amazing multitasking with belle fp1. Glad to see MNB posting this video so as to highlight belle multitasking. It seems like we have to do the marketing and promotion for these belle devices, well except for the pureview of course.
Great video! Nice to see that Symbian still has a few classy miles left in those legs. With FP2, Im sure even more so. I really haven’t seen any other OS approach Symbian’s level of overall functionality. in fact all Symbian really needs is a better UX. which I’m sure will come in due time.
I agree Nokia really needs to release an official statement on this. Perhaps something like the fans have spoken and we read loud and clear and that Symbian will be supported for the forseeable future perhaps even past 2016.
Together, a rejuvenated Symbian, a polished Meego look like really solid legs for Nokia to stand on. Even if only to mop up any market that WP cannot address. I’m really hoping both get a chance and Nokia’s BOD can see them for what they really are, a veteran with a lot more to give, and a rookie with a crapload of talent and potential.
No, Symbian and MeeGo can’t be competitive.
I didn’t like Android but how can Nokia compete with beasts like HTC One X or the new Samsung Galaxy SIII?
It’s impossible, they are far ahead in terms of hardware and software… just watch the Galaxy SIII announcement, the phone is easy to use and the UI is just great. It’s an intelligent phone. Unlike any Nokia phone that does what you want this one also KNOWS what you want now and next.
Oh, shut it down..
well i have seen the sIII the ui looks like a mess and features appear half baked.
and whe i have to choose between a monster like the 808 and a toy like the sIII…
It’s only a mess if you don’t know how to organize your shortcuts and widgets in the homescreens.
Mustn’t have actually heavily used S^3 (Belle+) & Maemo 5/6x.
I’m still getting a SIII or similar (not my only ph)…
But there’s no doubt the aforementioned STILL have their sw strengths.
And Maemo6/MeeGo would’ve been much better hw-wise by now.
If the team hadn’t shrunk almost 100%….
(U8500 or OMAP4 was on the cards, the former was more likely)
Multitasking on Symbian has always been very good..nothing surprising here. With a slightly better CPU and 1 gig of RAM you will be able to open 30+ programs without a problem, and all of them will be active.. no cheap tricks here
http://youtu.be/EUHPo9AytOU?hd=1&t=1m5s
Skip to 1 minute 05 seconds.
Nokia 5700
Also, Nokia 808 PV won, off the record since it was still a prototype.
I will get 808 pv.
Nokia belle FTW!
http://www.twitpic.com/9bgzvb
now thats the fantastic belle
the best n true multitasking,
waiting for 808 hyperion
The good ole days:
My road warrior multimedia computer.
Ahhh… the old days where apps use to be something usefull and not just a number to inflate your ego…
So, what the point of WP? No native API, no multitask, no BT, no filesystem, no usb otg etc…only “fluid” interface but in cost of only 1 (one) program running
so, which platform is burning?
Shhh. Don’t wake the *****.