As the recession continues to bite, will there be any innovation in the mobile market in the near future? I don't just mean at the top level, where smartphone users (no matter the OS flavour) will try out every single application they can, but in the marketplace where hundreds of thousands of phones are bought every day. How will new services prosper in the modern environment? Read on for my thoughts.
Ewan revs up his bike and roars out onto the circuits of Ducati Moto, the latest N-Gage title. Unfortunately, despite largely competent graphics and a full complement of features, the gameplay's way too easy, the bike handling is on rails and there are graphical glitches. Which is, yet again, a shame for N-Gage. Over on Ovi Gaming, Ewan wonders if anyone actually play-tested the title and I have to agree.
Sorry for the urgent 'stop press' item, but I've noticed that my domain manager company has gone out of business and that my old smartphones-show.com domain had lapsed. Can I ask any (lovely, friendly) AAS readers with web page or blog links to 'The Smartphones Show' or 'The Phones Show' to check where any links point to? The best URL to use is simply 3lib.ukonline.co.uk - Many thanks!
Yes, another year has passed and the annual Symbian bash is upon us. But with a slight twist, with the Symbian Foundation now well established and with the whole ecosystem, like much of the rest of the mobile industry, definitely in something of a state of flux. SEE (Symbian Exchange and Exposition) 2009 is free to attend and easy to get to. But what's on offer this year, what should you look out for? Steve Litchfield provides a few pointers...
Business Week have released their latest "Top 100 Global Brands" and not surprisingly telecommunications and IT companies are riding high in the list. Nokia is in fifth place and the highest placed non-US company, just behind IBM (#2) and Microsoft (#3), while Google has climbed up to #7 while Apple pops in to #20.
You may have noticed that the newer S60 3rd Edition FP2 phones, the ones that ship with the new v7 version of Nokia's Webkit-based Web browser, had been left high and dry regarding a client for Nokia's Ovi Store - trying to install the existing client resulted in an unusably slow experience. There's a new, Web v7-compatible client now though, v1.05(313) - you can get it from going to store.ovi.com in Web on your device - it's a 620k download. In use, the new Ovi Store client is faster than I've seen on any previous device. Anyway, that's one less thing for the Ovi Store people to fix up! (via Ovi Applications)
Back in July I reviewed Mobile Task Manager, a Java powered To-Do list and was pleasantly surprised at the flexibility it offered. I also hoped it would continue to improve. Well developer Tommi Laukkanen has released v1.2 with plenty of updates and a handful of bug fixes, mostly focused on prioritising your to-do's to make the best use of your time. You can download the free app here.
How about a new way to look at, integrate and play online with your media? That's what Kinoma Play promises, for S60 3rd Edition and QVGA screens at least. Integrating Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Last.FM and many others, together with all the content already on your phone, seems like Kinoma Play is all-encompassing. Here's Ewan's largely positive assessment of this (commercial) new media suite.
Nokia has been named as the world's most sustainable technology company according to the 2009/10 edition of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Already rated for several years as the leader within the Europe and Communications categories, this year Nokia was also chosen as "World Technology Supersector Leader", making it number one across the entire global technology sector. See below for extracts from the press release.
It has been a long, long, rocky path, but the Samsung i8910 HD is finally in mass markets - well, in some countries and for some networks, at least. And armed with II1 firmware, it's high time for me to wrap up this top-end Symbian flagship. Just how good is it and what are its weakpoints? Is it more of a media tablet than a full-on smartphone? Find out in our review (Rafe contributed text - it's a joint effort! And thanks to Stuart Clark as well for helpful feedback)
If you're a camera geek like me and wish there was a way to view the EXIF information for photos on your S60 5th Edition phone, well now there is. XpressEXIF does need a little fiddling around, plus Python, and there are a few caveats, but SymbianWorld brings us a walkthrough showing that viewing EXIF data is possible with this utility.
Standing down today and retiring from his role as Chairman of Psion Teklogic is the spiritual Grandfather of Symbian OS, Dr David Potter. He founded Psion in 1980 with £70,000 of his own money, and over the next twenty years grew it to be one of the leading mobile computing companies, and in the process laid the Foundations for the current smartphone with the spinning out of Psion Computers as Symbian in 1999.
Guest author David Gilson provides a brief look at Tweets60, a freeware alternative to the well known commercial Gravity. It certainly lacks Gravity's polish, but how useable is it in real life? David also explains why he prefers freeware - it's to do with lack of hassle more than lack of cost, a very valid viewpoint.
PC owners might want to check out the latest beta of Ovi Suite 2, now apparently getting closer to final release. This latest beta has better support for photo sync between desktop and phone, plus many other minor fixes. It's a 90MB download from here if you want to keep bang up to date.
Next week Imperial College London will be hosting the second "Over The Air" event, where developers, programmers, companies and other interested parties will gather to hear about the latest innovations in smartphone technology during Friday, and then work through the night and into Saturday to hack together new applications using those ideas. it's a mix of Scrapheap Challenge and cutting edge mobile development. The draft schedule has just been announced, and free tickets are still available.
