As Amazon announce plans to expand their music store, StrategyEye points towards Sony Ericsson’s similar plans for a music store. Details are limited, so there’s no word on what file format will be employed (and ergo what form, if any, of DRM will be used), nor on what countries will receive the service ‘by the end of 2008.’
In the second and final part of his definitive review of the 'Silver Snapper', the Nokia N82 , Rafe proves that this smartphone is a lot more than just a great camera. Looking at GPS and navigation functions, music, general applications and overall performance, Rafe concludes that, despite a few problems and annoyances, the N82 is "an outstanding handset".
Location Tagger, an application that enables the geotagging of photos captured on your phone, is the latest release from Nokia Beta Labs. Location Tagger serves as a preview release, Nokia are planning on building Location Tagger's technology into the core Camera and Gallery apps themselves. Much more below the break, with comment, screenshots and examples.
Nokia today announced that it would acquire Trolltech a company which provides software development platforms and frameworks. Trolltech is best known for its Qt product, a multi-platform graphical user-interface framework. Qt is used in KDE, the web browser Opera, Skype and Google Earth applications. Nokia intends to use Qt to enable cross platform development environments.
Competition for Nokia's Music Store perhaps? Amazon have announced the expected expansion of their DRM-Free MP3 Store from the American market into international territories will happen in 2008, although the press release does not give any indication of when this will happen. Thanks to the MP3 format, pretty much any smartphone should be able to handle Amazon downloaded songs, as opposed to the DRM restrictions Nokia's Windows Media based store will have; and Nokia's in-device advantage is limited to a subset of N-Series devices.
Photos have appeared on a German site (and reposted here in English) of a new Nokia E90, apparently a 'version 2', with totally redesigned, flush keyboard, presumably to stop any possibility of greasy fingerprints on the keys transferring to the screen. Comments welcome if this has made an appearance in other countries or if you can shed any light on timescales and distribution details.
Symbian Press has announced a new developer's title: "Games on Symbian OS", by Jo Stitchbury. Full details here, with availability next month. From the blurb: "...shows the potential for creating mobile games for Symbian smartphones... It covers various aspects of mobile games on Symbian OS, with contributions from a number of experts in the mobile games industry, including Nokia'’s N-Gage team, Ideaworks3D, and ZingMagic, as well as academics leading the field of innovative mobile experiences".
In the second part of this music-focussed look at the latest Walkman smartphone, the Sony Ericsson W960, Ewan's been picking apart the new Media Manager suite that's bundled on CD with the device. Is it polished enough for real world use? Ewan's not entirely convinced...
Ah, never mind the official Java YouTube streamer, emTube is still streets ahead, and pulling further away all the time. The author has quietly sneaked a big update, v1.0.10, online in the last couple of days. This includes lots of tweaks and fixes, plus a new 'Sort by' option and a way of scanning your disks for flash video files. See below for the link and the changelog.
YouTube has announced an official mobile client application for a number of handsets including several S60 phones. The application allows you to watch any YouTube video and offers browsing by popular videos (most viewed, top rated, featured), related videos or keyword search. You are able to sign into your YouTube account and access your own videos, subscriptions and favourites. The application also allows you to upload video from your phone to YouTube directly.
Nokia today announced its Q4 2007 results. Nokia's overall phone market share reached 40% (smartphone market share is higher still) with net sales of 15.7 billion Euros. In Q4, Nokia's converged (S60) device shipments were 18.8 million (up from 11.1 million in Q4 2006). Converged devices made up 14% of Nokia's total shipments (133.5 million). 3 million Eseries devices were shipped along with well over 11 million Nseries devices.
Will the Micro version of this Proporta travel charger kit be as big a hit as the original? Is it just as 'drop dead useful' and will it also win awards? And will you get mermerised by those curvy LEDs? Find out in my exclusive review of the Mobile Survival Kit Micro.
More cool applications have appeared for UIQ 3 users in the last couple of days. PowerMovie and TouchCalc are among them and, today, Bunch Launch has just been annnouced by CellphoneSoft. Basically, Bunch Launch is a utility to bring your UIQ 3 smartphone to a desired state, with all your apps running, in one go.
Here's the first part of Rafe's definitive review of the Nokia N82 , looking at the form factor, the connectivity and (of course) the camera. Loads of close-up and sample photos and masses of considered opinions. Watch this space for part 2, coming shortly!
