It had to happen - someone's gone and done an Apple iPad theme for Symbian. The example screenshots are shown below, along with the link, though note that the home wallpaper is optimised for the Nokia 5800 (and similar) - it'll look a little odd on some other S60 5th Edition phones!
Last Friday, Nokia announced that it had acquired MetaCarta Inc, a privately owned firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which specialises in 'geographic intelligence solutions'. MetaCarta is best known for its geosearch and geotagging products (e.g. NewsMap, which allows publishers to automatically created a map tagged with their news stories) and has partnerships with a number of leading technology firms. MetaCarta's technology will help Nokia improve its social location services, such as local search.
In All About Symbian Insight 113 Ewan and Rafe share news of Nokia's acquisition of MetaCarta, the preview release of Symbian Web Tools and the addition of E71 and E66 compatibility to Ovi Maps 3.3. The major part of the podcast focuses on the launch of Nokia's Comes with Music in China, before ending with some thoughts on Apple's iPhone OS 4. You can listen to AAS Insight 113 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Let's try and work out two end points on the line of support for hardware. If you bought a new Nokia phone yesterday, you would expect the Finnish company to support it with the latest products and updates. But you wouldn't expect Nokia to be supporting the very first S60 phone, the 7650 in 2010? Agreed? Now read on, because that thought is important.
Tim Salmon and I (in Phones Show Chat) often remark that if the perfect smartphone came along then we'd have nothing to debate and nothing to write about - but the current situation in terms of what I've tried and rejected is starting to get ridiculous. Am I too fussy in wanting something that's remotely close to perfect? Having seen, tried and rejected 101 smartphones, what the heck do I recommend to others?
It's always good to get new developers contacting us. In this case, it's Anthony Rich, with the donation-ware Graphing Calculator, screenshotted and linked below. It's Java-based and optimised for smaller screens - it's also clearly early in development, I'm sure Anthony would be happy with some feedback and suggestions right about now if this is something you'd have a use for.
As part of a new series for absolute beginners (AAS regulars, we're looking at your friends and family here, I suspect, or others coming in via Google), here's my first cut at 'Getting started with the Nokia 5230'. We'd genuinely like your feedback on improving this format of article. What else does a complete 5230/Symbian/S60 5th novice really need to know up-front? Your comments will be built into updates of this piece and into future versions for other popular 'entry' smartphones. Thanks!
Although not a hard core phone blogger, Nitish Kumar has produced a very well written (I'll forgive the mispelling of Xenon!) treatise on the Nokia N82, on why he chose it originally and on how it's hard to replace, even today in 2010, three years after release. The AAS N82 is also still going strong - though the 2.4" screen is looking like the sticking point for me nowadays. Comments?
Our very own Rafe is the author of a thought provoking editorial today over on Nokia Conversations, musing over the future of the (mobile) operating system and covering intelligence, location awareness and social nature. Comments welcome if you think he is, or isn't, on the right track!
You may remember that I've been following the adventures of Andy, aka 'HyperX', in his attempts to produce wonderful things with modified firmware for the power house Samsung i8910 HD. His latest adventure, in video form below, shows a whopping 62 full applications running at the same time. Also impressive is 194MB of free RAM after booting. Gulp. For the record, I'm now on HX 3.29 on my i8910 HD - and yes, there's probably a part 3 coming to my own HX journey. Walking on the wild side indeed - the performance of some parts of S60 with 62 apps all running is a little patchy, as you'll see in the video!
YACOB is a favourite Ewan term, meaning Yet Another Clone Of Bejewelled. And he gets to use it quite a lot! However, despite being YACOB, Fruitz is done well enough that it still gets Ewan's Ovi Gaming seal of approval - he just wishes they'd got a sound engineer in to help with the production.
Nokia has announced the launch of Comes with Music, its unlimited music service, for China. The service, which will be DRM-free, will be available across eight Nokia devices with a starting price point of €140 (£123 / $187). The cost of music is bundled into the price of the device; subsequently, users can download as much music as they like, with no additional charges, for the duration of the Comes with Music subscription (usually 12 months).
Digital Chocolate, a well known mobile and web games developer, has announced that its products have been downloaded from the Ovi Store more than 4 million times. To celebrate the announcement Digital Chocolate is, in a limited number of European countries, making five of its game titles available for free via the Ovi Store during April and May (variants of Tower Bloxx, Rollercoaster Rush, Crazy Penguin Party and Dictator Defense). Read on for further details and links.
In All About Symbian Insight podcast no. 112, Ewan returns with a bang and, together with Steve and Rafe, brings you up to date with developments in the Symbian world. We start with news of the WordPress Symbian client, the beta release of Nokia Bots and the recent upgrades to Nokia's Ovi Store. In the second half of the podcast there are hardware thoughts on the Sony Ericsson Vivaz (Steve) and Nokia 5230 (Ewan). You can listen to AAS Insight 112 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
David Gilson sneeks a peek at a couple of novel versions of a classic literary work, looking mainly at one by Offscreen Technologies, but also mentioning GoSpoken's more traditional ebook edition. What do you think of this trend of content being wrapped up in application form? Will it result in us drowning in icons? Comments welcome!
