According to a Nokia press release, the E75 QWERTY sliderphone is now making its way into shops, and may even be available already in some areas. As mentioned in previous stories, the E75 features Symbian S60 3rd Edition FP2, a 2.4 inch QVGA screen, side-sliding QWERTY keyboard, GPS, 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.5G HSDPA and Wi-Fi support. It's also the first Eseries device to be compatible with the N-Gage platform. The full release is below.
This week an interesting announcement slipped into the Forum Nokia Wiki about a change in Java strategy on S60. Also a couple of new members joined the Symbian Foundation, and, if you don’t have enough information already, a Publish on Ovi webinar is coming up later in the week.
Nokia's Ovi Mail just moved one step closer to other popular webmail systems by adding better message formatting, auto-URL creation and auto-complete for contact emails. There's still no integration with Ovi Contacts though (i.e. the module with your actual contact details in), so consider this still very much a beta.
The Flahorn icon pack has become somewhat legendary in the Symbian world, featuring in a load of PiZero themes, and the man's done it again, this time with a theme for S60 3rd Edition phones that emulates the icon set and general look of the new S60 5th Edition phones. Why buy new hardware when you can simply pretend?...
I apologise to old camera-phone hands who've been down this road before - this will seem a bit obvious, but, for the newcomers around here and to anyone who might not have thought this laterally before, consider that your auto-focus camera in your Symbian smartphone is good enough to replace a Scanner for occasional use. Using an N82 and 5800 as examples, I demonstrate what to do.
Another in our series of beginner's 'How to's for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and S60 5th Edition, Tzer2 here walks you through every aspect of connecting up a Bluetooth wireless keyboard to the phone - it's not something officially supported but it does work extremely well - if you know how! (As always, you can see a complete listing of these guides on our 5800 tutorial index page.)
Manikantan is a keen (Python and) Flash developer and has produced a prototype app, Translator, for S60 3rd Edition phones that leverages Google's recently updated language translation engine. A nice Web 2.0 example, even if it's not very polished yet. See below for screenshot and download link.
Curiously dated as a 1 April release, the Nokia Energy Profiler has been updated to fix issues with it freezing on S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 devices. With the release also came an update to the NEP External API, enabling developers to tap into NEP data or add new data capture to the application.
Nokia's application store, Ovi Store, is now accepting content from developers, and will launch in May. In our latest developer feature, Richard Bloor speaks to Eric John, Director of Media Product Marketing for Nokia Services, to discuss the developer proposition offered by Ovi store. There's questions on operator billing, supported content types, platform support and more.
Yesterday marked 'day one' of the Symbian Foundation. This announced the commencement of the beta testing of its new web site and that 81 companies have applied for membership (50 of which are first time endorsers). The new logo of the Symbian Foundation was also unveiled: Symbian, in stylised letters, underlain by a yellow heart. Read on for more.
As CJ puts it, "It’s been a long time coming". The brand new ShoZu release for S60 5th Edition/touch devices is now live (v4.01). ShoZu is the premier third party photo and video blogging client and works with just about any service. You can download ShoZu for S60 (all varieties) from m.shozu.com on your phone.
Ricky Cadden, on Symbian-Guru has published an interview with Symbian's David Wood, covering all aspects of the Symbian Foundation set up, plans for the future and much, much more. This has been a big week for Symbian, it's 'Week One' for the Foundation and there will be some in depth coverage coming from Rafe very shortly.
Yet more from the BBC, who are on something of an April roll this week.... You may remember that we were first to bring you news of their next-gen mobile home page revamp, accessible for the last month through a 'beta' URL? Well, this has now been tidied up and made official. Some quotes from the BBC below, but all you really need to do is go to bbc.co.uk/mobile in your phone browser and follow your nose from there. All the beta functions are there, including iPlayer integration (and live TV links, see above news item) for UK residents owning compatible phones and connecting over Wi-fi.
Only for UK residents (it seems), the BBC has now started streaming live TV for compatible handsets (currently the Nokia N96 and 5800) at mobile resolutions, 24 hours a day. The quality's currently not brilliant, seemingly a frame size of 176 by 144 pixels, though RealPlayer on S60 phones will sample this up to fit, of course. But - it is TV, it is the real deal and you get the full range of BBC channels. including those normally only available via Freeview or cable/Sky. Screenshot proof, link, handy S60 widget and tips, all below.
Exclusive: the BBC has re-enabled the 'Download' system in their iPlayer widget for UK residents. In addition to the streaming option, video downloads were initially withdrawn because of lack of DRM compatibility with some Nokia 5800 product codes. The issues seem to have now been resolved and the Download! option is back. Thankfully. See below for screenshot proof.
