Rafe and I attended the Over the Air mobile developer conference this past weekend (expect to hear more about this on the next Insight Podcast) and a number of the presentation made are now online. Scott Weiss of the Symbian Foundation talked about "Open Source and the User Experience" which can now be found here.
HeroCraft, one of our favourite games houses, has just released '$tolen In $ixty $econds' for all S60 5th Edition touchscreen smartphones - as it sounds, the idea is to roam the criminal underworld, planning crimes and making money. Hmm.... not sure we should be promoting that kind of behaviour on AAS. But heck, it's all virtual.... There are screenshots and details below if this is your sort of thing!
In another of my periodic case roundups, I explore a clutch of options for the Nokia N97, from in-situ shells to belt holsters. Surprisingly, this time around there are a number of options of almost equal relevance and quality and it will all come down to how you want a case to work.
The latest Chinese i8910UZCII1 firmware for the Samsung i8910 (Omnia HD) adds kinetic scrolling to the built-in S60 web browser and takes the browser build number up to 7.2.13841. However, the Chinese firmware contains some other issues which break compatibility with European languages, Samsung's PC Suite and some other application. So how can this help you? ... read on to find out.
With the news now official that Nokia has accquired Dopplr Oy, the company behind the social media atlas site Dopplr, the Finnish company has added yet another small niche service to their diverse range of companies. Dopplr (which allows users to say where they are travelling and see who lives there or is visiting at the same time, allowing for more serendipitous connections to be made) joins services such as Plum and Plazes in Nokia's store chest. Why?
In All About Symbian Insight 88 (AAS Podcast 150), Rafe and Steve talk about the release dates for some upcoming devices and preview the Nokia 5730. Rafe reports back from the Ovi Developer Day and Steve shares news of the latest Nokia 5800 firmware and upcoming firmware for the N86. There's also discussion about the Ovi Store and Vodafone 360. You can listen to AAS Insight 88 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
If your SIM-free Nokia N97 has been 'stuck' on v11 for ages, try your 'Sw Update' application again today. People are reporting that v12.0.026 is now available as a 700k over-the-air update. And no, we've no idea what took Nokia so long either.... All data should be preserved, but an extra backup can't do any harm, just in case. All you'll have to re-enter are details of your Internet access points and any Bluetooth pairings.
Kudos to Dave Cozens for coding up a useful set of news-focussed widgets for the Nokia N97. There's 'Nokia and Symbian news', 'UK traffic news' (couple of screenshots below), 'World news' and (ahem) 'Football news'. There's Twitter integration, automatic update checking and you can grab them here, on the All About Symbian forum.
In the first part of my coverage of the Nokia 5730 XpressMusic, I compare three slide-sliders (two of them Symbian) and reckon that a) on the whole, you get what you pay for(!) and b) that the 5730 XpressMusic contains a number of, at first sight, strange hardware design flaws. Rather surprisingly, too, I'd been really looking forward to trying this phone. The saving graces come when the sun goes down, as you'll see from the last photo in this initial impressions piece, when the 5730 exudes 'geek cool', and when you spot the 'extras'... Watch this space for a full, detailed multi-part review.
I was fascinated to read of the continued progress of some of Symbian's 'Wiki books' over on the Symbian Blog today. Essentially, these slightly niche guides and reference texts are being created in collaborative style by a number of authors, all contributing online into a 'wiki', a hypertext shared document. The 'wiki books' can then be electronically massaged into free electronic 'ebooks' or even passed over as needed to an on-demand book printing service. And it goes without saying that content can be kept up to date a lot more easily than with conventional '100% paper' titles.
Just because we've (temporarily) stopped writing about the Nokia N97 (back in its box, awaiting v20 firmware in my case!) doesn't mean that you should be short of reading matter. Clinton Jeff has spent time putting not one but two N97s (one black and white white!) through an exhaustive photoshoot and review, so if you're craving more N97 discussion then head over to his self-proclaimed 'Ye Giant Nokia N97 Review'.
Following on from Ewan's musings as to what would happen when the first Comes with Music subscriptions came to an end, pointing out some of the complications and pitfalls, Music Ally is reporting that Nokia is emailing people offering a free extension by up to 3 months, taking them potentially into 2010. This is likely because licensing terms and arrangements (amazingly) haven't been finalised yet - so Nokia seems to be taking the financial hit. Watch this space.
Breaking cover yesterday was the UK's newest MVNO (mobile virtual network organisation), Giffgaff. Piggybacking on the infrastructure of O2, it's going to be publicly available before Christmas and promises to be the first “people powered mobile network.” I sat down with the 'gaffer' of Giffgaff, Mike Fairman, to find out a little bit more, starting with that idea of being people-powered. Read on.
Are there times when you don't want to keep picking which music to play? Wouldn't it be nice if a utility picked up on your mood and automatically chose music to fit it? Playlist DJ, reviewed here by Rafe, does just that, picking tunes from the music library in your S60 5th Edition smartphone and generally helping you through the day. Best of all, it's free for the next month or so while the developers build up their song databases, so why not give it a try?
The Ovi Store team have just started to roll out the ability to re-download purchased content. Content is tightly linked to your Ovi account, which means you can re-download content either to the same device it was purchased on, or a different device (e.g. when you upgrade). Previously Ovi Store content could only be downloaded once, on original purchase, to a single device. Currently the re-download functionality is only available for selected content and there are some caveats. Read on in the full story for more details.
