Nokia's Ovi Share just acquired geotagging! From now on, any new images that are uploaded will get their EXIF data checked for location information. As you can see if you read below the break, this means that images can be automatically addressed and mapped. This brings Ovi Share into the same ballgame as Flickr and Picasa Web. Comments welcome on what's needed next in Ovi Share.
Mobile Social networks are not a big hit, according to new Nielsen Resarch (writes MoCoNews). With only 1.7% of UK mobile users using a social network specifically designed for mobile users. While users are moving to social networks via their handsets, the big winners in the connecting people stakes are, not surprisingly, the behemoths that exist on the desktop.Facebook's mobile site m.facebook.com accounts for over half a million hits and 9% of all UK mobile web users.
It could well be one of the games of the year and everybody's got an opinion on Nokia's Reset Generation. Including Ewan, who has first hand experience with the developer. In this feature, he draws on first person comments and other released information to bring you a good overview of Reset Generation and its significance.
Ricky Cadden, over on Mobile Burn, takes a long hard look at the Sony Ericsson W960 Walkman phone, and finds a mixed bag, from a bright screen to a cheap stylus, a poor camera interface and of course a long look at music playback functionality, which gets a strong thumbs up albeit with a wish for a built in 3.5mm headphone socket and the ability to playback by genre. Ultimately the W960 comes up short in Cadden's estimation with a poor user interface, slow USB transfer and clunky camera to blame.
Apologies to those who feel we're covering N-Gage a bit much lately, but this is something special: over on All About N-Gage we've put together a video of many brand new screenshots from the bizarre upcoming online strategy game Reset Generation (formerly Project White Rock), along with the game's main theme as a soundtrack. The game is an affectionate parody of gaming history, with every character making fun of someone much more famous. Watch it and see what you think...
It's... Insight number 24, aka AAS audio podcast 73, in which the usual team discuss the news of the week, including N-Gage and Nokia Communication Center (sic), three new S60 3rd Edition smartphones (black N82, Samsung i450, Nokia 6122c) and we introduce the idea and state of play in the world of Location Based Search.
Yeah, yeah, more hands-on with prototypes by other sites - you can tell we're a tinsy bit jealous - but then on the other hand devices like the N96 don't seem anywhere near finished yet and we'd rather wait for the real thing. Still, the N78 seems fairly complete, according to this latest hands on by PhoneReport, which provides lots of photos and makes a few new observations. (via Symbian World)
Guest writer Arjen Broeze has been trialling the new Route 66 Mobile 8 for over a month now and here's his very detailed review. The only real problem seems to be over-stubborn clinging to originally-calculated routes - apart from that Arjen gives this sat-nav solution a green light on all fronts. I was sceptical about the way search matches are still shown in alphabetical order, but Arjen argues that the search match filtering is good enough to do without location-sorted results.
It's always interesting to see what real world uses people find for their smartphones and which software they zero in on. In this post, Mark Guim discusses his use of Mobipocket Reader, Quickoffice and GooSync in his studies at college.
CoreCodec just announced the availability of version 1.24 of its CorePlayer Mobile for all platforms including S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3. The YouTube support might not be interesting for some S60 3rd Edition users but for the UIQ 3 community, it is the icing on the cake because for the first time, FLV videos can be played on UIQ 3 smartphones without conversion. See below for UIQ 3 screenshots, links and comments.
The N-Gage platform has now been officially launched for several weeks, but which phones are people actually using it on? Take part in our survey and let us know which N-Gage-compatible model you use to access the service.
Not directly Symbian-related, but Nokia have just brought out a Macintosh version of their Internet Tablet Video Converter. Are they getting a bit more used to supporting "alternative" operating systems, and when will we see their first desktop Linux app?
Master theme maker PiZero has made all his 'premium' themes available at half price until the end of May. Paying for themes may sound a bit odd when most other themes are free, but having tried some of these, I can testify that they're very high quality, being fast, RAM-efficient and 100% SVG-based, so they'll work on anything. Err.... advert over!
I guess this had to come, given that Nokia's Sports Tracker already contained an accelerometer-driven pedometer. But as Sports Tracker has widened its scope, there's room for a cut-down little brother, Step Counter. From the Step Counter page: "It determines the distance you have covered and your energy expenditure. You can even compare your activity levels on different days by looking up the summaries stored in a handy diary."
Congrats to Russ Beattie and Mike Rowehl, the guys behind Mowser. It may well have looked dead and buried a few weeks ago, but the service has been bought by the dotMobi consortium. Reporting on Dev.Mobi, James Pearce charts out the use of their new toy, namely to drive Opt-In mobilisation of websites, integrating the Mowser Directory, and of course using the (re)formatting technology.
