As I found out recently when doing my review of Samsung's i550, a lot of the success of S60 and the Nseries in particular is down to the existence of all Nokia's add-on utilities and applications. Many of which came through Nokia Beta Labs - which, Tommi informs us, is 1 today - so Happy Birthday!
System Rush is still just about the most impressive game you can run up on your N-Gage-compatible smartphone. But has it evolved much from what was effectively a 3D demo on Nseries handsets for the last two years? How does it stand up as a game? Pretty well, as it turns out. Read more in Ewan's rather positive review of System Rush Evolution.
In the latest of my semi-definitive (is such a term an oxymoron?) series of case reviews, I look at solutions designed to carry and protect the Nokia N82, from silicone sleeves to holsters to in-situ flips. If you own a case which you think performs better or have spotted something on the web that you think might fit the bill, please comment!
Many readers will be familiar with Mowser, the content adaptation engine that made making mobile-friendly URLs from traditional web sites fairly easy. It seems that Mowser's main developer has admitted commercial defeat, saying that there will be no more development of Mowser and that it 'could disappear at any time'. Great shame.
I'd been bending the ears of Nokia's Eseries team for ages about signing up with WOM World to handle buzz about their products and to manage triallist programs. And now it's happened, although my nagging was probably only a small part of the process(!) Here's the new, generic WOM/Nokia home page for you to keep track of via RSS. There will probably be an official statement along soon, too, hopefully with the announcement and trial-availability of at least one new Eseries smartphone.
Without wishing to harp on about the Nokia N93 too much(!), it was interesting to see the N93 get equal 'billing' with the N81 and N95 8GB in the title screen of Nokia's Mobile Games Innovation Challenge. Graphic proof below the break. I wonder if this actually means something? After all, we know that N-Gage support for the N93 is on the way...
All About N-Gage has just published an in-depth review of Asphalt 3: Street Rules for the new N-Gage platform. Is it a turbo-charged delight, or only fit for the scrapheap?
To promote N-Gage, Nokia has put up a new interactive gaming site - Get out and Play. The loading screen itself is Breakout, there's a film based on Snake and you can then play Breakout with real people as blocks/paddle/ball. Hmmm.... Comments welcome. (Tzer2 adds: The film is made entirely in stop-motion without any special effects, using 1000 extras to make up the snake at its largest. Everything in the film existed in real life, there's no CGI at all.)
Craig Loxton's Tech Blog is worth keeping an eye on, partly because he's in the middle of a transition from the Nokia E90 to the E51, and partly because he's just discovered an unofficial way to get Blackberry Connect working on the E51 - and it's a lot, lot faster.
Samsung has shown off a new S60 3rd Edition smartphone at the Tele-Vision fair in Nieuwegein. The L870 is a quad-band slider with GPRS and UMTS support, FM radio, 3 megapixel camera and USB 2.0. The L870 is, notably, only 13.5mm thick, thin for a slider smartphone. Picture below.
Over on All About N-Gage, we've just published an editorial discussing the release version of the new N-Gage application, looking at where there's room for improvement. There are no major disasters, but somehow the rough edges of the app currently make it feel a bit rickety.
With the black Nokia N82 arriving in shops and with the titanium version gaining more and more fans, you'll be hearing quite a bit more about this smartphone in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, Vaibhav Sharma is a pretty well-respected member of the Symbian community - in these two good articles he looks at the N82's build quality and feel and its overall usability and performance.
In which I rant a little about the glaring lack of common sense in today's navigation applications, end up rather late and stressed for a wedding I should have been half an hour early for... and I explain what's happened to the sat-nav group test that we promised six months ago...
You know how you've always told your other half that your smartphone is better than her/his pen and paper? Well, with PiZero' latest - Paper, your smartphone can even ape the paper/highlighter look. While I'm here, if anyone's been eyeing up the latest Macs with a tinge of tech-lust, check out this Leopard theme for S60. And Giambi (don't tell me - yet another Italian theme genius?)'s WARM series of SVG themes for S60 are stunning too.
Smartphones may have evolved since the first Nokia Communicator, but what made that phone such a success was the telnet client - system admins could fix their IT infrastructure from anywhere. Smartphones evolve, but managing your IT from the handset is still a worthy goal, as Simon Bisson finds out over at IT Pro.
