Nokia Beta Labs have released their Wellness Diary application, which they announced in September. Available for all touch-screen enabled Symbian phones, the application runs in the background monitoring the user's activity. For example, it uses the accelerometer as a pedometer to measure your physical activity, and a schedule can even be set for the application to periodically ask you how many snacks you've eaten! Users can set personal targets and share their progress with social networks. To find out more, read on.
There’s no doubt that Facebook is one of the key drivers of content on a mobile platform, and what Mark Zuckerberg has planned for his users will affect the mobile market. So Rob Jackson’s analysis of the announcement at the start of the month on the “Facebook Mobile Platform” makes for interesting background reading.
Limited Q3, 2010 worldwide smartphone platform sales figures are now available, published by Gartner here. Year on year, Symbian-powered smartphone sales are up over 50%, but it's still a sharply rising market and Android's explosion into second place means that Symbian now has a very serious competitor, in addition to being 'down' to 36.6% world marketshare. With Android on the march, iPhone marketshare was also down year on year, ditto RIM and Windows Mobile. See below for some comments and the stats.
After the fiasco where Skype started blocking all IM access to third party Symbian/mobile clients like Nimbuzz and Fring, it seems that ICQ has started doing the same, blocking Nimbuzz, as reported here on the latter's blog. With many IM services already highly proprietary, it seems that the Instant Messaging is imploding before our eyes. Or maybe we'll all end up on Google Talk and Jabber? Comments welcome if you're a heavy IM user!
Yesterday's news that Nokia would be taking over governance of the Symbian project was great for anyone wanting to publish a dramatic headline. However, to call this a failure for Symbian would, at best, be a cursory observation of what this really means for the platform. To many observers, the writing was on the wall for quite some time, and for others, it was the only logical conclusion to the Symbian Foundation experiment. Over the past year, I wrote two articles about the wider adoption of Symbian: "The risk of opening Symbian" and "Does Symbian have a service layer gap?". Now that the governance of Symbian has reverted back to Nokia, it's a good time to review both of these articles to help give readers some context to what the changeover means for Symbian.
While the press focus might be on the organisation of the Foundation, the operating system continues to drive forward, as NTT Docomo announce eleven new Symbian OS-powered handsets at the SEE2010 show. This makes 143 models of phone that have now used Symbian for the Japanese network.
Symbian's SEE show (Symbian Exchange and Exposition) takes place over the 9th and 10th of November in Amsterdam. Over the next two days we'll be bringing you the key news, views and information. This news story contains our live coverage, where you can see the latest photos and text updates; you can also interact with the team, asking questions and adding your own thoughts. Alternatively you can keep up to date by following our @aas account on Twitter, where we will be posting text updates and photos.
In a conference call this afternoon, Nokia and the Symbian Foundation outlined some major changes in how the Symbian operating system will be managed, going forwards. The Symbian Foundation will still handle licensing, trademark and patent issues, among other tasks, but all governance of the open source Symbian codebase will be taken up by Nokia. It was remarked that the 'foundation' model made perfect sense when there were five companies depending on the OS, but that it made less sense now, in late 2010.
A hugely entertaining read by Tim Ocock (formerly of Symbian) over on Tech Crunch Europe this morning. Ocock’s well placed to comment on “The Successful Failures” of Symbian, as he straddled engineering and management during his time at the company. Starting at the birth of Symbian, right through to his current advice to Nokia and the Symbian Foundation (ditch S40, support your developers with useful API’s and tools, and spend time educating the market and the Analysts), this is one to read over lunch."
The well known WiFi tethering application, JoikuSpot, has expanded its range of supported Symbian devices. In addition to S60 3rd Edition and Symbian^1 devices from Nokia; JoikuSpot now supports recent Sony Ericsson devices (Satio, Vivaz and Vivaz Pro). Further expanding its compatibility with Nokia devices, the JoikuSpot have also released a Premium edition for Symbian^3 devices. Prices are currently reduced from 15 Euros to 9 Euros.
Just when you thought that HX-V8-32 firmware was the last 'hurrah' of the Samsung i8910 HD, along comes HyperX and his team to push the venerable smartphone to one final chapter. HX-V11-5 includes full Qt integration and extensive customisation options, some of which are listed below. There are still ways in which the i8910 remains the top dog in the Symbian world (besting the N8 with stereo speakers, larger display, etc.) so this new release is particularly interesting.
The symmetry behind the headline is slightly spoilt by the recent naming change of the main OS to just be 'Symbian', but the point remains: Nimbuzz, the popular IM and VoIP client, has now been released in version 3.0, fully optimised for Symbian(^3) and with significant interface improvements, but also available for all other Symbian-powered phones. You may remember that Skype has withdrawn access to Nimbuzz (and Fring and other apps of this kind), so there's no Skype messaging, but as you'll see from the video embedded below, there are still plenty of reasons to give Nimbuzz a try.
Buoyed up by the recent SYMBEOSE funding, there will be a distinct air of optimism at SEE 2010, Symbian's annual two day show, this year in Amsterdam. Rafe will be there on the show floor and reporting on any announcements on the 9th and 10th November. The keynotes look like being more important than ever in the current economic and technological climate - I've already quoted the full list of speakers, moderators and panellists, but listed below are the main keynote speakers - expect to see Rafe and his trusty laptop near the front on the day!
Now this is yet another piece of good news. While the N8 might have been the smartphone for the camera geeks and the C7 is the newest Symbian handset for the fashion conscious, it’s the C6-01 that I think is going to be the most important of the new Symbian devices (yes, even shading the E7). The small and affordable unit has now started shipping from the Nokia depots around the world, so expect it in the retail chain and available to buy at some point early next week.
Just released in the Ovi Store is Auto Trader Mobile for all S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 handsets. Auto Trader, as the name suggests, is a huge online second hand car buying and selling system and this new solution works well, if quirkily, giving full information on search matches, looking up your location and allowing you to store server-side notes. See below for screenshots and comments.
