Over on our sister site All About N-Gage, Ewan has reviewed FIFA 08, pronouncing it great for both novices and footie fanatics, praising the crisp graphics and training touches in particular. The only downside was thought to be the lack of multi-player options. (Tzer2 adds: Most of Europe can still get FIFA08 for N-Gage absolutely free from Nokia's N-Gage Play website.)
Fellow mobile writers Matthew Stevens and Darla Mack have drawn our attention to Gypsii, another entrant in the albeit crowded marketplace for social networks powered by the mobile phone. Gypsii is primarily built around photo sharing and tagging each photo with the GPS derived location data, then sharing this with your friends on the Gypsii network.
More proof that Symbian Signed is starting to uncork the freeware blockages of the last year. Martin Storsjo's most excellent Large Time screensaver has also (at last) been officially Symbian Signed. (via p@sco)
Here's our Nokia 5320 XpressMusic Gallery with a collection of photos from today's event showcasing Nokia's newest S60 phone. Rafe includes some detailed commentary on the music, gaming (N-Gage) and hardware design features of the phone. There's a lot to like in this mid-tier music maven. We'll have a text preview, with more details, in the next few days.
Well done to Krisse for being post of the week in Carnival of the Mobilists 120. Some good background reading here and I'd better pay attention this week since 3-Lib is the next host(!)
Nokia have announced a partnership with Sony BMG, allowing their catalogue of titles to be available with the Comes with Music program, due to be available in the second half of 2008. Along with Universal, Nokia now have two of the 'big four' music labels in the program. EMI and Warner are still absent, although Nokia makes a point of stressing that they are still 'in discussion' with many other international labels.
Interesting to see the recent crop of accelerometer-based utilities starting to get Symbian Signed at last. p@sco is reporting that ShakeSMS is now available for download in official Signed form, so no more messing around with IMEI-based .SIS files, which has got to be good news.
Nokia just announced a new S60 music and gaming focussed smartphone, the 5320 XpressMusic. There's a new 'Say and Play' feature (voice-controlled music playback), up to 24 hours of playback time (almost double that of the N95 8GB), a dedicated audio playback chip and USB2 transfer speeds for loading music on in the first place. Some thoughts, PR details and images below.
AAS Insight 21 (aka AAS podcast 70) sees Rafe and Ewan chatting at length about Nokia's Q1 results, Orange Partner Camp (Rafe was there) and the rise and rise of N-Gage, looking at FIFA 08 and Space Impact: Kappa Base. Ewan apparently reckons Rafe 'waffles' a bit in this podcast. I call it 'informed expert analysis', but then I know which side my bread's buttered on... Oh, and here's the RSS feed for you to subscribe for the future.
These N-Gage promotions seem to be appearing thick and fast! This one is very simple and easy to enter though: just play any Gameloft N-Gage game (Asphalt 3, Brain Challenge, Block Breaker Deluxe) on your N-Gage phone (currently N81, N82, N95 and variants) and upload at least one score to the Arena before the 18th of May 2008. Everyone who does this is automatically entered into a draw for a range of prizes.
Nokia just announced that their Music Store is now available in Australia. Cool. But there's a big music-related announcement in London tomorrow (Tuesday) - so there's much more to come. I'm betting on the release of a new PC music client, as demoed at Go:Play. Any takers for that bet?
WalkingHotSpot, the software that turns your phone into a WiFi hotspot, is now available for download and there are some exclusive screenshots and preview thoughts below (the break). This means you can share your 3G data connection with other devices over WiFi. The obvious use for this is with a WiFi enabled laptop when travelling. The current version is intended as a trial to showcase the technology; the full version will be made available through carrier channels.
NTT DoCoMo has announced it will develop an Operator Pack for FOMA handsets. This will result in the adoption of a global software platform across the FOMA range of devices. The Operator Pack will reduce development costs and speed time to market, it should also make it easier for the manufacturers to offer phones (variants based on Japanese FOMA models) to overseas markets. Operator Packs will be developed for both the Linux (LiMo compatible) and Symbian OSs.
Over the weekend, Google released a cute plug-in for Firefox users called "Google Send To Phone." Highlighting any text in your web browser, and then click the phone icon on the toolbar to send the text to your phone as an SMS. One caveat, it's for US based phones only.
The battles between Nokia's three Nseries flagships have raged on and off across the Internet for many months. Steve's used each of the N95, the N95 8GB and the N82 as his main device for long stretches of time and here presents a real-world summary of attributes and differences. Is there a winner? Only just. Comments welcome if you've also used all three or just have an opinion!
