Rafe's been trying out Nokia's newest Music service offering, Comes with Music - for real, with a full retail package. There may be some caveats with the system (PC/MSIE-only, DRM-heavy), but overall he comes away very impressed. How is the PC client to use and what's the overall experience like for a new music-loving phone user? Can you retro-fit CwM to an existing handset? What can you do and what can't you do with the downloaded music? Find out in Rafe's definitive Comes with Music review.
In Italian, at least. But we've come to trust p@sco's judgement and here, after a week or two of real world use, he pronounces the Nokia N85 as both 'very, very beautiful' and the 'top' Symbian-powered phone in the world, even trumping the Samsung i8510 and Nokia N96 overall. If you can read Italian then you're in for a treat.
Nokia today released its 3rd quarter results for 2008. Converged mobile device shipments (S60 phones) were 15.5 million (down from 16 million in Q3 2007) including 9 million Nseries and 3 million Eseries devices. Sales and profit were down, but the gross margin in the device and services division increased (36.5% from 36.1%). Nokia's market share fell to 38%, from 39% last year and 40% last quarter.
The next two years could be trickier than expected for the nascent mobile advertising industry (thinks Tricia Duryee at MocoNews). Agencies are likely to become more conservative in their approach, focusing on proven strategies to get the marketing word out. That could prevent advertising initiatives on various mobile platforms making a large impact on revenue.
I have to confess a liking for the Boy Genius Report - all very American, but they don't pull their punches. In this case going over the first Google Android device, T-Mobile's G1, with a very Steve-like critical eye and pointing out a number of serious 'version 1' flaws and summarising the challenge facing Android. Also excellent is the G1 Review, from Matthew Miller, on ZDNet's Smartphone and Cellphone blog. Android looks set to be one of Symbian's more significant competitors in the years ahead.
Forum Nokia recently kicked off a series events to help educate developers about changes and editions in S60 5th Edition. For example, tomorrow, there are a pair of webinars: 9am London (11am Helsinki, 4pm Beijing) and 11am San Fransisco (2 pm New York) which focus on Touch UI development and APIs. With the first S60 5th Edition device announced and more on the way it makes sense to get informed now.
Argh! It's another press release promoting another new application and service for your pocket computer. Many years ago the joke was, that of the ten thousand Palm OS applications available, six thousand of them were on-screen digital clocks - the more advanced ones had an alarm feature as well... Reading about yet another 'innovative product connecting your mobile phone's video to the web' might have pushed me over the edge.
Take Nokia USA, 30 Nseries still and video finalists, plus pro director Spike Lee, and what do you get? An arty music video, entitled 'Humanity'. Ostensibly showing off what sort of footage you can grab on Nseries smartphones. Which is all very well, though if someone could explain to me what the song 'Love is not the enemy of life' means......
Now this is pretty trivial, but bear with me. Am I so unusual in matching a phone's theme to its body colour and styling? Below the break I've illustrated the idea with the silver Nokia N82, but I'd welcome your comments and feedback. What other device/theme pairs work very well?
Just a quick link: Nokia Beta labs want feedback on their Communication Center product and are giving away Amazon gift vouchers for some of the respondents to their survey. (via the Guru)
These roundups are never 100% definitive, because there always seems to be at least one favourite service excluded (in this case, Ovi) and also because of the nature of the game - the goalposts are always moving. But still, there's a useful SyncML service review roundup over on Mobile Royale today, including several services that I'd never heard of - worth a read.
Since the dawn of time (ok, about 1995), developers have been looking to replace the default home screen of PDAs and smartphones. Epocware's new Handy Shell seems pretty comprehensive for S60 and so we asked Ewan to install it on his main device and run with it for a week... The result? A narrowly missed MegaApp. From configurability to stability, Handy Shell seems to do a lot to live up to its price tag.
There's an interesting interview here today in which Richard Bloor talks to Antony Edwards, Vice President, Developer Product Marketing at Symbian, discussing how developers will be able to contribute to the Symbian Foundation, the challenge of software distribution and how the Symbian Foundation's developer program is shaping up.
