The recent availability of Doom, Wolfenstein and Quake in Symbian-friendly guises got Ewan wondering how easy or hard it would be to get Quake working, in all its majesty, on a Nokia N95. Here's his Quake for S60 tutorial, with appropriate links and tips. Have a blasting weekend, everybody!
You were right to save your money and not go to CTIA in Las Vegas - everything you need to know about what was shown is represented in Rafe's comprehensive CTIA 2008 image gallery for free, with pertinent analysis and commentary where needed. It's all here, from tweaks to new Symbian OS-powered hardware, to software innovations, from WiMax and LTE to demos in the sky.
Props to Devin for a fabulous guide to improving the quality of your photo results taken with a smartphone's auto-focus and LED-equipped camera. From fill-in flash to partial focussing, I couldn't have written a better guide myself - a must-read.
...Although not by me (sob). I've got my own thoughts and opinions, which will have to wait until the black N82 arrives at AAS towers. Until then, kudos to Daniel from Sweden, who has unboxed (seemingly) the very first black N82 out in real world shops. Some photos below, plus a link.
Forget all the new fangled brain games, Steve has turned to the classics - Chess. Odesys Chess promises a challenging AI opponent, as well as a strong online multi player environment. Steve is impressed, but not enough to tell us his ranking, in our latest review.
You may recall some months ago that the instant social messaging service Jaiku was bought and absorbed into the bosom of Google... and promptly went into hibernation. Well with spring on the way, boss Jyri Engestrom has blogged that Jaiku will rise again under the new Google App Engine. It's still being developed, but watch this space.
In the interests of public knowledge, I can't resist linking to this news story, reporting that (confirming customers' suspicions when using 3.5G-capable Nokia smartphones) the UK network O2 have been artificially limiting 3G and HSDPA connections to a meagre 128kbps, slower than EDGE. Any correlation between this observation and the fact that O2 are the same exclusive promoter of the EDGE-only Apple iPhone in the UK is entirely a figment of your imagination, surely?
In Insight number 20, Rafe and Ewan talk about what they saw on their recent trips, to CTIA in Las Vegas, and to Over The Air in London. Subjects covered include US operators, LTE and WiMax and Symbian SQL Lite. Listen here and subscribe using this RSS feed.
Mobile Content Portal Mippin continues to launch new features for its user base, and today sees the highly inventive 'Free Games' section of the site launched. With a couple of hundred games (supplied by Greystripe) to be rotated on a regular basis, Mippin is giving users another sticky reason to use the site.
Nokia's PC Suite just got a biggish update, with Calendar viewing on your PC screen, plus full Text message handling. And there are cosmetic improvements too. Here's the PC Suite download page. Comments welcome. (via S-F)
As the new N-Gage platform has finally (and properly) launched, All About N-Gage has updated its Frequently Asked Questions section to answer our readers' most common queries. If you can't find the answer you want in the FAQ, post about it in this item's comments thread and we'll try to get back to you.
Got an idea for a game? Then one idea to getting it published could be Nokia's Mobile Games Initiative Challenge. Announced today, it offers a 70,000 Euro prize fund, and a pre-production contract with Nokia publishing. More details on the dedicated web site.
At least it does for Rita El Khoury, who's written a most insightful and passionate article about the advantages of T9-style predictive typing over and above qwerty thumb keyboards and other software-based input systems. Well worth a read.
The Brain Training genre just got the S60 native seal of approval, with Brain Challenge's appearance in the first flight of games for N-Gage. I was pretty impressed when I tried it out and so was Ewan, who's been putting his Scottish grey matter through the wringer with it since N-Gage went live. Here's his full review of Brain Challenge.
We suspect that the game of refreshing N-Gage's showroom each night may become a regular event. FIFA 08 was added to the show room at the begining of the week. It was part of the initial N-Gage preview client seen from last Autumn, but is now available in full, for real. The full version adds a number of extra options such as on screen tutorials challenges, and the option to play tournaments and full season, but the gameplay remains much the same.
