StyleTap have now confirmed that their Palm OS emulation system is now in private beta for Symbian OS - I didn't get an invite into this stage, but by applying to be a beta tester, you might be lucky. After a short while, it will be opened up to all beta testers, etc. The significance of StyleTap is that there are still many people in the world who are hanging onto ancient Palm handhelds and Treos because they depend on one or more specific Palm OS-only apps - StyleTap will help them move fairly seamlessly onto S60 and Symbian.
Nokia's N93 seemed to be blazing a trail for a new generation of phones equipped with 3D graphics acceleration, with the N95 and N82 strengthening this assumption. However, this year's flagship device the N96 doesn't have any 3D hardware, so has Nokia changed its mind? In a special editorial, AAS's sister site All About N-Gage takes a look at what Nokia's options are for 3D chips with particular regard to their recently launched N-Gage platform. Will they get together one day, or is this a doomed romance?
Nokia's opened a new site called N-Gage Feedback Forum, which lets you submit ideas and feedback, and vote on other people's submissions too, all in a Digg-style interface. It's hosted by the consumer feedback company UserVoice, and it should be very interesting as long as Nokia does actually respond to the points raised. The top suggestion right now concerns the continuing lack of N93/N73 support...
Samsung today announced the high-end, feature packed Samsung INNOV8 (model number i8510). It is an S60 slider with a 8 megapixel, autofocus camera with dual LED flash. The phone runs S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 and other key features include a 2.8 inch screen, WiFi, 16GB of on board flash memory, optical sensor, integrated GPS, accelerometer sensor, and DNSe audio technology.
Widgets on mobile seem to be a hot topic this year; we have already covered the technology several times on AAS. But now that the first S60 Widgets are becoming available what is the reality like? In this feature Ewan takes a look at some of the Widgets he finds most useful.
If you have your mobile phone with you all the time, surely that's where you'd expect to see your social networks enabled? Well, even with dedicated mobile sites, and the occasional java utility to get to sites such as Facebook and MySpace, users aren't biting (reports the LSE in this PDF report). With only 47% using their mobile to check email or browse the web there's a lot of work to go before you can address the tiny 7% that use the mobile for social network usage.
As any sane person would realise, simply slapping code into the Open Source bucket isn't enough to build an eco-system, and it's good to hear from both John Forsyth of Symbian speaking at OSCON, and Janne Jalkannen (via Nokia Conversations, but speaking on a personal level) that this is point appears to be well understood in the respective companies.
Well, at least they didn't give the E71 to Nokia-hater Andrew O.... Writer Dave Oliver gives the new E71 his seal of approval, concluding that it's "a brilliantly efficient piece of technology that does pretty much everything you might want it to do and it does it all extremely well. Like a technological servant of sorts, it serves up its many excellent facilities and a host of other titbits with a minimum of fuss - and no small amount of style."
Lifted from the comments to a previous story, I wanted to highlight an addition to the excellent traintimes.org.uk. When accessed from your phone browser, the site now has the facility to add a UK train journey (via a vCal file, don't worry, it all happens seamlessly) into your phone's Calendar. Very cool, and the site only needs just over 100K of data per lookup, much less than the full Nation Rail equivalent.
If you have an N-Gage-compatible phone (at the moment that means the N81, N81 8GB, N82, N95 or N95 8GB) you may like to take a look at this article over on AAN which details an ultra-simple method for installing the N-Gage application. It works entirely through the phone's browser, and doesn't require a computer at all. We've mentioned this method before in other articles, but it seems a lot of people missed it and Nokia doesn't really publicise it either, so here it is again in greater detail.
In a not unsurprising move, Nokia's XpressMusic 5320, Nokia N78 and Nokia N96 are now listed as receiving a compatible version of the N-Gage games client ahead of the older Nokia N73, Nokia N93i and Nokia N93. Let's hope the latter three don't drop off Nokia's to-do list completely.... [mutter]
Spec-sheet comparisons are all very well, but how good are the Nokia N95 8GB, the Apple iPhone 3G and the HTC Diamond in real life? The AAS team has come up with a dozen things that we all like to do with our phones and Steve was then set to accomplishing all of them on all three devices. Can the sheer usability and likeability of the iPhone triumph over Nokia's N95 design and S60? Is the HTC Touch Diamond a competitor here? Find out in the full usability feature.
It's another interview podcast, this time with Ewan speaking to Alfie Dennen from Moblog.net, which launched a new version of the popular platform late last week. We cover the history of the Moblog company, how to deal with upstart services such as Ovi(!) and what makes a service like this 'sticky' in podcast #85.
