Eric Pfeifer, Content Acquisition Director at Handmark provides insight into the world of application shops post Apple App Store and Ovi Store, with some interesting indication of applications and content demand from future stores.
Nick Anstee wanted to add a load of RSS news feeds into a single widget slot on his new (and seemingly much loved) Nokia N97. In this tutorial he shares how he did it, with the aid of a rather useful third party service from, somewhat surprisingly, Yahoo. See also his PS for an even quicker way of achieving the same.
Samsung Italy have released a fairly major (I8910XXIG2) firmware update for the i8910 HD (Omnia HD, as it's branded in Italy). The biggest change is to re-enable AAC (8bit 16KHz. mono) as the audio codec for HD video recording. A video example, taken on the new firmware, is posted below.
A third member of the AAS team has now had a few weeks with the Nokia N97 (we're saving Ewan til last - he'll be reporting back from the Edinburgh Fringe with it in August) and here Tzer2 presents a brief look at what stood out, especially in comparison to the smaller, cheaper sister device, the 5800 XpressMusic, drawing comparisons with the N95 and 6120 from a couple of years ago. Summary: it's only arguably better, has the potential to be much better, but has to be seen as too expensive.
A little off topic, but then this is Friday/weekend and we're all supposed to be letting go a little - I've been moaning a lot in the podcasts and on The Phones Show about how Symbian OS and other mobile OS roundly trounce Apple's iPhone (much as I love it in other ways) in terms of what I consider vital to a modern device: multitasking, something which Symbian OS pioneered in handhelds. Here's a very well written piece, and witty with it, written by Engadget's Editor-in-chief, Joshua Topolsky, talking about exactly the same issue. Mind you, if Apple responded and introduced proper multitasking, the iPhone would present an even bigger threat to the other devices and platforms. Comments welcome!
Google has now formally launched its mobile 'product search' system for users in the UK, USA, Germany and South Korea. I've put some screenshots below - essentially you can type in any product (e.g. while standing in a shop) and get a bunch of the best deals from around the web. In Web, go to (or create a bookmark for) www.google.com/m/products or www.google.co.uk/m/products (or similar for Germany and S.Korea).
At last, at long last, the popular Twitter client Gravity has gained large fonts, for use by those like me who (ahem) have less than 20:20 vision in our advancing years. You'll need to go online in Gravity, move to the start page and click on the 'alpha' (and 'experimental') version 1.20 build 5570, but don't worry, it works just fine. You also gain, as shown below, the ability to have a different (e.g. a white) theme/backdrop, again greatly aiding visibility. v1.20 works fine on all S60 3rd Edition and 5th Edition phones.
We've teamed up with Nokia N-Gage to give away a Nokia N96, a license for the N-Gage game Million Dollar Poker and a few Nokia goodies. All you need to do is answer a simple question and give us your name and contact details. Million Dollar Poker is the most recently released N-Gage game.
Spin the numbers around the carousel, add in a Sudoku grid and a touch of frustration, and you have a new puzzle game. Will Rotoku, new in the Nokia Ovi Store, be enough to satisfy Ewan?
Telexy Networks has launched Network Commander, a collection of useful network utilities for Symbian OS. A while back Telexy released a piece of software called SymSMB - basically it allowed Symbian devices to connect to network shares via Wi-Fi. Very clever, but they encountered a small legal issue with a large Finnish phone maker. To cut a long story short, they shouldn't have been doing two jobs at once. Naughty. So SymSMB was pulled from sale, sadly. But there's now Network Commander and I've looked at it briefly below.
In All About Symbian podcast 138, Rafe talks to Daniel Rubio, Chief Architect of the Symbian Foundation, about his role (Daniel also heads up the Symbian Foundation Architecture Council) and the importance of SHAI (Symbian Hardware Abstraction Interface).
Launched today in Nokia's Ovi Store is a free Bing widget:- you'll recall that this is Microsoft's next-gen answer to Google's main search site. Offering Web, Mobile web, News, Images and Videos, the tabbed interface gives you results almost instantly, since content is cached for each tab/data type. Some screens and comments below.
With the advent of the N86, James Burland, host of the N95 Nokia Creative Awards, has just published the very last set of superlative photos taken on the most iconic smartphone of our time. Clever stuff, the winning entry is nothing short of sheer genius...
On Monday Vodafone launched its Summer of Widgets competition. Every week through out July and August Vodafone will be giving away three prize bundles (consisting of Samsung NC20 netbook and a Nokia N96) to the developers submitting the best widgets. Widgets must be developed using the Opera widget runtime for S60 and be uploaded to the Vodafone Widget Developer Platform. Read on for more.
Slightly off topic, in that the main device covered isn't powered by Symbian OS, but The Phones Show 85, now online, should be required watching for any smartphone fan in that James Burland demonstrates somewhat emphatically the huge graphical processing power inside the Apple iPhone 3GS. Yes, yes, we know that Nokia for one have chosen not to go down this route, so consider this a look at what might have been if the N95 had been a taste of things to come in the S60 world...
