Popping up at the start of the week was a significant alpha version of Gravity. Taking the popular social media client up to version 1.5a, it’s not quite polished and stable yet, so if you want to wait for the hardened version, then check back in January. But if you’re happy with a little bit of peril, then you’ll get a number of new features and improvements, including a portrait qwerty keyboard for touchscreen devices!
There's a great tutorial feature just published over on the Nseries blog by Ari Partinen, looking at ways of getting more effective low light photos from the Nokia N8 (i.e. without using the Xenon flash). How can you maximise contrast and style while minimising low light noise? Well worth a read if you own an N8.
Extended Depth of Field (EDoF) cameras, also known as Full Focus, have enabled Nokia to make ever thinner smartphones. Rather than relying on the larger actuating auto-focus lens system to produce a sharp image, EDoF exploits image processing algorithms to create an image that is universally sharp. The trade off here is that capturing fine details (like text) is often not possible, and there is a minimum focal distance of 50cm. Well, Jade Bryan over at SymbianWorld.org has come up with a method to get around this limitation, and like all the best ideas, it is remarkably simple. Read on to find out more.
Sorry, I couldn't resist another link of interest to a couple of stunning Nokia N8 camera projects: in this case PiX, the (South) African Photo Journal documenting in detail how they got on using the N8 to shoot the cover of their publication, replacing a dedicated DSLR. The video report is embedded below, and you can see their cover here on the PiX web site. And LMVisual, which used the N8 exclusively to produce a very professional video showing the art of BMX stunts, also embedded below.
One aspect of the performance of modern devices that is rather taken for granted, especially in the Symbian world, is audio rendering, i.e. how good a music player is each device? Devin, over at the Nokia Guide, has been putting the N8 to the sword here with the aid of his seemingly super-human hearing. Result? The N8 comes through with flying colours. Devin, how about some comparative tests now: don't suppose you can get hold of a few competing phones?
Mobbler, Symbian's Last.fm client, has a new beta version for Symbian^3 users. The new beta supports the new Scrobbling API and menu items for the radio stations recently discontinued by Last.fm have been removed. There is a long list of new features too, like Twitter sharing, artist biography pages, and improved lyrics pages. Also added is support for the new mix radio station created by Last.fm to replace discontinued stations. The Mobbler project is also asking people to install an error reporting agent (ErrRd.SIS) which will help the developers capture bugs in the new beta version.
As part of the Symbian Foundation's transition to a licensing only organisation the majority of the Symbian Foundation websites closed today. Together with the departure of the majority of the remaining staff, today marks the end of major operations by the Symbian Foundation. Of course, the Symbian platform will continue under the guidance of Nokia, who have committed to make the future development of the platform available via an alternative 'direct and open model'. Some comments below.
I couldn't resist embedding the interview below for aspiring Nokia N8 film-makers (like me?!), shot by Nokia with the McHenry brothers - the guys who did the short film 'The Commuter', which aired last month, every frame of which was shot on the N8 (though they cheated with the sound, which I'm a little disappointed with!). With some nicely techy tips and questions thrown in, it's worth 17 minutes of your time to sit down and watch.
Asri Al Baker from i-symbian.com and friend of All About Symbian has been at it again with his Web Run-Time Widgets! This time, he has broken away from the Google world and treated us to a launcher for Facebook Touch. For those who don't know, http://touch.facebook.com offers a variant of Facebook optmised for finger-driven mobile browsers. As said previously, there's nothing stopping users from just adding a bookmark to their browser, but these WRT Widgets offer the benefit of an identifiable icon in both the application menu and home screen shortcuts.
Anyone who is interested in testing the latest features of Pixelpipe Share Online should now direct their browser towards Nokia Beta Labs. Pixelpipe is the latest third party application to be invited into Nokia Beta Labs for users to get the latest bleeding edge features, and more importantly, provide useful feedback to the developers! To announce their invitation to Beta Labs, Pixepipe CEO Brett Butterfield has written a guest blog post, to introduce the social media sharing agent to the uninitiated.
Putting itself forward as the “real-time home screen” Hiplogic’s *Spark has left beta and the full version is officially launched today. With hooks into your own social networks on Facebook and Twitter, as well as news headlines from PA, Sky and CBS and a new daily deals module (powered by this month’s web darling, Groupon), *Spark certainly makes a strong case for itself. See below for plenty more, including comments, screens, links and an in-depth, exclusive video interview with Hiplogic's CEO, Mark Anderson.
The shipping date for Nokia's fourth Symbian^3 device, the communicator form-factor Nokia E7-00, has been pushed back by around a month in order to "ensure the best possible user experience". Originally the E7 was expected to ship in the last week of December. Nokia has not specified an exact new shipping date, but it is likely to be in late January or early February.
It’s the first of many articles for the end of the year, but Tech Radar’s look forward into 2011 covers both familiar ground (more Android devices, iPhone 5, Windows Mobile 7 getting a bit of stability) but the comments on Nokia and Symbian at the close of the article are interesting. “Whether Nokia will come up with a true competitor to the iPhone or a high-end Android handset remains to be seen, but deep down, we kind of hope it does.” How many more end of year posts will crack open the media door for a Symbian success in 2011?
Over on A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch is taking a closer look at one of the current key elements of the modern smartphone, the web browser. Pulling numbers from the Stat-Counter Service, he not only points out that the leading browser is Opera, but that Nokia’s web-kit effort is sitting nicely on 17% of the global market, compared to Opera and Safari on 22% and Blackberry on 19%. Android, by comparison, is on 11%. What does that mean for website designers?
[sarcasm alert] I had to chuckle when I saw this blog post on one of my favourite sites about a third party extension to Android, enabling - shock, horror, amazement - folders, to organise one's applications. Maybe the developers are copying Apple, who famously added folders for applications earlier this year in their fourth iteration of the iPhone OS? That must be it. They couldn't possibly be copying what Nokia and Symbian has had since (ahem) 2002, eight years ago, could they? See below for the appropriate Android 'Folder Organizer' screenshots...
