Sony Ericsson has announced, following regulatory approval, that is has completed its acquisition of UIQ Technology from Symbian. UIQ Technology will operate as a separate business subsidiary of Sony Ericsson and the UIQ software platform will remain openly available. We can expect to hear more about Sony Ericsson plans at the upcoming 3GSM conference,
NTT DoCoMo started shipping the D703i (Mitsubishi) and the F703i (Fujitsu) phones yesterday. The phones run on MOAP on Symbian and are only available on NTT DoCoMo's FOMA network in Japan. They take the total number of phone models based on Symbian OS shipping in Japan to 47 .
Symbian is going to have a big presence at 3GSM 2007 in Barcelona and their 3GSM web pages are now live - including coffee, lifestyle, lounge and blogs! And a reminder that AllAboutSymbian (ok, Rafe) will be there too, reporting back on the new devices and services.
Good games for S60 3rd Edition seem to be arriving in a steady stream. Quite a number of them from ZingMagic's direction, it has to be said. Here I review Magi-Mix, a superbly-implemented and very challenging word puzzle.
Another Nokia N95-related link - I've just added it to my interactive smartphone-selector Grid. Plug in your personal preferences and see which are the most suitable devices for you. And if the N95 wins - well, you've only got another month or so to wait!
X-Plore is a file manager for S60 phones from Lonely Cat Games the authors of Smart Movie and Profimail. X-Plore is currently available as a free beta. It includes the usual file manager features and also includes a images and text viewer. It does not use the standard S60 UI elements and consequently is able to fit more information on the screen at one time.
The first part of a new series of tutorials on developing for UIQ is now available on the Sony Ericsson Developer world website. The tutorials are written by freelance developer Simon Judge and part 1 covers cover UIQ the platform and offers an architectural overview.
Just a note that I've now updated my big one-page S60 device comparison table over on 3-Lib to include this year's new Nokia S60 3rd Edition smartphones. As usual, comments and corrections welcome!
According to a report on Pocket Gamer, a secret workshop for American and Asian publishers and developers on Nokia's next gen gaming platform was held in Santa Monica last week. Perhaps most notable in the article is the incredible list of publishers that apparently attended the event: Disney, Sega, Sony, Universal, Square Enix, Capcom, THQ, Glu Mobile, Digital Chocolate, EA, Tecmo, Namco and Vivendi. The article also claims 3rd party publishers just got their development kits in January, which could suit a Summer launch and Xmas advertising push fairly well (old generation N-Gage titles usually took 6 - 12 months to make). These revelations seem to confirm what All About Symbian exclusively revealed last October. Another event will apparently be held in Madrid next week for European publishers and devs.
