Orange and Nokia today announced a three year strategic international partnership on mobile services. The two companies will work together to provider users with an offering of music, games, advertising, maps and location based services. The relationship will see 10 Nokia handsets added to the Orange Signature range with services integrated into the familiar Orange user interface.
In the third part of his review of the Samsung i450, Ewan reckons that devices like this are key to the future of S60 - with the technology becoming both less visible and incumbent in low to mid-tier phones. He also looks at the standard application set and at third party application compatibility.
The eagerly-awaited next gen N-Gage game Snakes Subsonic is now available from the N-Gage application's showroom. However, one of us couldn't see it even after selecting "Update Now", click on the headline to find out how this problem was solved.
The N-Gage platform aims to usher in a new age of high quality connected phone gaming. However if you upgrade to a new phone, you cannot transfer any of your N-Gage games from the old phone. In a special feature article All About N-Gage looks at why this is such a damaging policy for N-Gage, what the unintended consequences are, and a number of potential solutions. Will Nokia change their minds on this issue? Update: Looks like Nokia has indeed now changed their minds, their official blog has announced a game transfer system is on the way! Read the Nokia blog's statement.
According to the Finnish business newspaper Kauppalehti, Nokia's Chief Financial Officer said Nokia is considering manufacturing Linux-based mobile phones. The article quotes Rick Simonson, Nokia's Chief Financial Officer, as saying "we are definitely moving in the direction (of Linux-based phones)" at a seminar in Boston run by JP Morgan Chase. There was no further detail though, and apparently Simonson refused to be drawn on which kind of Linux would be used. Nokia already makes the Linux-based N800 and N810 internet tablets, which use Nokia's own version of Linux called Maemo, but current tablets have no telephony ability.
A beta version of eReader.com's eBook software is now available for S60 3rd Edition. eReader is a long standing eBook store which provides some of the current best sellers in eBook form, protected via its own form of DRM. They provides a version of their reader for multiple platforms. However a few years ago they seemed to lose interest in support Symbian OS handsets, but under the new ownership of Fictionwise this seems to be changing.
Opera has announced the availability of the Opera Widgets SDK. The SDK allows the development of cross device and cross platform applications using standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, DOM, Javascript). Opera Widgets can run, assuming the presence of the Opera browser (9.5), on a PC, mobile phones (e.g. UIQ 3.3 phones), game consoles (Wii) and TVs. Opera Widgets is the widget platform that will be used by future UIQ devices.
So you've been eyeing up qwerty clamshells from the dark side (Windows Mobile)? So had I - in this case, getting in the Toshiba Portege G910 flagship, with a spec sheet that rivals the Nokia E90 - in theory, at least. Having used both, here's my illustrated head-to-head review: G910 vs E90. The winner? You can probably guess, but let's just say that this Windows Mobile clamshell has got more than a couple of surprises up its sleeve.
Sweden is the latest country to get its own Nokia Music Store. The deal is along the same lines as those in other countries, with 10 krona per track, 100 krona per album, and 100 krona per month for unlimited tracks on your PC.
BigBen, a well-known utility for the previous generation of UIQ devices, is finally available for the latest UIQ3 phones, like the Sony Ericsson P1, the G900 and the Motorola Z10. It can be used as an automatic screen locker, it's configurable and personalisable. It can also display visible and audible reminders for unattended events, like calls or SMS. More info and a screenshot after the break.
Konami and Nokia have announced that a number of Konami Mobile titles will be added to the N-Gage platform. The first game will be the award winning Metal Gear Solid Mobile, which a 3D tactical espionage action game that sees the player carrying out solitary infiltration. The game is being developed in conjunction with Ideaworks3D and using its Airplay 3.5 SDK.
Symbian today publish its first set of 2008 results, which showed shipments of 18.5 million devices in Q1, a year on year increase of 16.5%, a figure which suggests a flattening of device shipments. This takes total Symbian OS device shipments to 206 million. There was also a 92% growth in consultancy service revenue to £4.8 million driven demand for services from 'a broader and deeper range of customer mobile phone products in the pipeline'.
In the spirit of better-late-than-never, we've finally done a brief summary of how the N81 / N81 8GB performs as a gaming phone for All About N-Gage's hardware section. This aspect of the N81 was missing from All About Symbian's original review of the phone as the N-Gage platform hadn't launched at the time, and we felt it was unfair to judge an N-Gage phone without N-Gage games.
I reported last week that GooSync was testing Contacts sync with GMail Contacts - it just came out of beta and now anyone with a GooSync Premium account can do the same contact sync. Do note some of the caveats from my original article though.
MobiMate recently added extra real-time flight information and facilities to their flagship traveller's app WorldMate Professional. Luckily our own Ewan knows a thing or two about travel utilities and so I threw the app in his direction. The result? We now have ourselves another (though fairly rare) All About Symbian 'MegaApp'. Here's the full review.
