Steve and I have had the Samsung i8510 (a.k.a. the INNOV8, in some markets) for the best part of a week, putting it through its paces. In all honesty, it's too early for a full review because there are some things needing to be attended to by Samsung, but what Steve was really interested in was how well the screen, 8 mp camera, focussing camcorder and DSP-powered music playback performed. I hope you'll be interested too.
Guest contributor Nick Anstee signed up to be one of the first to get a Nokia N96, as part of a limited 'wildlife' run. Read on for his first impressions of the N96, after a couple of days of intensive playing, plus photos of the device and some really nice photo samples taken on the device.
Several sites are reporting that a BBC iPlayer application will soon be available for the Nokia N96. Some N96's will ship with the application preloaded, but it will also be available for download from the BBC website. The application will support both the downloading and streaming of BBC TV and radio programmes. Read on for more.
Some folks are gonna love this. Others will hate it. But Handy Shell is coming, taking over the whole S60 standby/menu/control key schema and making it remeniscent of a Windows Mobile home screenadding new functionality. Ricky Cadden's been playing with the Handy Shell beta and you'll find his thoughts and screenshots right here.
Shazam have been at the music recognition game for a while - and we look here at the native S60 version of their flagship Shazam ID utility, which samples music snatches from the radio and then lets you know where it's from. Ewan's been trying to catch it out but ended up quite impressed.
An updated firmware, v30.0.015, has been made available for the Nokia N95 classic. Updates include the latest versions of Nokia service applications (Nokia Maps 2.0, Share online 3.0), inclusion of the full N-Gage client and smaller updates to a number of applications. The updates also adds automatic screen rotation to the N95 classic. Read on for more details and screenshots.
Nokia yesterday announced it has started shipping the Nokia N96, which means it will become available, SIM-free, in shops over the next few weeks. Availability via operators will take a little longer; the UK launch on the 3 network is scheduled for October 1st. The N96 is a high-end Nseries device with a focus on mobile TV and video (large 2.8 inch screen, video stand, DVB-H receiver, and preloaded movie content). It also features a 5 megapixel camera and integrated GPS. Read on for more details.
There's a new episode of Sauna Talk on the N-Gage developer site, where once again host Arnold Faber discusses mobile gaming with Nokia's Miikka Skaffari while not wearing any clothes.
Samsung will be taking up Nokia's offer to bring the last of the Symbian Shares under the Finnish roof (reports Reuters). With Nokia now in receipt of acceptances from all the shareholders, they will gain 100% control of the company, and will be able to implement the Symbian Foundation plan, and we suspect a major reorganisation of the Symbian staff.
...In which I am impressed by a couple of examples of superbly 'joined-up' applications from the iPhone world. Can the Symbian ecosystem compete? What advantages does the iPhone have to help the creation of joined-up apps and is there hope for similar software for S60 users? Comments welcome - can you think of any similarly impressive Symbian examples?
And I thought it was just me. James Burland's written an eloquent rant about how he keeps wanting to go back to his trusty Nokia N93, which still outperforms allcomers on the video recording front (stereo sound, optical zoom). With photo and video capture being critical to many people's phone use these days, is he right to criticise Nokia's direction? Although agreeing with him in a way, I'd also point to GPS, larger screens and 3.5mm audio output as modern boons.
Ah - you see, Nokia do keep tweaking their apps and compatibility lists after all - the E71 finally has a proper version of Nokia Internet Radio made especially for it. (via the E71 blog)
As you may have already seen, Google has launched a new web browser for Windows PCs called Chrome. According to their comic PR site, it's based on the WebKit open source browser engine, which is also used as the browser engine in the Symbian S60 browser and OS X Safari browser. WebKit currently powers the default browsers on Nokia, Samsung and Apple smartphones as well as Macintosh computers, and Google is taking it onto Windows PCs as well as its own Android. It seems there's now a potential for WebKit to dominate almost every major computing platform, could this be game over for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer?
Rafe gives his first impressions of the Nokia N79, along with detailed analysis on exactly who it will appeal to and where it fits into Nokia's burgeoning Nseries range. The hardware is the main focus as Rafe takes an early look at a prototype of Nokia's latest Nseries 'candybar' handset.
Nokia have announced that Comes With Music will make its debut in the UK, through an exclusive deal with The Carphone Warehouse. Available with the the S40 based 5310, the deal is an exclusive for Carphone Warehouse pre-pay customers until Dec 31st 2008. As advertised, the service will allow users to download as much music as they can from the Nokia Music Store for a year. Pre-orders can now be made at www.carphonewarehouse.com.
Symbian's report on their business in the second quarter of 2008 makes some good reading. The Headline number of shipped Symbian OS units is an impressive 225.9 million units over 249 different models, and compared to Q2 2007, there's been an increase in sales for that period of 5%. Digging a little deeper, the royalty received peer unit has dropped from an average of $4.30 to $3.40, leading to an 18% drop in income from royalties.
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