The Shazam application is becoming more visible in Symbian, what with over a million downloads through the Ovi Store, and preloaded onto a number of Symbian devices either out of the box (5630) or through the firmware update (the 5800) and it’s paying off for the company. The “what is that tune I can hear” application has now indexed over one billion songs, and the user base is 75 million.
You'll remember that Ewan did a four part review of the Nokia X6 32GB (Comes with Music) a few months back? (links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) It's fair to say that quite a bit of his criticism was based on early software issues and observations over the slow speed of the 32GB version's mass memory. Fast forward to May 2010 and we have a X6 16GB with more mature v20 firmware and a far faster mass memory. Can this cheaper edition succeed where the CwM version failed? And is the X6's hardware and software now ready for the prime time? Here's part one of Steve Litchfield's two part review of the Nokia X6-00. Part two will follow on Thursday.
During a recent visit to Nokia's London design office, I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes with a Nokia N8. The device was a prototype and we were asked not to switch it on as the Symbian^3 software is still being worked on. However, I thought it would still be worth sharing a few initial impressions and pictures of the hardware below. The N8, which was announced in late April, is due out at the end of the summer. Read on for more and a Nokia N8 mini-gallery.
In All About Symbian Insight 118 Ewan and Rafe share their thoughts on a visit to Nokia's design HQ in London, the release of Sports Tracker and memory performance on Ewan's X6. The second half of the podcast features an outside broadcast recorded at the recent #NokiaNav event in Richmond. Rafe and Steve are joined Julien Fourgeaud and discuss the event and related accessories and activities. You can listen to AAS Insight 118 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Leaping on Mercury Meltdown, a past PSP favourite and now available in the Ovi Store, Ewan finds out in this review, over on Ovi Gaming, that both titles and marketing screenshots can be deceptive. From blocky graphics to clumsy controls, it's fair to say that this is a game that disappoints at almost every level.
OpenTable for Nokia, an application which lets you book a restaurant table from you phone, is now available to download from Ovi Store. OpenTable is a well established online restaurant booking service; it covers more than 13,000 restaurants in the US, UK, Canada and Mexico. The key advantage of the service is that it provides a complete 'end-to-end' offering allowing you to browse restaurants, making a booking and receive a confirmation. This saves significant time and effort over the traditional method of telephone booking.
With Steve borrowing an X6 for a few weeks (expect his thoughts on Nokia’s first capacitive screened smartphone next week) one thing we wanted to look at was the relatively slow speed of the music player on my X6. While we’re comparing over Skype and not side by side, there’s still a marked difference between Steve’s 16GB X6 and my 32GB X6. And we have a theory....
In April, a renewed version of Sports Tracker, which turns your phone into a GPS sports computer, was released for S60 5th Edition devices. In the meantime, Sports Tracking Technologies have launched their website and now they have made available a S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 version of the application. S60 3.2 devices were supported by the old version of Sports Tracker, but the new version has a number of extra features and UI tweaks. It will also support the new online service, which is set to become available shortly. Read on for more.
I was asked a very good question last week: "Why do you stay with Symbian when there's a world of wonder with iPhone and Android?" I have to admit to finding a number of positives in these other platforms, sometimes accompanied by positives in their hardware, but it's true that I do keep coming back to Symbian as the OS powering my smartphone-of-choice. Investigating my own leanings and trying to justify them, here are the top 10 reasons why I stay with Symbian.
Leah Betancourt is wondering why the location based services so beloved of Web 2.0 people haven’t taken off and been adopted by the general public. The arguments boil down to two areas (“privacy issues” and “where is the value”) and an easy solution doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. More below.
Following on from our review of Gravity Surf on Ovi Gaming earlier this month, developers Synqua games have been in touch to thank us for the balanced review, and to let us know that one of the ideas we posted (controlling the game via the accelerometer) has been implemented. This is the perfect example of how to build up a business in the competitive online world of applications. Let me explain…
Rafe reports back from a 'conversational briefing' with Marko Ahtisaari (Head of Design at Nokia) at Nokia's London Design HQ. There's an explanation of Nokia's "smart push", of how Nokia's three tier device strategy fits together, of how Nokia's software and hardware design teams have been brought together to promote a holistic approach and accelerate the pace of innovation, and there are hints of future design directions for both Symbian and MeeGo devices and software.
Breakout clones have been a computing staple since the earliest days of TV consoles. So it's not surprising to see yet another variant hit the Ovi Store. In this case it's 3D Brick Breaker Revolution 2, featuring psychedelic effects and more power-ups than you can imagine. But is it any good as a game? Steve Litchfield investigates in this first part of a double-review here on our very own Ovi Gaming site. In the second part, Ewan Spence looks at World Series of Poker 3: Hold Em Legend, admiring both its ambitious UI and gameplay but having reservations about the quality of its graphics.
Canalys have chipped in with their version of the worldwide Q1 2010 figures for phones and smartphones. Most numbers are similar to the IDC/Gartner ones (e.g. Nokia 38.8% world smartphone marketshare, RIM 19.2%, Apple 15.9%), but there are extra numbers brought out, such as breaking down the different interfaces and form factors. See below.
Nokia's Podcasting is a wonderful media consumption tool. But, aside from its own somewhat limited 'Directory', Nokia doesn't make it simple to get new podcasts into Podcasting's feed 'system'. In this tutorial, David Gilson looks at way of using Google reader on your desktop computer to harvest interesting podcasts and import their feeds into your smartphone.
