In All About Symbian Insight 63 (AAS Podcast 120) Rafe gives some insight into iPlayer, Steve talks about YouTube's S60 client application and both talk about their views on Samsung's Omnia HD. You can listen to AAS Insight 63 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
In a group review Steve rounds up a number of cases and protection solutions for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. He gives scores for protection, style and usability and assesses how well each case does in each scoring category. He concludes by offering an overall opinion, but our prior experience suggests people have strong personal preferences so we would love to hear from you too.
More Carnival of the Mobilists goodness over here this week, in Carnival 166. Always good to read - the posts help round out one's mobile industry knowledge!
Virgin Mobile, a UK MVNO (virtual network), is selling the Nokia E63 for £149 PAYG. The news is worthy of note, both because of the low price and its availability on a 'pay as you go' basis (rather than a contact). A similar example is the Nokia 6124 available on Vodafone for £75. Both of these demonstrates how Symbian devices are becoming more affordable as they are further pushed down into the mid tier market, potentially increasing their addressable market.
In All About N-Gage's latest review, Tzer2 gives Gameloft's Prince Of Persia the once over. The graphics look amazing but we're concerned about the spoon-fed gameplay, poor collision detection on the bonus levels, and the lack of multiplayer or even proper N-Gage Arena integration.
Yes, Ewan's heading off for a three week tour of the USA, taking in social media and gaming events. To try and add a little Symbian spice to proceedings, we insisted he take the Nokia 5800 with him, to really try it out 'on the road'. This is the sixth of his regular video reports, embedded below, letting us know how he's getting on with S60 5th Edition and the 5800. In this part, Ewan answers some feedback questions and talks more about the PIM apps with regard to touch integration, before describing why Nokia Maps is a better bet than Google Maps for the overseas traveller. Oh, and watch out for the battlestar-sized stylus and the Black Helicopter....
The San Francisco GDC conference is starting on monday and All About N-Gage's Ewan Spence will be reporting live from the event (there have been some interesting rumours regarding N-Gage news). To follow AAN's GDC coverage, you can visit our website of course, but we also have various other online presences such as our Twitter channel and our RSS news feed. And if we have any interesting vids to show you they should end up on our YouTube channel. Also see Ewan's personal Twitter feed.
Reported widely today is a new over-the-air update to Nokia's GPS-uber-utility, Sports Tracker. v2.05 (up from v1.83) brings better touch support (map zoom icons, more reliable finger swipe screen transitions), plus N79-like support for the Polar heart rate monitor and (on compatible devices) the integration/backup of accelerometer-based step counting. You can get v2.05 by going into the application and using 'Check for updates'.
After almost eighteen months of silence, a Nokia forum moderator has finally made an official statement about the status of N-Gage on the N73, N93 and N93i. In short, N-Gage will NOT be coming to those phones. As many predicted, the relatively older OS versions and less powerful hardware on those models apparently weren't up to the job of handling next gen N-Gage games. The low sales of the N93/N93i wouldn't have helped either. Our editorial thoughts on this issue are below. (Click here to see which phones ARE getting N-Gage.)
Released yesterday was my Show 78, with a six minute video version of my Samsung Omnia HD first impressions, published here at the start of the week. A huge thanks to Rafe for helping with the video and you can expect text and video in more detail from him on All About Symbian shortly. Show 78 also includes my March Top 5 Phones. If you want to comment on either, please see the YouTube thread.
As we mentioned last week, Canada's CBC has set up an online OPML podcast directory which can be used to browse all their audio and video podcasts on an S60 device's Podcasting application. One of the CBC's tech blogs has posted an article explaining how the directory was made, using the Macintosh-based NetNewsWire feed reader. However, you can use other readers on other platforms too, and we recently published a similar OPML directory how-to using Google Reader instead. For those of you who just want to browse the CBC podcast directory on your S60 phone, see our "how to add directories to S60 Podcasting" article which also covers the BBC and NPR directories too.
Just released in the Nokia 5800's Download-Widgets folder is the free WeatherBug, offering worldwide weather status, forecasts and radar animations, all (optionally) keyed to your GPS location. As the folder suggests, it's implemented as a (Web Runtime) widget, in similar fashion to AccuWeather, released last month in the same folder. How many more ways do we need to find out what the weather's going to be like tomorrow? Screenshots below.
Samsung Mobile Innovator has announced the availability of the Qt for S60 Garden technology preview device DLL installation files with Samsung certification. This enables the Qt for S60 demos , as well as applications created with Qt for S60, to run on Samsung S60 phones.
Hot on the heels of their new Mobile site, YouTube has now also released an official (native) S60 client application. It is compatible with most S60 3rd Edition phones. The video quality is good, and looks to have been optimised for QVGA screen resolution. There's a basic interface to browse and search through YouTube's extensive video catalog. All videos are shown in full screen, but widescreen videos are shown in a 'letter-box' format. Read on for more information and screenshots.
On Tuesday Nokia announced it would be 'streamline operations in several units and functions'. Approximately 1,700 employees will be affected, mainly in the UK, USA and Finland. While the economic environment and Nokia's longer term cost-cutting plans are largely responsible, Nokia says some cuts are a result of the Symbian acquisition.
