Under the title of "Destination E7", Nokia's latest promotional stunt has been to give two Scots girls E7s and lend them a VW camper and set them the challenge of setting up a 'pop-up shop' in London (postcode E7, get it?) a week later, sourcing all their inventory along the way. Along with a cameraman, of course, to record the results for the embedded highlights video below.
Nokia's Battery Monitor utility has been proving its worth on many of our smartphones over the last six months, first in beta and then in production form. The UI of the previous version was implemented in Web runtime, whereas this new version 2.0, exclusively for Symbian^3-powered phones, has a UI fashioned from Qt and is slicker and faster as a result. There are significant other improvements too, detailed below.
Nokia today updated its outlook for Q2 2011, substantially downgrading previous forecasts. The company says it now expects net sales to be "substantially below its previously expected range of €6.1 billion to €6.6 billion" and that, "Devices & Services non-IFRS operating margin could be around break even", against a previously expected range of 6% to 9%. Multiple factors are impacting Nokia's Devices and Services business, including competitive dynamics and a product mix shifting towards to lower end and pricing tactics by Nokia and certain competitors.
Nokia has announced, via its Conversations blog, quoted below, that the Nokia E6 and X7 are now shipping. Both devices are due in for review in full retail form at All About Symbian imminently and will receive the usual comprehensive testing. The two phones use the new Symbian Anna version, and this is expected to start rolling out to other Symbian^3 phones soon. Watch this space.
The Nokia E6 can be pre-ordered from the Nokia UK online shop for £349 SIM Free, £339 on PAYG or from free on a £25 per month contract. It also available for pre-order in Nokia online stores in Germany (€429) and Italy (€399). Pre-order will also be available from a number online retailers shortly. The E6 is expected to starting shipping towards the end of June.
Shazam, the music identification service, has updated its Symbian client to version 3. The update features a cleaned up user interface. The main screen now only features the large button which triggers audio sampling. The buttons for your previous 'tags' and Shazam music charts have been moved to the top of the screen as tabs, along with a new settings page. The latter gives access to upgrading to the paid version of Shazam, as well as linking to one's Twitter and Facebook accounts. Read on for more details and screenshots.
Nokia Bubbles, the interactive screen saver, has been re-released at Nokia Beta Labs. This should be of interest to anyone who had problems or missed it the first time around. Prior versions of Nokia Bubbles required testers to install a beta version of the Qt libraries. That caused so many problems for testers that Nokia had to issue a .SIS file to downgrade their Qt files. Now however, Nokia Bubbles works with the current Qt libraries and is installed with Nokia Smart Installer, thus avoiding the earlier issues. Read on for more details and screenshots.
A couple of Friday links of interest. Firstly, the Nseries blog guys have put together a nice little piece looking at the various battery technologies used by Nokia over the years, from Ni-Cad to Li-Poly - interesting to see just how much more efficient the modern cells are! Secondly, of interest because of Symbian's traditional expertise in this area, Andre at the My Nokia blog has written a comprehensive look at the way multitasking does (and doesn't) work in Windows Phone Mango, the version Nokia will be using next year in many of their upcoming smartphones.
In an interview with the Nokia Conversations blog, China Edition, Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, said that "software updates to Symbian devices are expected until at least 2016", and that there is " a long history still to be paved for Symbian in the future". While Nokia has previously made it clear that Symbian investment would continue, the 2016 date is a definitive statement and may be further in the future than some have anticipated.
Nokia today announced the Nokia Oro, a premium Symbian^3 smartphone. Material used in Oro, which is based on the Nokia C7, includes 18 carat gold plating around the edges, high quality Scottish leather on the back and a single sapphire for the home key. Key hardware features include pentaband 3G radio, 3.5 inch AMOLED screen with toughened glass, 8 megapixel EDoF camera and comprehensive connectivity options. The Nokia Oro comes in a nice box and will be available in Q3 in select markets and cost upwards of €800 before taxes and subsidies.
Yesterday Microsoft offered the media a preview of Mango, the next release of the Windows Phone platform. The release will deliver more than 500 new features, with an emphasis on communication, apps and the Internet. Mango will also see wider language support, the addition of 1500 APIs for developers and significant performance improvements. Mango is scheduled to arrive in the autumn and will be the version that Nokia uses on its first Windows Phone devices, scheduled to appear in 2012 in quantity.
Following on from last week's episode, which focused on NFC, here is the fifth episode of the 361 Degrees podcast. This week episodes focuses on RIM and their Blackberry devices, following their recent Blackberry World conference and the release of the Blackberry Playbook. 361 Degrees is a podcast all about mobile technology, created by Ben Smith of Wireless Worker and co-hosted by Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review and Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian.
According to Carl-Christian Buhr from the Digital Agenda for Europe, the ill fated SYMBEOSE open source project, proposed six months ago, has been quietly cancelled, to noone's surprise, given that Symbian itself is back within Nokia's control and is no longer open source. Apparently, no money ever changed hands, either... making the whole initiative something of a damp squib.
Over on the Ovi Daily App Blog Ewan has been reviewing Herocraft's Robo. Robo is an action puzzler that sees you use logic the guide a robot around a landscape of boulders, mirrors and lasers; as Ewan notes this is a variation on the classic Sokobahn game. Robo is available for the N8, C7, C6-01 and E7; it can be downloaded for £1.50 from Ovi Store.
Just a couple of weekend links of interest. The Ovi Store publishing team has announced that application update notifications are coming this week in an update of its Ovi Store client, v2.8, initially for Symbian^3 phones only. Quote below, we'll cover this more when v2.8 actually appears. In other news, the folks at phoneArena have pitted the Nokia N8's camera against those in the LG Optimus 2X, the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S II. Suffice it to say that the N8's unit acquits itself very well, but kudos to the feature compiler for the work that's gone into this detailed comparison.
