The smartphone is making an audible difference to the world (writes Clive Thompson at Wired). He’s spotted that his mobile phone bills are dropping, and there’s one obvious cause. he’s not phoning people as much as he used to, and what calls he is making are not lasting as long. It’s all to do with the rise of social networks and smartphone connectivity, "This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways."
In All About Symbian Insight 129, we start with a number of short items: Angry Birds as a favourite game, Qt on Samsung and Sony Ericsson, Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition. In the second half of the podcast we respond to number of listener questions, from a discussion of how quality impacts on user experience, to how Nokia should market the N8 and the possibility of an Android Nokia device. You can listen to AAS Insight 129 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
TripAdvisor and Nokia have announced a partnership that has two major elements: firstly a TripAdvisor application will be made available via the Ovi Store and secondly the TripAdvisor service will be integrated into Ovi Maps. TripAdvisor is one of the world's biggest travel web sites, it covers more than 1 million businesses (restaurants, hotels, attractions) in more than 70,000 cities. As well as the usual business listing information, typical of such sites, it is well known for its user generated reviews, which number in excess of 35 million. Read on for further details and screenshots.
"No..." "No..." "There he is!". Yes, for some Friday fun it's Capcom Europe's port of the popular children's book series, Where's Wally! How well does an artwork based book translate to the gaming world on your smartphone? Ewan decides to risk a pun and takes a look.
We recently reported that Furtiv had announced new beta version plugins for Nokia Share Online. Futiv have now announced that the current wave of plugins are now officially available, for free in the Ovi Store. In total this now means that Furtiv offer Share Online plugins for YouTube, Facebook, TweetPhoto, Picasa Web Albums, TwitPic, Dropbox, MySpace, Orkut, yfrog, img.ly, LinkedIn and Flickr. See Furtiv's publisher page on the Ovi Store for more details.
Location based tools on your smartphone aren't always about the check-in. Sometimes they can be for information and discovery as well. Locago harnesses multiple sources of information (including user generated contet) and puts these layers over a competent mapping and routing tool. Let's take a closer look at it.
What’s the best game in the Ovi Store? Nokia asked last week with ten games to choose from, and the result are available. But in a lovely nod to their ability to spot a top game, the write-in "others" category provided the runaway winner with 36% of the vote. The winning garland has been placed on Angry Birds, available for the N900. Which isn’t that surprising given that (a) it’s a runaway hit on the iPhone and (b) the N900 version sold six times as fast as the iPhone version!
More significant news from the Samsung i8910 HD firmware scene, which is accelerating, amazingly, rather than slowing down. 'faenil' has organised a one-click installer for the Qt 4.7.0 beta2 libraries for non-Nokia smartphones such as the i8910 HD, in theory letting them install some of the new Qt apps (e.g. the superlative Orange Wednesdays). A quote and video from faenil below. In related news, HyperX is now finalising HX8 firmwares, including even more customisations and a fix for Samsung's longstanding Music player bugs (a video for which is also embedded below). It's all go... What do you mean, you don't own an i8910 HD?
The Nokia N8, the first publicly announced Symbian^3 device, is available for pre-order from Nokia Italy's web store. It is priced at €469 (£390 / $600), with availability stated as being at the end of September, just in line with Nokia's stated Q3 shipment date. Nokia Italy is offering free delivery and say that customers pre-ordering will be 'among the first to receive the new N8'. Other Nokia stores will no doubt make their pre-order processes available shortly.
Many years ago, everyone thought that Instant Messaging (IM) would be a big winner on the mobile platform. That’s turned out to not be the case – the winner in the field of short form updates has been the status message on Facebook and the broadcasting nature of Twitter. So what happened? And are the same mistakes being made by the current slew of location-based apps that are the so-called 'next wave of innovation'? Read on...
In this feature, I've been taking a long hard look at the top-end smartphones in the Symbian powered world over the last three years, pointing out their flaws and frailties, and - where appropriate - pointing out what should have been done to fix things up. Yes, Symbian has been cracking along with record momentum in the mid-tier, with Nokia trouncing the iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones in terms of raw unit sales, but Symbian's partners have been scoring rather a lot of own goals in recent times. And what of the 2010 Symbian^3 crop, such as the imminent Nokia N8 - will these suffer a similar fate? I'm optimistic...
Spurred on by his reviews of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro and Samsung i8910 HD, David Gilson looks at the huge investment Nokia has made into providing an Ovi service layer - it seems that, whatever Ovi's detractors might say, the absence of this service layer on non-Nokia hardware is desperately noticeable. He also wonders whatever became of Symbian's Horizon project - as good a starting point as any for getting applications out to all Symbian smartphones.
Got a smart idea for something on mobile? Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2010 might be just the thing for you. This competition (with a prize fund of 150,000 Euros) is accepting registrations for the competition until August 22nd. They're looking for smart ideas, not just finished products, and are hoping to accelerate innovation in European mobile start-ups. More below....
