The application/service Nokia Friend View, which has been made available on Nokia Beta Labs today, is a combined location and micro-blogging application. It allows you to share your location (automatically using GPS or network-based location or manually) with your friends and see where they are, or at least where they were when they last posted a status update/post. Screens, details and thoughts below. Of particular note is that it has both a Web component (for desktop access) and also that it works on any S60 phone and not just Nokia devices.
If you care to go into Download! on your S60 phone and use 'Refresh', you'll see a maintenance note from Nokia saying that the system will be down all weekend. A sign that a major overhaul is afoot? Let's hope so. Comments welcome if you know any more info on this....
Nokia's "Share on Ovi" service has announced that the popular live video streaming service Flixwagon will be available on handsets. By linking your Ovi account to your Flixwagon account, whenever you finish a broadcast on your handset via Flixwagon, it will upload the completed video to your Ovi account (as well as your Flixwagon account), giving an immediate benefit of having your archive of live videos alongside the rest of your Ovi hosted media.
Rafe's had Nokia's 'Tube' for around three weeks and has been using it day in, day out. In this, part one of a hugely in-depth two part (p)review of the 5800 XpressMusic, he introduces the device, explores the hardware and, most importantly, looks at how well S60 and touch work in daily life. With photos and copious screenshots, Rafe tells all, and I think it's fair to say that the 5800 XpressMusic has pleasantly surprised us.
You wouldn't think we would mention the US elections on a site devoted to mobile devices, but there's an interesting and fast-growing phenomenon known as the "cellphone effect" which is potentially throwing polls off by several percentage points, reported over on the excellent fivethirtyeight.com. Essentially it boils down to this: some polling companies have a tendency to only interview people through their landline phones, so anyone without a landline simply isn't represented in their surveys. That means politicians with strong support among mobile-only households would do much better on election days than landline-only polls predict.
Even more chat about Firmware Over The Air - here's a set of interesting videos featuring Mikko Kuusisto from Nokia's firmware group, talking about how NSU and FOTA came about and with some interesting titbits about automatic notification for users of new firmware. (via S-G)
Yesterday, in a third quarter earnings call, Motorola's CEO, Sanjay Jha, said that they would be streamlining their OS strategy to concentrate on three platforms: P2K (low end and feature phones), Android (consumer smartphones) and Windows Mobile (business phones). Motorola will no longer use its own LinuxJava (MOTOMAGX) or the Symbian UIQ platform. It also appears that several UIQ phones that are currently in development, which would have hit the market next year, will be abandoned. Read on for more.
The presentation that was held by UIQ Technology at the Symbian Smartphone Show 2008 in London is now available for download. It contains some interesting facts about UIQ Touch (err... I thought UIQ supported touch since day one?). Also some cool design concepts which will probably hardly see the light of day. Anyway, the Powerpoint file is available for download from UIQ.Com.
UIQ is dead! But not for CellPhoneSoft, one of the most active software houses that still supports UIQ and who has produced File Associate, which can assign different applications to open files. For example, it can associate .DOC files with Docs To Go instead of the built-in Quickword. And it has a generic viewer to view .ZIP, SWF and TXT files too! Screens after the break.
