DVB-H, perhaps already the worldwide front running candidate technology for mobile TV, has received a huge boost with the news that Nokia and Motorola have announced that they will 'work to achieve interoperability among their DVB-H-enabled mobile devices and network services'. Full press release follows...
Steve Litchfield's been trialling Route 66 for S60 3rd Edition. Has it improved since the very first 'Series 60' version? Sadly, not much, although it's still a competent choice. Here's the lowdown on what's good and what's bad.
The Nokia E50, E60, E61 and E70 have now been added to the Nokia Phone Software update service. Thanks to Stefan and Tommi's Blog for the heads up. The service is now also available on the Europe wide site.
AAS colleague Darla attended the opening of Nokia's New York City flagship store. Here's part one of her illustrated diary entry. I wonder when Nokia will hit London?
You may have already bookmarked my own 3-Lib web guide, but there's another mobile web portal on the block, 247mini, run by recent Nokia E61 convert Shaun McGill. It's pretty impressive, too, and well worth bookmarking from any PDA or smartphone.
GearLog have spotted that Nokia's officially introduced a new variant of the E70. The black-faced E70-2 has 850MHz GSM instead of 3G, effectively making it quad band and thus working properly in the USA. It's initially available only in the 'flagship' stores, though.
Herewith first news of a major firmware update to the E61. V2.0 is now available and is being rolled out to service centres over the next few days and (hopefully) via the PSU service. Full details here. Items that caught my eye: improved performance and better RAM use, plus audio improvements.
Now, don't get too excited. This huge list of improvements to S60, posted on Tommi's Applications blog, isn't stuff which is all definitely being implemented, it's strictly user requests. But it's still impressive that someone at Nokia is both talking and listening to real users, and we're promised that the list has been passed on to the right departments.
Interesting to see Darla posting the news that ROK have launched a free mobile-based Voice over IP service. The catch? Well, it currently requires S60 2nd Edition smartphones at each end, each running the client application and each within a few metres of their home or office broadband connection with Bluetooth-enabled PCs. Hardly mass market, but let's drink to continuing innovation.
Michael Mace has written what has to be one of the clearest market comparison articles I've read in a long time. Over on his blog he's gone into some wonderful cultural comparisions of the European and American marketplaces for mobile technology. Ever wondered why Nokia "has Rock Star status" in Europe yet is "lost in the crowd of semi-anonymous Euro-brands" in the US? Why number portability is king? And why not to ask a European Operator about MMS revenue?
Following on from my own detailed review of Navicore Personal 2006, blogger Shaun McGill has written up his own (shorter) mini-review, concluding that it's "a competent GPS application that does everything asked of it - a few tweaks here and there wouldn’t go amiss though."
