The publishing arm of Symbian, Symbian Press, has announced two new titles for developers; Mobile Python, by Jurgen Scheible; and Developing Software for Symbian OS, Second Edition, by Steve Babin.
During their keynote today at the Symbian Smartphone Show, Samsung Electronics announced two new phones (the GPS enabled i550 and i560), to sit alongside three other phones. All five S60 3rd Edition phones will be available before the end of the year.
The slightly predictable mess that's Microsoft's altering of their Office file formats (to XML) has left smartphone owners in the lurch. But at least there's light at the end of the tunnel with today's Smartphone Show announcements: Dataviz has announced Documents To Go Premium Edition version 4.0 for UIQ 3 smartphones and Quickoffice has announced Quickoffice Premier 5.0 for S60 3rd Edition, both offering full Office 2007 editing. In other news, Quickoffice has announced a partnership with SoonR, dubbed Quickaccess.
UIQ has announced its second ‘Open Application Competition’ for 2008 at today’s Symbian Smartphone Show. Aimed at finding some of the best new applications (and developers) in the UIQ ecosystem, the competition runs from today until the end of 2007 (December 31st), where a jury of experts will judge the submitted applications.
Symbian has announced a number of changes to the Symbian Signed program at today’s Smartphone Show in London’s ExCeL center. Joining the existing ‘Certified Signed’ and ‘ Open Signed’ areas of the program is a new ‘Express Signed’ service, which should be welcomed by a large number of smaller developers.
Dreamspring has announced a 'Life Information Management' tool, DreamLife, planned to be released in early 2008. They are recruiting beta testers at the moment. DreamLife integrates DreamConnect 3 with the UIQ 3 Calendar, allowing you to link contacts to activities and giving you the ability to add and edit activities and contacts from one place. Full press release after the break.
Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show Nokia showed S60 running with a touch interface. The touch interface will support both finger and stylus input, has full multi lingual support, has support for tactile feedback (haptics) and is backwardly compatible with the existing S60 platform. Read the full story for and to view the video showing S60 Touch running on some concept devices.
Sony Ericsson, Motorola and UIQ Technology today announced that Motorola has taken a 50% stake in UIQ Technology. UIQ Technology was previously wholly owned by Sony Ericsson following its purchase from Symbian earlier this year. This represents a very significant endorsement of UIQ by Motorola and underlines Motorola's plan to expand its high end multimedia portfolio using UIQ powered phones.
Nokia has announced that the black N95 8GB smartphone has started shipping across the world, with most of Europe and selected Middle East countries also getting the Spiderman 3 movie preloaded into the large internal flash drive. Reports of sightings welcome.
There's a big new version for Gmail's Java application for mobile phones, released quietly yesterday. If you click on a contact in Gmail Mobile 1.5, you'll see full details, including their photo, and if you entered the phone number in your contact's details, you can call them directly from Gmail Mobile. More improvements listed below.
You'll have spotted our own Flickr 'live' photostream from the London Smartphone Show (above) - as the action starts tonight and rolls on through to Wednesday, we'll keep it stocked with interesting snaps. One tradition of Symbian's own show coverage is a 'quirky', sideways look at the show from two of its employees, Freddie and William - here's theirphoto blog.
What more timely moment for a Carnival of the Mobilists than right before the annual Smartphone Show? And, just to confuse people, my Smartphones (i.e. plural) Show is the Carnival host this week. Lots of good reading in Carnival 95, if (as the editor) I do say so myself...
Red Five Labs has announced the launch of a public beta for Net60. Net60 is a .NET Compact Framework implementation for S60 devices. It enables Windows Mobile applications developed using C# and Visual Basic .NET to run unchanged on S60 devices. The current beta is aimed at system integrators and independent software vendors who are interested in using the product.
