Aha. Things really do seem to be coming together on the sync front. From GooSync's extensions to My Nokia Backup to the imminent Ovi Sync, I've now spotted that Google's GMail contacts is a) about to acquire a SyncML interface, meaning that you can sync from any Symbian OS phone, and b) now changed so that your contacts don't get flooded with email addresses (this has been a longstanding bugbear of mine).
Those of you involved in Second Life might want to take a note of tomorrow's Virtual Worlds Business Panel being run by the Nokia team. It's being held on the main Nokia Island ("Nokia," funnily enough) and runs from 7pm GMT (Noon in SL, 8pm in the UK). Those of you in SL can make a date, everyone else, you've got 24 hours to go find the client and get it running.
Nokia's unified login system Nokia Account is now working again and accepting new registrations, just click on the "New Account" link below the login form. As we noted before, it's not yet in use by most Ovi services, but the plan is for your Nokia Account username to replace all the separate logins Ovi currently requires. If you want to make sure you get your favourite username, it's worth registering it on Nokia Account now so you're ready for the unification. (Note that the registration only requires an e-mail address OR a phone number, you don't have to give both.)
Nokia today released its 2nd quarter results for 2008. Converged mobile device shipments (S60 phones) were 15.3 million (up from 13.9 million in Q2 2007) including more 10 million Nseries and just under 2 million Eseries devices. Net sales from the services and software division was EUR 119 million (up 42% from Q1 2008). Nokia increased its overall market share to 40%, up from 38% last year and 39% last quarter.
You've written your Killer App, now it's a matter of selling it. But at what cost? Ewan thinks about the issue of pricing games and applications in the modern world. In response, Steve points out the true cost of gaming and argues that purchase price is almost irrelevant. Comments welcome!
Smartphones Show 63 just went live, with a hands-on video review of the Nokia 6220 Classic. There's also a review of the HTC Touch Diamond, comparing it to the Apple iPhone 3G. See also the Hi-res YouTube version and the RSS feeds for the QVGA and VGA versions.
Symbian supremo David Wood's new blog continues to pop up some interesting entries. Here, he talks about this week's Mobile Monday event, focussed on a topic close to my heart, 'Enabling Location in Applications', with relevant links and quotes. I was particularly interested to see the high profile of Skyhook's Wi-Fi location system, something which had hit my radar earlier in the week.
Nokia has completed its acquisition of Plazes, a privately-owned start-up company in Berlin. By acquiring Plazes, Nokia "will be able to extend its context-based service offering with social presence and time-based activity planning features." It's not clear whether this service will be rolled into another service (Nokia Chat?) or developed standalone and rebranded.
Nokia's Mobile Games Innovation Challenge is a contest to find the best new concepts for mobile gaming on either N-Gage, Symbian or Java. It's open to all professional game development companies, even the smallest ones, and the top three ideas will receive prize money to develop their ideas. Nokia doesn't want any actual code, they just want a text outline of an innovative unpublished game idea and optionally some mockup screenshots and/or video too. The contest closes on the 20th of August.
With the news that Apple have (unsurprisingly) had 10 million downloads from their on-device AppStore in the first weekend of operation, I can't help but reflect back on the continuing disaster that is Nokia's Download! system - read my rant below and see if you agree!
We usually link to the Carnival of the Mobilists, of course, but we're especially keen this week as one of our articles was selected as the top post. Great general mobile reading, as always, in Carnival 132.
Nokia is going to unify its Ovi and other online services using a single login system called Nokia Account. In theory you can already register your Nokia Account username on the official website, though the registration section seems to be down for maintenance right now so you may want to check back later (it did work yesterday and many have already registered). At the moment Nokia Account is only being used by a few services, most notably Nokia Chat, but eventually it will be used by the entire Ovi suite including Ovi Share, Nokia Maps, Nokia Music, N-Gage etc. We've mentioned this before in other recent AAS items, but a lot of our readers apparently still don't know about this unification, so we thought it deserved a bit more publicity.
You walk into a meeting with device X. You ride on the tube with device Y. You stroll around the park with device Z. What impressions will others have - and will these impressions be accurate? In the editorial below I give a few examples but would welcome extra real world anecdotes and data points!
Owners of smartphones have long looked down on budget phones with the assumption that cheap means nasty. However, budget phones have developed in leaps and bounds lately, and Krisse argues that they may catch up with smartphones sooner than most people realise.
With today being another 'iPhone day' and with Apple's new commercial Mobile Me service going live, it's worth noting AAS regular Matt Radford's comparison between Nokia's free My Nokia service and the $100/yr Mobile Me. Matt's notes complete the picture somewhat and his conclusion is spot on, although I suspect that within a few months, Ovi Sync will have rectified the relative lack of integration.
