Nokia E90 fans might want to note that the latest Smartphones Show, no. 60, includes a hands-on review with the Toshiba Portege G910, gunning for exactly the same target market with a fairly similar form factor. There's also my thoughts on the iPhone 3G and a mini-rant on phone contracts.
Dennis at WAP Review does a great job this week of bringing us all another installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists, no. 127. Good reading for a spare moment.
Make sure you don't miss Serko Artinian's five part look, over at Symbian Guru, at the North American Nokia N95 8GB versus the (non-3G) Apple iPhone. Lots of good insight here. Links: Part 1 - Form Factor and Build Quality : Part 2 - Its GUI : Part 3 - Syncing And Connecting : Part 4 - Core Apps : Part 5 - Multimedia Computer or Feature phone?
Another one of those Interesting Things Which You Might Not Have Noticed: the Finnish phone network operator Saunalahti has a service called Wippies with the same idea as Fon. You order a free Wippies Wi-Fi router which lets all Wippies members access your home connection wirelessly, and you can access theirs, with the aim of building a free nationwide or worldwide service. It was initially just an experiment in Finland last year, but it's now expanding to cover other countries too, with Sweden, Denmark and most recently Estonia joining the network.
In this beginners tutorial, I share a little of my sat-nav experience, hopefully of help to anybody suffering from slow GPS locks, especially under S60 and Nokia Maps, and frustrated by the apparent 'unreliability' of mobile navigation software. Here's how to make sure your GPS locks are faster and how to speed around Nokia Maps.
In AAS Insight #28 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss some of the news from the past week including Trolltech, Mail for Exchange 2.5 and the Symbian Smartphone Show before moving on to the general waffle topics: firstly S60's increasing integration with the PC and web, secondly smartphone statistics and definition.
Gaming was also fairly high on the agenda at the S60 Summit. Ewan was in the room and taking copious notes - here's his report on Nokia's strategies and expectations for N-Gage for the next few years.
The Doctor Who brand may conjure up a vision of a game that's rather different to the one reviewed here. Top Trumps Doctor Who is a new commercial game for mobiles and we couldn't resist setting our resident time lord expert onto it in order to evaluate..... evaluate... evaluate...
In this article Steve explains, step-by-step, how you can use your Nseries phone to create a time-lapse video using the sequence mode of the camera application and a quick bit of video editing. He has also included a quick example of his own, but we would like to see your examples too.
The European Commission has announced unconditional approval of Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech. Nokia can now proceed with the final stages of acquisition, which are expected to be completed quickly. Trolltech's Qt, a cross platform graphics/GUI tookit, is the principal reason for the acquisition and will be an important part of Nokia's cross platform development strategy.
If you've ever wondered what use Nokia's built-in IM (Instant Messaging) application was, then you're in good company. However, the truth is that it just needs TLC and a good online gateway. As 'Talk about Nseries' reports, Mobjab is a new service that lets Nokia's IM integrate with a number of popular IM systems, including AOL and Windows Live Messenger.
Just to prove they were listening during all those S60 Summit seminars, Rafe and Ewan focus in this feature on S60's Web Run-Time (WRT), which was heavily promoted at the event. They cover what it is, where it's going and what it will mean for developers and end users. In addition, Rafe recorded this podcast, talking to Ganesh Sivaraman about WRT and all things widgetey.
Sony Ericsson have slipped to fifth place in the handset sales market (reports SMSTextNews) with LG replacing them. The report, from Gartner, puts LG on around 8% of the market for sales during Q1 of 2008. Nokia are still number one, with 115.2 million phone sales, and there's also a global increase on all handset sales from Q1 2007 of 13.6%.
As part of last week's S60 Summit, S60's Saara Bergstrom - who now runs The Voice of S60 podcast - sat down with our very own Rafe and Ewan to chat about the event, the platform and the smartphone world in general. Here are the MP3 and eAAC+ links for you to grab and listen to.
Now here's interesting for the trend spotters. Use of the 'mobile' web goes up at weekends compared to the working week. And on top of that, the sites being visited aren't the same as those from the office connection. Business Week has more on the cyclical habits of the browsers.
