Steve Litchfield reports back from a week of family holidays, enlightened by plenty of chances to learn more about using a smartphone productively. Seven days away and seven things learnt! Steve ranges from network connectivity and practicalities of GPS to the terrors of sand.
Phonelocator is a real-time GPS tracking application for S60 phones. It send location information to the Phonelocator website where you can view the phone's current position and a trail of where it has been. The software includes some intelligent algorithms designed to minimise data and power usage so you should be able to run it over relatively long periods.
Nokia has extended the deadline for entries to its Mobile Games Innovation Challenge to the 8th of September. The contest is looking for innovative game concepts (actual code isn't required) for S60, Java or N-Gage, with the top 3 concepts getting money and contracts to actually create the games. The concept can take the form of text, mockup images and optionally video too. It's only open to professional development companies though, private individuals cannot enter.
This month Ewan has been running around the Edinburgh Festival making recordings for his Fringe Podcast. To keep him in communication range (voice and Contacts), organised (Calendar) and on track (Nokia Maps) he's been using a Nokia E71. In this editorial he describes his E71 enabled Fringe experience.
Bloglines, a popular web-baed feed reader, has been experimenting with a new mobile interface (v3). If you want to try it, bookmark m.beta.bloglines.com/feedtree in Web on your phone. Changes are 'favicons' in the feeds list, a 'pin' system for marking things for later attention, auto-marking-read and breaking up long lists of uread items within a feed into manageable chunks.
In a further sign of consolidation in the wireless semiconductor industry Ericsson and STMicroelectronics have agreed to merge Ericsson Mobile Platforms and ST-NXP Wireless divisions respectively to create a 50/50 joint venture. The new venture should be in a better position to compete with Qualcomm and Texas Instruments and may help drive lower chip costs.
Continuing Steve's series of 'S60 Mac virgin' walkthroughs, he tackles the thorny subject of video, both transferring it to the phone and doing useful editing on footage from the phone. Do any of the Mac video solutions play better with Nseries MP4 video files than the current crop of PC editors? In previous parts, he connected up and synced via Bluetooth, and he transferred media and bookmarks using the USB cable.
When goods are virtually free, why do people pirate software? Developer Cliff Harris took the simple step on his blog... to ask the pirates why they weren't buying his titles. While the Positech titles in question are for the desktop, the principles should apply to mobile games as well.
The N-Gage platform's first ever adventure game Dirk Dagger And The Fallen Idol is now available to download through the N-Gage application. If you can't see it in the app's showroom, click on "Options" and then "Update Now". If you still can't see it, click on "Available Games".
In case you hadn't gathered from the RMR news piece, NS Basic has now been formally released for Symbian. It's a Visual Basic-like development environment which "makes it easy to create apps for S60 3rd Edition and UIQ3 devices". The full press release is here. Comments welcome if you give this a try.
Nokia Beta Labs have released an enhanced calculator for S60. The calculator, which has been ported from Series 40, features standard, scientific and loan modes. A big plus, in standard mode, is the use of the D-pad as shortcuts for the common operators (+, -, × and ÷) which greatly improves the speed of entering calculations.
Two bits of news from RMR Software - if anyone's still using an older Series 80-based Communicator then note that all RMR's software is now reduced by between 45% and 70%. Also, more 'cutting edge' is that RMR has put together what's possibly the first real Style Tap-based app for S60 (i.e. Palm OS app running within Symbian OS). More on this below the break.
Content from the Lonely Planet travel guide series is now available in Nokia Maps. The guides are available via the Extras section in the Options menu of Nokia Maps 2.0. The Lonely Planet guides take the form of a collection POIs (Points of Information) which are divided into several categories (Eat, General, Night, See, Shop and Sleep). Read on for more details and screenshots.
You can now play the excellent N-Gage multiplayer title Reset Generation for free through Facebook (click here to visit the game's Facebook page) and Google Gadgets (click here to visit the game's Google Gadgets page). You can also put it on your own website or blog for free by copying the HTML code included below, and of course you can play it on your phone through the N-Gage application. All versions of the game share the same game world, so it should be very easy to find opponents.
Nokia currently has three platforms in development simultaneously, for their smartphones (S60), normal phones (Series 40) and internet tablets (Maemo). They all have their good and bad points, but in this feature krisse looks at how S60 could learn from its two sister-platforms. We would like to hear what you think S60 can learn from Series 40 and Maemo in the comment thread.
