Time for the next part in my video review of the Nokia E75 enterprise device. How well does the dual format device cope with going online through the Web browser, and what other internet features does it carry? How does it fare for N-Gage games? And what about left-handed owners? I take a look in part four of the series, below.
Nokia’s Ovi Contacts application for (seemingly) all S60 3rd Edition phones has been updated today, with v1.06 mainly containing reliability fixes, though there's also an enhanced name search function, to help find people to chat to. See also the Beta Labs post on the update.
A couple more S60 5th Edition tutorials from myself and Tzer2, looking at How to Sync music from Apple iTunes to the Nokia 5800 and Shooting, editing and sharing videos. And, again, here's the full Nokia 5800 XpressMusic tutorial index, which should help you get much more out of your device.
Federation. No not the evil kind from Blakes 7 or the Star Trek goodie two shoes, but the federation of communications. It's one of the reasons that the internet really started to work. Look at the different operating systems, servers and applications that can all happily talk to each other. Every home, office and school with a router is a small network, connected to a bigger network, and so on and so on all the way up the pipe. So why is IM such a problem? Read on for my thoughts.
With the Nokia N97 getting ever closer, there's now an official Flash site, with the usual feature lists, animated graphics and 'interactive demo'. There's also a 'Pre-order' page, although this only works if you live in the USA, Sweden, Germany or Italy.
Today’s existential question – does a technology exist if there is not a competition to promote it? The Nokia Developer Summit offered us the hackathon and you can now see the outcome and several other summit sessions online. Also, NAVTEQ is getting involved with the European Satellite Navigation Competition 2009.
More beginner features in our S60 5th Edition tutorial series from Tzer2: How to use the FM radio (and RDS) on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and How to transfer and listen to music tracks and CDs on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. This last is lengthier and includes material on the newish 'Nokia Music' Windows application. It is planned to extend this comprehensive set of tutorials once the N97 is available. And, no doubt, to some degree when the Samsung Omnia HD arrives, as well. Enjoy.
So much for the quality stamp of being in the good 'ol BBC. Their latest Digital Planet podcast, going out worldwide, starts with an scaremongering piece which claims that the only reason why there hasn't been a mobile phone virus pandemic is that there aren't enough Symbian OS-powered phones out there yet. Completely ignoring the fact that the viruses mentioned are ALL for really old phones and OS versions, involve manual, deliberate installation and are aimed at really naive users. The Symbian Foundation's new PR dept would do well to fire a rocket into Gareth Mitchell, Jason Palmer and self-confessed expert Prof Barasbi, who, patently, haven't a clue what they're talking about. Pah.
Over on our sister site, All About N-Gage, Ewan reviews Age of Empires III. Thankfully, for an N-Gage title, there's full online multiplayer gameplay, but even without this there's plenty of Real Time Strategy to get your teeth into, with quick 'Skirmish' and career 'Campaign' modes. Still, I suspect it's the excitement of online multiplayer action which prompts the highish score - kudos to the developers, Glu Mobile.
Samsung Mobile Innovator has released the first iteration of the DevPak for the Samsung i8910 HD (formerly the Omnia HD). This plugs into the existing S60 5th Edition SDK to provide an emulator skin and control features, as well as additional APIs.
Trust CJ to find this little gem - Nokia's Star Trek tie-ins mean that there's now a Star Trek mini-site hosted within nokia.mobi, including a Tricorder application to download. Follow CJ's lead for how to get to the mini-site.
David Wood, writing on the Symbian Foundation Blog, about reviewing the release plans, has highlighted some details of upcoming Symbian releases. Symbian^2, the equivalent of S60 5th Edition Feature Pack 1, will be functionally complete next week and in devices early next year. Symbian^3, for which the majority of the source code should be available, enhances communication architecture, multimedia and graphics functionality, and should reach devices in the second half of 2010.
Symbian ^4 will see the full integration and optimisation of Qt into the Symbian platform. Further proposals includes the 'Orbit' extension library for Qt (replacing AVKON) and a new 'Direct UI' interaction and navigation logic. Put crudely, this means we will see an evolution of the existing S60/AVKON UI to a new Qt-based 'Orbit' Symbian UI for devices coming out in 2011. Read on for more details.
Perhaps a little trivial and off-topic, but I thought readers might like to know how I got on with polishing out the micro-scratches in the camera 'glass' on my Nokia N95 8GB. Using Displex, bought for a song from eBay, I managed to get all the scratches out in under 5 minutes. If nothing else, bookmark this for the future in case your phone's display or camera cover get scratched?
The next version of Nokia’s tool for S60 widget development is currently in beta testing. In ‘A First Look at Nokia WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio 2.0’ I’ve been given the opportunity to preview the new features and find a considerably richer tool, offering support for all the current and forthcoming S60 widget features.
Maps on Ovi, a comprehensive mapping service running on Nokia's web servers and which syncs down to Maps 3.0 running on S60 3rd Edition FP1 and FP2 phones, was initially released for Windows-based browsers but has just gone live for Safari on the Mac (see maps.ovi.com). As with Windows, there's a browser plug-in involved. See below for screenshots and brief comments.
