Vodafone UK customers (PAYG and monthly) apparently all get free data from Christmas Day to New Years Day - yes, it's only 50p a day, but still a handy little stocking filler from the big V? And got to be handy for all those people unwrapping Vodafone-branded phones and wanting to try them out for free....
It's been a rough year for the Symbian ecosystem, and an especially rough year for their partners. Samsung and Sony Ericsson have taken their portion of the punishment, but the lion's share belongs, for good or ill, to Nokia. The ecosystem strikes me as remarkably like another that last year was on the way down, but is now in good health.
As an experiment, I lent my Nokia N97 mini to All About iPhone's Matt Radford, to see what he thought of the device and its interface, coming from a staunch iPhone background. Embedded below is my ten minute catch-up interview with him, for your interest. A fuller textual report from Matt is in the works over Christmas, pudding and festivities permitting!
Guest author Julian Grail takes on a review of the alliterative Magic Message Manager, claiming to filter your emails and SMS in powerful ways. Unfortunately, it suffers at the end of the day from not being integrated tightly enough into Symbian OS/S60. Comments welcomed if you've had a chance to try Magic Message Manager yet.
Track and Protect, now available in beta, is a personal remote security tool for Symbian phones. It brings easy-to-use remote management and security features, such as remote locking and wiping, to a consumer audience and also includes a location tracking module. We've taken a closer look at the beta version in this in-depth review and conclude that Track and Protect should 'significantly improve the chance of having your phone returned to you', if it is lost or stolen. Read on for more.
How about that for an early Christmas present? Aimed at the Nokia N95 (which must be drawing its pension by now), Nokia have released a new firmware for the device. We're off to dust down the older phones (they must be in here somewhere) to find out what delights are in v35.0.001. Be aware that user data is not preserved in a firmware update on the N95 range, so you must back up your data first if you want to keep it. The N82 also gets v35, though this does have User Data Preservation, making the upgrade a little easier.
As you wind down for Christmas and New Year, a chance to clear some Links of Interest from my inbox. The ever insightful Tomi Ahonen, as part of a rant against smartphones not taking over from PCs, makes some interesting observations about 30 second tasks versus 30 minute ones. Only a short piece and worth reading. And the Bluetooth SIG has formally adopted the new Bluetooth 4 spec, (rolling in Nokia's Wibree work), meaning that ultra low power wireless communications between all our devices is getting ever closer. Quote from the press release below.
A couple of Phones Show-related links for you: show 98 is now live, with my video review of the Nokia E72 and a walkthrough of Nimbuzz with Twitter on the Nokia N97. And if you're anywhere near Berkshire in the UK on the 6th of January 2010, there's an informal Phones Show pub meet - anyone welcome, though my offer of 'free beer' might need a caveat if too many people want to attend... 8-)
Our very own Asri al-Baker has taken the time to sit down with Malcolm Lithgow, the guy behind Dreamspring, a software house which has been in the Psion and Symbian worlds for almost as long as I have(!) - Asri questions him on the challenges and rewards of developing for Symbian and asks him to summarise a modern developer's other options (Maemo, iPhone, Android, etc.) Here's the fairly lengthy, but interesting, interview.
One would assume that with the Nokia N95, N96 and N97 having sequential product numbers, there would be a common aim for their use in the minds of Nokia's design team, along with a clear technical evolution. To be fair, you can see the former, in their focus on multimedia in conjunction with a decent camera. However, the latter isn't that easy to demonstrate, as I found when comparing the three Nokia flagships (from 2007, 2008 and 2009) head to head - it seems there are plenty of attributes for which the N95 wins and still more for which the N96 wins....
'Tis just a little thing, but oh so worthy - one of our favourite Symbian developers, Sittiphol, has come up with NorthPole, a free compass utility for the Nokia E72. Meaning that you don't have to boot up Ovi Maps just to find out where North is.
Paragon Software (who long term readers may know better as Epocware) have released version 2.0 of Handy Shell, a replacement stand-by screen for your S60 smartphones which provides huge levels of customisation and interaction over and above the regular active stand-by screen on your phone.
In this review, Ewan takes a look at SPB Weather, a new commercial weather forecasting and reporting application that has both functionality and cosmetic appeal. Moreover, there are several tactile innovations, including an interactive weather-layered globe. At the end of the day, the only thing left to complain about is... the weather itself, this being the UK!
Sasken, which provides mobile software services and solutions, has put forward a proposal in the Symbian Foundation for a Social Mobile Framework, which will hopefully be included in future releases of Symbian. The aim is "to enable seamless integration of social networks and web services into native C++ applications". Some more details and links below, if you're a developer or if you're interested.
The application development system Python for S60 has finally reached the big version 2.0, at least in runtime form, and is being pushed out via SW_Update on selected S60 phones. I've done some screens of the availability and installation process below on the Nokia N86. I daresay an official announcement and a full development release is also imminent. Watch this space.
