In All About Symbian Insight # 7 (AAS Podcast #55) Steve, Ewan and Rafe look back at 2007 and pick out their highlights from the year. We cover the Nokia N95, a resurgent UIQ and Nokia's Ovi announcement. In the second half of the podcast we turn our attention to 2008 and make a few predictions.
Twelfth Night has come and gone so Xmas is well and truly over, but you can still get Snowed In 6: Deep Freeze for free if you hurry. Simply download the game from this page (click on the relevant "try" button), install it on your Symbian device, and then head on over to the unlock code page to get your free key. SI6 is available for all Symbian platforms, and the offer ends on the 15th of January.
Amazingly, at 5pm GMT today, Bluetooth will be exactly 10 years old. I have to admit that, apart from music transfers and the odd Nokia Software Update, I hardly use wires in my computing set up at all. Internet comes from Wi-Fi and 3G and the vast majority of device to device transfers (syncs/installs/GPS connections/etc) happen via Bluetooth. Even small kids know that Bluetooth is the free way to send content between phones. Here's the official birthday link - Congratulations, all!
A US variant of Nokia's flagship Nseries device, the N95 8GB, will shortly be made available. The only change in the specifications from the standard N95 are in the supported the WCDMA frequencies - 850/1900 MHz instead of 2100 MHz. The device will be available from Nokia Flagship Stores and Nseries retailers during the first quarter at an estimated retail price of $749.
Movement over the weekend for the mobile website designer, with long time AAS friend Russ Beattie's Mowser updating the Wordpress plug-in to sit alongside a newly announced domain mapping tool . If you're running any site (not just a wordpress blog), it's now a simple process to have an automatic mobile version created, and have a convenient URL pointing to it.
Reports are sneaking out of CES (in the USA) that Motorola just officially announced the Z10, their upgrade to the original UIQ 3-powered Z8. The 'banana' form factor is still there, as we reported from the Z10 prototypes at the Smartphone Show, and the Z10 will have the 30fps video capture and video editing suite demo-ed at the show, but there's also a 3.2 megapixel stills camera, which brings the device up to date, if not exactly cutting edge. Photo, specs and links below.
Neuros, the maker of the video-to-MP4 hardware encoder that Krisse uses on all the All About NGage game videos, has created an "Unlocked Media" trademark to promote the concept of open standard DRM-Free files that can be stored and played anywhere. Click through for its explanation of the trademark in text and video form .
Ah. I just 'got' where PiZero's going with his new (beta test version of his) 'Stealth' theme. It's for those nights out when you'd really not advertise your smartphone to the criminal fraternity by its dazzling luminescent display. Or perhaps for surreptitious use in a darkened cinema? Anyway, head on over if you'd like to help test the concept.
If you're in any way technical and want to get to grips with the ins and outs of audio codecs and the practicalities of streaming and decoding internet radio then you could do worse than check out Menneisyys' latest cross-platform epic analysis in the forums. Warning: not for the faint hearted!
A small but interesting morsel from the folks at Projectnext.eu: If you have the latest version of Nokia PC Suite installed, and rename any file using the extension .n-gage it will automatically adopt a Nokia application icon, and right-clicking on it will bring up an option to install it. This option doesn't work of course, but the fact that it appears implies that PC Suite has already been designed with the Next Gen N-Gage platform in mind.
Just to assure those who might worry that AllAboutSymbian game reviews would turn into AllAboutJava, there is light at the end of the tunnel! Read on for a preview of a real treat for Symbian gamers.
