With a veil of secrecy around it that rivals the darkness of Apple’s PR department, Project White Rock, the multiplayer experience for N-Gage due out mid 2008 has had good feedback from the testers (according to this report on Pocket Gamer). If the testing team, who get the 'most repetitive job in the world' award want more, then this bodes well for Nokia.
Forum Nokia has released a tool, primarily aimed at developers but of interest to power users trying to work out where that extra 10% of battery capacity is going. Nokia Energy Profiler works with all applications, built-in and third party and should identify any culprits!
Aha! Nokia PC Suite just added Vista Calendar sync, along with a more 'modern' (read "slower and uses more RAM"!) interface and extra drag and drop file capabilities, plus the usual bug fixes. Get the new v6.85 here. (via Vaibhav)
The award winning MMplayer is a multimedia player with support for various media formats such as OGG, AVI, MP4, MPEG, etc. Previously available for Palm OS 5 only, it has now been ported to Symbian UIQ 3 and S60 3rd Edition. Head over to its official web site for more information and download. Some screenshots after the break.
It seems I just can't keep up with the news today! Google just upgraded their free Maps for Mobile client (www.google.com/gmm on your smartphone) to v2.0.3, adding a 'virtual GPS' feature (thanks Stefan), in which your location on non-GPS devices is estimated based on cell tower information. Google is an amazing company. Also (unrelated), they're investing in green energy in a big way, yet more brownie points from me.
Apologies for linking to an AAS comment thread already half-linked below, but an AAS user has been doing battery benchmarks for two N95's, one with old v12 firmware and one with the new v20 with DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling), it seems that for low-CPU tasks like music playback, the battery is used more efficiently, with the underclocking resulting in 20% longer battery life from the BL-5F.
The traditional landline phone is dying in Europe, according to a new study reported by the BBC. On average, 18% of European households now have no landline phone but do have a mobile phone. This figure rises as high as 48% in Lithuania and 47% in Finland. It also reveals that there are 95 mobile phones for every 100 people in Europe.
We reported that this didn't work at first when we tried with the new v20 firmware for the Nokia N95 Classic. They've flicked the switch at the Nokia Music Store (UK beta) now and N95 owners can join in the browsing and downloading fun. Even if I did spot far too many 'N81' references flashing through the URL popups 8-)
We mentioned the RAM-hungry Widsets in our RSS piece above, but thanks to Stefan for pointing us towards a fascinating tutorial on how to get started with next generation widgets, those that are pure XHTML, CSS or Javascript and which run on top of S60's Web runtime. This is how widgets should be done. Recommended.
Asri al-Baker finds the new Easy Search utility for UIQ 3 smartphones like the Sony Ericsson P990i and P1i a real life saver and an answer to a heartfelt request from long ago. Now it's not just S60 users who can trawl their content for a piece of text!
Smartphones Show 48 is out (in YouTube and H.264 MP4 form), the highlight of which is a real world head to head challenge between the two black and silver flagships, the Nokia N95 8GB and the Apple iPhone (on O2). Watch Matt Radford of AAS and I as we try and assess the devices on common, every day tasks. Oh, and here's the RSS and iTunes feeds.
Encompassing both phones and (UIQ) smartphones, Sony Ericsson has announced the nominees for its 2007 Content Awards, winners to be announced on Dec 18th. Some familiar names in the press release below. Of interest also is Sony Ericsson's lavish Flash site showcasing each nominee.
