AAS's Ewan Spence only bought his Nokia N95 a week ago, but he's packed an awful lot into seven days. Here he reports back on what works well on the N95 and what.... works even better. The highlight seems to have been using it to film and then edit videos and photos from Yahoo Hackday... on the spot.
So there I was chatting to the AAS team yesterday and wondering how long it would take until the N95 received its next firmware update - and it turns out that v12 firmware is on the horizon at least, Ricky Cadden has got himself a preview and some screenshots. The main addition so far noticed seems to be Assisted GPS, in an attempt to solve the N95's legendary GPS lock-on problems.
Kudos to Nokia's S60.com lifestyle site for constantly coming up with interesting freebies. 'SMS Export' for S60 3rd Edition is this month's limited edition download, plus there are new themes to grab and more. Note that you do need to register on the site, but it's free.
The latest Airbus aircraft have been cleared to run the OnAir mobile roaming service (reports SMS Text News ). In essence a low powered base station in the sky, it will allow SMS, email and voice calls to be made while above the regulation 10,000 feet. Air France (France), TAP (Portugal), BMI (UK) and Ryanair (Ireland) have expressed an interest. Looks like I'll be continuing to fly BA and American then.
It's interesting watching some of the side deals being done around the iPhone. Apparently YouTube are going to make all their video catalog available in higher quality H.264 format. Ostensibly for iPhone compatibility, but note that all S60 3rd Edition FP1 devices and many older Nseries devices (e.g. N73, N93, N80, etc.) have H.264 video compatibility. Hopefully YouTube pages will soon come with a hook or link for smartphones to follow and play?
It's probably worth pointing out that the VoIP and Multi Platform IM application Fring is now available for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 (The Register). Given Windows Mobile already has a Skype client expect a lot more focus on the VoIP angle in the coming months, which of course will have a nice knock-on effect with the Symbian version!
It seems that the Nokia N80 has had a major firmware update, to 5.0719.0.2 (from v4.x), which is already available in your Nokia Software Update. For unbranded/unlocked devices, anyway. (Via Symbian-Freak)
Nokia is set to reorganise its corporate structure from January 2008 as part its move towards becoming an 'Internet company'. Nokia's current structure of business groups and horizontal group will change to three main units: devices, software and services and markets. Currently S60 devices are produced by the Multimedia group (Nseries), Enterprise group (Eseries) and Mobile Phones group. The new structure sees a greater emphasis on software and services a main stay of which will presumably be the S60 Platform.
In advance of my more detailed AllAboutSymbian review, I've included a video review of the Nokia N76 in Smartphones Show 35. Also in this show is a feature on making the most of your smartphone's battery life. Show 35 is here in MP4 format on the page, here on YouTube and here's the iTunes feed.
In this editorial Ewan ponders on the importance of marketing in dictating the sales of high end phones. What can be learnt from the Nokia N95, one of the most desirable phones on the market, and what implications does this have.
The beta of Opera Mini 4 is now available from the Opera website. The new version renders a full page overview from which you can then zoom in to read the page (very reminiscent of S60's browser overview / minimap mode). Other new features include the introduction of a mouse and power scrolling making it easier to move around pages and a quick access context menu. Read on for more and screenshots.
Another nail in the coffin of over-fancy, bloated web sites. In addition to Opera Mini, Google Mobile and operator-branded proxies (e.g. the new Vodafone system, bought in from Novarra), you can also now surf to your heart's content without wasting bandwidth using the new version 4 of Skweezer. Start by pointing your smartphone browser at http://www.skweezer.net/.
MSN has re-launched its mobile site, mobile.msn.com. If you're heavily into Microsoft services (Hotmail, Messanger, etc.) then this makes sense to bookmark in your smartphone's web browser.
With the media about to erupt in a stream of iPhone reviews, Steve gets his thoughts in first, taking Jobs' original line-up of phones that are "'smart', so they say" and comparing how functional they are in daily life. Are miniature keyboards really the problem? Steve thinks (not for the first time) that a lot comes down to where, when and how you need to use your smartphone.
