The Nokia E75 is now available in the UK. It is available from the usual SIM-free sources, including the Nokia UK Shop, for a cost of £375. We'll have the first part of our E75 review online shortly. Also now available, SIM-free, is the Black/Silver variant of the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music (which is the colour variant Orange are selling).
In All About Symbian Insight 67 (AAS Podcast 127) we talk about the Nokia's Q1 results - how good/bad are they? We move on to the news that Samsung firmware updates (and a new PC Studio) are on the way, and discuss two Symbian OS topics. You can listen to AAS Insight 67 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
In 'Mobile Development - For Everyone', our latest developer feature, Richard Bloor talks to Amer Hasan, Senior Manager, Apps & Developer Programs at Vodafone, about Betavine's £20,000 widget competition. The article explains how Vodafone sees widgets reducing the barriers and costs of development and the importance of open standards in choosing which widget platform to use.
It seems that Nokia will shortly be releasing the first device specific S60 SDK (focussed on the N97) and there has been a lot of talk about Symbian on MIDs, how will this affect developers? Read on for my analysis.
With the advent of Google Latitude, Nokia Chat, Nokia FriendView and other similar services, Steve Litchfield ponders their future, wondering why they haven't taken off as fast as he'd originally predicted. Part of the reason, he suspects, is that the typical demographic for such mo-lo-so applications is fairly restricted, i.e. most of us either know exactly where our main contacts are or don't need to know.
The UK's Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has been commenting on alleged police brutality during protests at the recent G20 conference in London. The head of the IPCC has apparently said that "the widespread use of mobile phones by protesters to take photographs and video footage of the clashes was providing invaluable evidence" in investigating three separate incidents including one death. Many worry about intrusive surveillance putting too much power in the hands of authorities, but perhaps cameraphones are turning the tables?
Whiling away a slow news Sunday, I thought I'd take a moment to round up the Twitter addresses of the AAS team, should you want to follow our ad-hoc notices and thoughts in almost-real-time. I'm @stevelitchfield, there's also @rafeblandford, @ewanspence, @Richard_Bloor and (now that he's started to write here occasionally) @whatleydude. Plus, of course, @AAS, an official AAS account and @allaboutngage for All About N-Gage.
Sony Ericsson today posted its Q1 2009 results and they make for grim reading. Sony Ericsson lost EUR 358 million in the first 3 months of 2009 and shipped 14.5 million devices, a 35% year on year decline, and gross margin dropped from 29% to 8%. The numbers were not unexpected and Sony Ericsson is moving to restructure the business, but it will take time.
Nokia's Download! system, integrated into every S60 device, has finally had one of my long-standing bugbears fixed. Never mind that the whole thing is now seemingly administered by Jamster (explaining all the '1 of 3' 'costs' listed throughout some of the app pages), the core 'Applications' section now has freeware marked as '0' (i.e. costs nothing), while trialware and demos now appear, less misleadingly (they used to say '0' too), as 'Try for free'. There's also the new 'Payment in application', in readiness for Ovi. See below.
Continuing a long run of success, Nokia has scored again with the N86 8MP at the annual TIPA (Technical Image Press Association) awards. The N86 won in the 'Mobile imaging device' category - perhaps a little premature given that the device hasn't hit the streets in production form, maybe Nokia has been handing prototypes to the 'right' people? Previous winners in the category were the Nokia N82 (2008) and N95 (2007), so at least it does seem as if the judges have got their heads screwed on straight.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the discussion on my recent “Why I Don't Use the PIM on S60” bring in a bundle of comments both on the site and in the emails. Lots of you brought up similar points, so I thought it would be a good idea to bring those into an article about why a PIM on a mobile device is a really good idea. [And Mr. Editor (Steve) couldn't resist sticking in his thoughts as well... bah]
Lee Williams, writing on the Symbian Foundation blog, shares a few photos on Symbian ^1 (effectively the current version of S60 5th Edition) running on an 'off the shelf Intel Atom based motherboard'. The Intel Atom is one of the processors regularly used in netbook computers. The concept highlights the flexibility and maturity of Symbian platform and demonstrates that there could be potential areas for it to be used beyond mobile phones. Read on for further thoughts.
Slightly erroneously (see below), but at least it's informing them! As shown (again) below, Nokia Software Update, recently updated, now informs users of the main benefits of installing specific firmware updates. As well as the simple numeric enhancement, users now get plain English 'this is why you should update' prompts. Add in the recent use of official Nokia press releases to push major firmware updates and the slow but steady stream (e.g. here) of general minor update articles and it seems that Nokia's update servers are really cranking into gear.
Mobbler, a last.fm client for S60, has been updated to version 0.4.4. The new version supports the new Last.fm Web Services, which is an official API / integration route, and should improve stability. Other new features include improved album art support, the ability to disable scrobbling, a sleep timer (perfect for using music to send you to sleep), and the ability to view you Last.fm data.
MobileTinyURL has launched, a way of creating mobile-friendly (i.e. avoiding too much character multi-touch) URLs for phones. The service is free and works for all content types, not just for HTML pages. Will it catch on - comments welcome!
