After much expectation in the user community, the Nokia N95 just got its Flash Lite 3/Web runtime firmware update. Although not as big an update as v20 was (which introduced demand paging and transformed the speed of the device, remember), v21.0.016 is still a major firmware and well worth installing. More details and screens below...
Launched in October 2007, Mippin has managed to not only get over the initial ‘what is this service?’ that every Web 2.0 property has to deal with, but has continued to gain users and presence in its first six months. I caught up with VP of Product Management Prashant Agarwal at the recent SXSW Interactive festival, where he demoed two of Mippin’s latest features to me – Mippin Video and Mippin Today.
PDA Essentials magazine, issue 73, is now out in the UK. Of specific interest is an interview with Mark Loughran, sales director of Nokia UK, in which he states that Nokia should sell 35 million GPS-enabled smartphones this year. That's er.... a lot. Mark mentions the 6220 Classic as important in achieving this goal. More from issue 73 below, including their Sony Ericsson W960i review.
In Insight #18 (AAS Podcast 67) Rafe, Ewan and Steve talk about this week's news (N-Gage First Access closing and Comes with Music). Rafe and Steve discuss their first impressions of the Samsung SGH-i450 and Samsung SGH-i550 (S60 phones) and afterwards Ewan talks about how he recorded and broadcast video on his trip to the USA.
Yep, it's that time of the week. Your generic mobile reading is over at Situational Marketing - Carnival of the Mobilists 116.
The UK High Court has over-ruled a decision by the UK Intellectual Property Office in regards to their application for a patent for their method of indexing library functions (reports IT Pro). The UK-IPO had turned down this application, although the European Patent Office had granted it (the UK office does not recognise patents which are 'nothing more than a computer program,' where Europe does), hence their appeal to the High Court. While the case is concluded, the UK-IPO office has indicated that it will appeal the judgement.
New mobile site GoMo News is going to be making a historical splash at the upcoming CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas - they'll be based in a classic Airstream Bus at the Hard Rock Cafe; with tech demos, and live interviews on site and streamed over the internet. More at www.gomonews.com, and of course we'll be taking a good look at CTIA here on All About Symbian as well!
And now on AAS, some facts, numbers and percentages from over the Easter Weekend. One in three mobiles will be smart in five years times, it is one in ten today (ABI Research); Nokia continues to rule the mobile web browser as their webcore based browser takes 0.25% of the total global browser market, the much trumpeted iPhone manages 0.06%) (Statcounter); and staying with the Finns, Nokia's growth in the US market for 2008 will have the lions share, 70%, made up of replacement sales, a slight increase on last year (Reuters).
Dubbed the 'poor man's N95', how does the budget Samsung i450 stack up? Pretty well for the price, actually. Rafe'll have an in-depth textual review here soon, but in the meantime I've done a video review in Smartphones Show 55, out today. There's also iPhone AppStore/Download! chat from AAS regular Matt Radford and a video version of my push GMail walkthrough.
Thanks to Ricky Cadden for pointing us towards the brand new beta of OwnSkin's Professional Theme Creator. It's a 100% online theme creation application for S60 smartphones, i.e. no messing around with Java tools or having to install an SDK. Be patient while it's loading up, it'll take a minute or so to load into your desktop browser but the end result's well worth it. Finished themes can be shared directly or simply downloaded as SIS files for your device.
Will the incredibly popular Y-Browser file manager ever get to the big 1.0? Somehow I doubt it, but in the meantime note that Y-Browser's now up to v0.88, released yesterday, with tweaked design, bug fixes (especially to help SP2 compatibility), menu shortcut accelerators, wildcard file selection, file association settings added, plus a proper plug-in manager. It's all a (fabulous and) free download over at DrJukka.
Officially, the recent N-Gage beta testing phase (aka "First Access") was only open to N81 owners. However, some people managed to find unofficial ways for other phones to take part as well. In recognition of this, the beta test feedback survey has been opened up to non-N81 owners as well, which means they'll also get a free copy of Mile High Pinball when it's released.
Never mind the debates about which is best: clamshells, candybars, sliders, and so on. There's a wider debate going on - how large should a smart mobile device be? I argue that once you get beyond a certain size, you lose the 'take it everywhere' usefulness, you sacrifice robustness and you fail to achieve mass market sales.
It's not often that Krisse struggles, but there seems to be a dearth of Easter themes around. For our article, we've only uncovered four Easter themes of varying relevance - can you help Krisse by suggesting other themes that fit this holiday better? Comments welcome!
Ha. I said that zany position art 'genius', Nokia N82-toting Stavros should have his own TV show - and now it's happened. Move over Ali G and Alan Partridge. See below for the details.
