Over on Ovi Gaming we've taken a look at four touchscreen-based budget titles available for €2 each: crazy golf simulator Pirates Cove Mini-Golf, GClue's adaptation of Reversi/Othello, puzzler Electric Beams Touch and reaction timer Speed Tester Touch. There are also gameplay videos and screenshots of all four alongside the reviews.
Following a successful event in 2008 (see our report here), Vodafone's Betavine labs have announced another Over The Air event, to take place on the 25th and 26th of September at Imperial College, London. Betavine will be joined by Lonely Planet and OMTP to present the 24 hour hacking and coding event, where new ideas are presented in the first few sessions and everyone else starts a single day burst of coding to present their ideas and hacks.
With announcements from many platforms on new developer studios being commissioned, success stories for independent coders, and huge download numbers being related in the media on what seems a daily basis, where is Nokia? Why is the Ovi Store not getting written about? Because unless the Ovi Story is told, developers are not going to want to take part in a software warehouse that appears to be a ghost town. Read on for my take...
Haptic feedback is rapidly becoming an integral part of the touch screen experience. Immersion Corporation, a leading supplier of haptic technology, has recently joined the Symbian Foundation and its technology is expected to become available to developers in the near future. This article looks at the technology, what can be achieved, and its impact on battery life.
Over on Ovi Gaming we've reviewed six games that are available in Ovi Store for one euro each: African board game Mancala Touch, Japanese-themed arcade game Go Sushi, turn-based puzzler Octopuzzle Deluxe, computer classic Mine Sweeper Touch, geographical tutor Flags Trivia and foreign vocabulary builder Dictiomania.
You've got to love a good Tomi T Ahonen rant. Fired up by a ridiculous piece by Forbes magazine, Tomi launches into a lengthy, enthusiastic, occasionally unbalanced and gratuitously violent rant against the piece's author and in defense of Nokia as an innovator in the mobile world. Like all Tomi pieces, it's long, so grab a coffee and sit back while he slams punch after punch into Forbes' so-called journalists. Note: it's not an anti-Apple rant - it's a rant against the US-centric media who, seemingly, haven't got a clue about the wider mobile world picture.
Mundu Radio is a multi-platform software application for Internet radio, allowing you to stream hundreds of stations from around the world straight to your handset. Which is something that Nokia Internet Radio application can already do for most devices - does Mundu add enough to this mix to make it worthwhile? Ewan fires it up late at night, under the bed covers, to find out...
A nice bit of detective work by Devin has revealed that Files on Ovi (now just Ovi Files), always the least sexy of the Ovi services, has changed from a commercial into a free service. Possibly driven by poor take up, Nokia has simply made it free for all and is quoted as saying that existing unused subscription periods will be refunded. Interesting. I'd like to see them make pedestrian navigation free for all next in Ovi Maps - now that would put the cat among the (ahem) apples and blackberries...
One of my most essential Web Runtime apps, for S60 5th Edition, is Device Info - mainly for showing free RAM, but it does have plenty of other uses. It has now been updated to v2.0, with extra readouts, including IMEI. Grab it here for the 5800, N97 and Samsung i8910 HD. (via Wampyre)
Just a few quick notes of interest for Nokia N86 owners. Go into 'SW update', in your 'Applications' folder, and you should see an update to Ovi Maps, taking you from v3.0 to v3.1. This represents bug fixes and optimisations. The NokNok guys are also reporting that some N86 product codes are also showing Conversations 9.20, a threaded SMS system that plugs into Contacts, and which was previously only available from Nokia Beta Labs. Nokia also announced today that the N86, its imaging flagship, will shortly go on sale in the US, SIM-free, for $558.
Solving a charging problem chez Litchfield, I was struck by the realisation that all chargers are not made equal. If this seems obvious to you then feel free to skip this chatty tutorial, but otherwise you might like to read how I sped up the charging time on my Nokia N86 by a factor of almost four simply by using the (ahem) right mains charger. Item of trivia: mains charging of a modern smartphone can be up to twelve times faster than microUSB trickle charging - quite a difference.
Over on Ovi Gaming we've recently been doing some reviews and videos of cheap, simple touch-based Ovi Store games for S60 5th Edition devices. Touch Card Match is a colourful version of memory, Spin The Bottle Touch is an underwhelming bottle-spinning simulator, Chessboard Touch lets two people turn a phone into a timed chess board, and Freecell Touch is a no-frills ultracheap version of the classic card game.
Never mind its geek-perceived flaws (e.g. pointed out by me!), I was interested to note that Vodafone just published their current top 10 selling phones (presumably for the month of July) and that the Nokia N97 was at no.1, i.e. it's the best selling phone on Vodafone right now. Snapping at its heels was the Nokia 5800, followed by a herd of feature phones. The Blackberry Storm and an Android phone were at the bottom of its top 10 - the full list is below.
The Symbian Foundation today announced the first details of Symbian Horizon, an application-publishing program, which aims to reduce the barriers developers face when taking their products to market and thus increase the profitability of creating Symbian applications. Symbian Horizon will place applications in a number of partner app stores including Nokia's Ovi Store, Samsung's Application Store and AT&T's MEdia Mall, effectively acting as an application publisher on behalf of developers.
Nokia has released their Q2 2009 results. Profits were down 66% year on year, but this was ahead of market expectations. Nokia cut its prediction for H2 2009 profitability and market share for 2009, which has driven down its share price. However the underlying results are encouraging, given the economic climate, although some concerns remain in the high end of the market. Converged devices sales (smartphone) were up at 16.9 million, compared with 15.3 million units in Q2 2008 and 13.7 million units in Q1 2009. The 5800 shipped 3.7 million units, while Eseries and Nseries shipments were 4.7 and 4.6 million respectively.
