Based on Web Runtime and a little clunky round the edges, but nevertheless free and available now in the Ovi Store is Nokia Shopping List, screenshotted below, with multiple lists to help you with your weekly/daily/special shopping trips. As usual with this genre of application, you just cross items off as you buy them, then clear the list at the end, ready for next time round the supermarket/mall.
One novel promotional idea the Ovi guys and gals had a few months back was to produce a promotional magazine in the Issuu 'virtual' format - here's issue 1 of the 'Ovi Guide', from the Spring. Issue 2 has just been released at a whopping 44 pages and, though biased towards marketing Nokia's products, does have plenty of app mini-reviews, plus some useful tips and pointers in it. Moreover, it's glossily implemented, embedded below on this page (if your browser window is wide enough!) and well worth a detailed look.
There are more than enough news sites and commentary around for you to read on your phone. What I need is a snack sized piece of fiction to get me thinking, make me smile, have my heart fly, and entertain me on a daily basis. If you do as well, www.cellstories.net is for you, providing a new short story every day, laid out to work on your smartphone's small screen.
Since the dawn of time (1993), Symbian devices/smartphones have had various three or four-fingered salutes to kill things and, importantly, to bring them back from the dead should the unimaginable happen. The keys required to 'hard reset' a S60 phone have varied over the years because of differences in form factors and button availability, but it seems one of Forum Nokia's writers has discovered the magic combination for the Nokia N8 and other Symbian^3 phones, see below.
While the location based information provided by Google’s Latitude system has always been available on Google Maps for Mobile, hooking in to the system from a desktop computer has always needed you to go through a clumsy route using iGoogle. Well, no more, as you can now see where your friends are on this standalone web page.
Now that didn’t take as long as the N8! Nokia’s Conversations Blog is reporting that the Nokia C7, announced last month at Nokia World, is now shipping to customers. Making it the second Symbian^3 device to hit retail, the C7 matches the majority of specs of the N8, missing out the HDMI port, 12 megapixel camera, and of course has a reduced price tag.
Definitely not recommended for anyone reading this, but fascinating reading nevertheless is iFixit's teardown of the Nokia N8, with numerous valuable insights into how the N8 was made, including titbits like the AMOLED display not being fused to the outside glass so that, in theory, you don't have to replace both if you break the latter. Details of the various chips inside are also of interest, though I'd warn again - do not try this at home. Leave N8 dismantling to your local Nokia Care Point!
We apologise for the never-ending stream of news items about the N8, but it's hard to shut up when exciting things appear day by day. In this case it's Nokia's home-grown Panorama application, first seen in the likes of the N86 8MP and N900, but now customised for the N8 and made available in the Ovi Store. See below for screens and a sample of its output.
Nokia has just released an official iSync plug-in for the N8, meaning that Mac owners can now do a full Contacts/Calendar sync to the Mac Address Book and iCal. See below for some screen proofs and notes - there are some changes to the way Calendar sync works with iSync on Symbian^3 phones.
There's a great post here by Ari Partinen with tips on taking better portrait photos with the N8, specifically looking at how he achieved the professional shot reproduced below, with nothing more than the Nokia N8 and some white material (as a reflector). Well worth a read and, if nothing else, shows what Xenon-lit fill-in flash can do to improve smartphone photos - even in broad daylight.
Forgive the blatant plug, but this is one Phones Show programme that you might want to catch. Inside show 122 there's my video review of the Nokia N8 - trying to summarise this device in 1500 spoken words over 10 screen minutes wasn't easy - you can judge my efforts below, as the show is embedded for your convenience. There's also a mini review of the Motorola Flipout, a diminutive but capable qwerty smartphone.
After two years of absence, Nokia's in-house Internet Radio application has finally been ported officially to S60 5th Edition, appearing in the Ovi Store, as shown below, for the likes of the Nokia 5800 and X6. Interestingly, it's not shown in the store for the N8 just yet - doubtless that's coming up shortly too. The usual warnings over using it only over Wi-fi apply - don't use it over 3G unless you're sure your data tariff can handle it!
A couple of interesting links of interest in the last 24 hours over on Nokia's official blog. Nokia’s new devices and the environment looks at some facts behind progress at keeping phones and their packaging as 'green' as possible. I guess when you're selling over a million phones a day then you have to really worry about the impact you're having on the planet! Also of interest was this drum-thumping post on entitled Nokia ranks number one as mobile Web platform, referring to new stats from Opera that show that in the top 20 tech-capable countries, in 16 of them a Nokia device was the leading phone used to browse the web. Some quotes below from each.
SPB have updated their streaming TV application, SPB TV, to v1.5 and along with some bug fixes, the application is now free to download. Previously a number of streaming IP TV stations were free, but now the whole TV guide is available to every user. You can grab your copy at SPB. More below.
Symbian have announced the line up of the Application Developer Track at the upcoming Exchange and Exposium in Amsterdam next month. With notable contributions from Nokia and Orange, the event is well on course to its goals of sharing experience and knowledge throughout the community.
