There's an interesting piece over on Reuters today, interviewing Symbian's David Wood and summarising the current smartphone market rather well. David is (understandably) optimistic that Symbian can hang onto its 50% market share in the coming years. Worth a five minute read.
Yes, it's quite practical, once you get over the shock of seeing your svelte N97 turned into something rather retro in feel. Here's my review of the 3600... I'll repeat that: 3600mAh Mugen replacement battery (and cover) for the Nokia N97. And hey, you also get to choose between black and white, and you get a stylus thrown in - what more could the N97 owner away from home ever want?
A little bit of lateral thinking by the Nokia Beta Labs team sees Braille Reader coming to touchscreen S60 5th Edition phones, making the most of both touch and haptic feedback. I'm not qualified to comment on its usefulness, but see below for the launch video.
Courtesy of camcorder entrepreneur Ewan Macleod, we have our very own Rafe Blandford going over the Nokia N97 mini and X6 in detail in a (thankfully) quiet room at Nokia World 2009. And, in similar vein, though powered by Maemo 5, we have Rafe giving the Nokia N900 exactly the same detailed treatment. Enjoy.
Yes, no catches or tricks. Win a brand new Nokia N97 on behalf of All About Symbian and The Phones Show. The competition set-up video is also embedded below, I'll look forward to your video responses/entries! The competition will run for just over one week.
We keep being told that Near Field Communication and wireless is the future - that's certainly the case in this fun video from Jack Schulze and Timo Arnall. Called "Nearness" it's a Wile E Coyote hodge podge of mechanisms and gadgets to create movement from nothing. Enjoy!
For completeness (and, yet again, to prove to ne'ersayers that I'm not in anybody's pocket), The Phones Show 90 is now out, with almost no Symbian content whatsoever (it's mainly about the HTC Hero). However, just to keep this news item on topic, Phones Show Chat 4 is also out, and this has large chunks of Nokia E71, Opera Mini 5 and musings on new qwerty phones.
It's coming close to the one year anniversary of Nokia's all you can eat music service, “Comes With Music”, and that birthday is pretty important to those who picked up the first wave of devices from The Carphone Warehouse. Because the 'all you can download' part was only ever going to last a year... so the flow of bits and musical bytes is about to run out for the early adopters. Or is it? Read on for my thoughts.
Web development standards — HTML, CSS and JavaScript — are a front runner in the quest to provide an accessible development environment for Symbian. However, Web Runtime (WRT) has its limitations and, across the industry as a whole, is rather fragmented. Find out how Symbian hopes to address these issues in the latest developer section feature.
A new release of the Java-hosted Opera Mini is always a big event. This is a beta launch, but still extremely interesting, with Opera Mini 5.0 adding smooth font aliasing, multiple browser windows, a password manager and much better support for touchscreen phones. On the downside, the application is larger, at 220kb (still small in the overall scheme of things, though), and custom form and editing fields mean that you can't now copy and paste text in and out of the application. I was going to produce a walkthrough of the new features, but there's absolutely no point because our good friend Stefan has already done this in good detail. You can get Opera Mini 5.0 by going to mini.opera.com/beta in Web on your phone.
It was an early Series 60 legend - the file manager utility that also cooked the tea and did the laundry. And today FExplorer has surfaced into the modern Symbian age, fully updated for all S60 3rd and 5th Edition phones, courtesy of SBSH. The bad news: it's now commercial software, as Ricky Cadden reports, along with a selection of screenshots. However, if you don't think you can rise to the purchase price, there's also a launch competition to win 5 license keys.
Are bulging App Stores overrated? Whichever Symbian-powered phone you own (or even if you have an iPhone, Blackberry, etc), could you manage with only three third party (i.e. add-on) applications? And if so, which ones would they be? Steve Litchfield conducts a spot survey and ponders a few personal theories...
Exclusive: as shown in the screenshots below, the next firmware for the Nokia N86 8MP includes a 'Face Detection' option, a feature not seen in a Nokia-branded camera phone before. With this, as you may have seen on some consumer Samsung phones, the Camera application can scan for human faces and will automatically focus on any that it finds. Also present in the next firmware will be significant photo quality improvements (less artefacts, better colours, also demonstrated below), a new Ovi Store client and, hopefully, a mountain of stability fixes - the N86 8MP v11 firmware is reckoned by some to be not fit for heavy use. [Updated with extra info and new screenshots]
While watching an interview recorded at the Gnomedex conference over the summer, I was struck with a statement from Micah Baldwin. In talking about the startup environment online with Jolie O'Dell, and specifically social networks, he said that any market can comfortably take three major players in the space. And given the crowded nature of the Smartphone OS market, do we have three clear heavyweights?
Now in it's tenth year, the World Mobile Phone Throwing Championship has been won by Pauli Kosunen, throwing his unspecified handset over 79 metres - roughly equivalent to an olympic level discus throw. In the women's competition the Finn's also saw success as Keikki Hamalainen threw her phone 37 metres, and the junior prize went to a 43 metre throw from Verneri Aleksejev. Unfortunately the final prize went to Japan, as Team Happi took that back to the Far East from the Far North.
