At the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Fransisco Glu Mobile and Nokia unveiled a number of new N-Gage games. The Dark Knight ties in with the new Batman movie and sees you fighting to eradicate crime in Gotham city. SPEED RACER, also tying in with an upcoming movie, is a racing game while Super Slam Ping Pong is a fight title in the style of Super K.O. Boxing.
Ahead of our device previews here are a number of image galleries, with the usual commentary, of the 8 Symbian OS powered devices which were announced last week at Mobile World Congress 2008. The Nokia N96 (high end Nseries), Nokia N78 (entry level Nseries), Nokia 6210 (navigation focused), Nokia 6220 (mid tier all rounder), Sony Ericsson G700 and G900 (the first mid tier UIQ 3 phones), Samsung G810 (camera focused high end slider) and LG KT610 (mid tier QWERTY clamshell).
In All About Symbian Insight #13 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss their first impressions of Mobile World Congress 2008. Rafe gives his impressions from the show floor while Steve and Ewan pick out their highlights from the various announcements and cover a variety of news from last week.
While the usual web suspects had their tricks ready for covering last week's MWC, the BBC's Technology team of Darren Walters (back at base) and Rory Cellan-Jones (on site reporter) were happily posting away on their BBC blog using an N95 and the latest mobile software tools (such as Shozu) Darren and Rory's thoughts are here and here respectively. And while you read that, I think I need to get a big "Isn't that demarcation?" sticker for the Camera Crew.
Up to 20% of mobile users are listening to music on their mobile. That's the findings of the latest M:Metrics report (via SMS Text News). This sits very nicely with the numbers Nokia have reported for sage of their Music Store - 20% of eligible users have registered with the store. Nokia also report that 25% of that number (ie 5% of the total) use the on-device client; a significant improvement on the 1.1% that M:Metrics report downloading direct to the device.
Playyou, the social gaming network that lets you build your own games (Hmmm, why does that sound familiar) has a nice Q&A on their blog with Kars Alfrink, who does consulting work with them. Partly it's to highlight his upcoming talk at the Games Developer Conference on Casual Social Gaming, but also about Playyoo's Games Creator software.
Handmark were promising a native S60 version of their information portal app at last year's Smartphone Show. It seems it just went live, at least for UK users. It's a 2.4MB install though, and you need to surrender phone number and postcode info before it'll do anything. As with the original Java version, you get news, sport, dictionary, weather and finance stats for free, but you need to pay for mapping and travel help (via IntoMobile)
Released as a Valentine's present is the latest build of Mobitubia, one of a handful of third party YouTube viewing applications. With the ability to download the FLV videos and watch them while offline, it's a popular choice for a number of you, and it shows the powerful nature of having a fully open platform that third parties can write applications.
Service after service, app after app, solutions keep appearing to offer media streaming (from our own hard disks or from hosted servers) over the air. But what happens when the masses start doing this and the bandwidth runs out? Is putting all our music online really the best solution? When it comes to media that's truly mobile, you can't beat the old school approach, I reckon....
To be filed under 'editorials that I was about to write but someone else beat me to it', Ricky Cadden (moonlighting over at SMS Text News) has issued a few pithy retorts to criticism that the S60 Touch demo at MWC was lame. I completely agree with your points, Ricky, I'd much rather see S60 have touch added as an extra than see a whole new iPhone-wannabe interface.
Mobile World Congress 2008 certainly hasn't been a washout - there have been announcements right, left and centre that are definitely of interest. But there haven't been any slam dunk launches that have got the whole show floor talking, argues Ewan. For those, you'll have to wait until MWC 2009...
Yamake has broken cover, in the latest N-Gage press release. A 'game creating game,' players are able to pick and mix their own games from a range of mini-games, add in their own skins, themes, text, sound clips and movies from their PC. These can then be uploaded and shared with the rest of the Yamake community.
Gamasutra has a fascinating editorial by Russell Carroll, from Reflexive Games, talking about the amount of piracy in casual games and what measures have proven effective. The scary number is that piracy runs at up to 92% for their titles, and rather than one pirate copy equals one lost sales, Reflexive found that they had to stop one thousand pirate downloads to gain one extra sale.
Ah yes, Valentines Day across the world and Krisse, a true romantic, has been researching the very best free 'love' themes for your S60 3rd Edition smartphone. If these don't get you in the mood for romance then nothing will!
Stefan points out the announcement of Dolby Mobile at Mobile World Congress, an audio process to create "rich vibrant surround sound" on a mobile device. It sounds remarkably like a repackaging of Dolby technology that was displayed at CES 2006, but it's nice to see the audio names reaching out to mobile (and putting out a 'we're here in the mobile space' press release into the bargain).
