Nokia Music PC Client is now available in early beta form from the Nokia Beta Labs website. The application is designed to help you manage your music collection on your PC and then transfer it your mobile device. The software has been designed with mobile users in mind and includes the ability to directly rip a CD to a mobile device, to easily sideload music from a PC and to use bi-directional playlists and music sync.
Opera has formally updated Opera Mini, the proxy-based web browser, to version 4.1. With a speed increase compared to v4.0, and the addition of URL completion and the saving of web pages, the little browser that lets the server at the end of the connection do all the heavy lifting continues to improve in leaps and bounds. While the built in browsers on S60 handsets have significantly improved over the years, Opera Mini, while targetted at lower-powered phones, still packs a feature set that makes it a contender.
In a tutorial for beginners, and with plenty of real world examples, I look at some practical photo-taking tips for your multi-megapixel smartphone when conditions are less than perfect... and I explain that adjusting the photo later in software is cheating - but often helps a lot!
Yesterday at Where 2.0, Nokia announced Maps on Ovi, a Web component designed to to complement Nokia Maps 2.0. As part of the Ovi brand, Maps on Ovi will allow users to plan their trips on their desktop and then synchronize (automatically or manually) it with their smartphones. Conversely, if you're already out on the road, you can record routes and points of interest on your handset and then upload them to the Ovi service when you return home to share with family and friends. More details and a screenshot below. Comments welcome!
Nokia's Ovi Share just acquired geotagging! From now on, any new images that are uploaded will get their EXIF data checked for location information. As you can see if you read below the break, this means that images can be automatically addressed and mapped. This brings Ovi Share into the same ballgame as Flickr and Picasa Web. Comments welcome on what's needed next in Ovi Share.
Mobile Social networks are not a big hit, according to new Nielsen Resarch (writes MoCoNews). With only 1.7% of UK mobile users using a social network specifically designed for mobile users. While users are moving to social networks via their handsets, the big winners in the connecting people stakes are, not surprisingly, the behemoths that exist on the desktop.Facebook's mobile site m.facebook.com accounts for over half a million hits and 9% of all UK mobile web users.
It could well be one of the games of the year and everybody's got an opinion on Nokia's Reset Generation. Including Ewan, who has first hand experience with the developer. In this feature, he draws on first person comments and other released information to bring you a good overview of Reset Generation and its significance.
It's... Insight number 24, aka AAS audio podcast 73, in which the usual team discuss the news of the week, including N-Gage and Nokia Communication Center (sic), three new S60 3rd Edition smartphones (black N82, Samsung i450, Nokia 6122c) and we introduce the idea and state of play in the world of Location Based Search.
Guest writer Arjen Broeze has been trialling the new Route 66 Mobile 8 for over a month now and here's his very detailed review. The only real problem seems to be over-stubborn clinging to originally-calculated routes - apart from that Arjen gives this sat-nav solution a green light on all fronts. I was sceptical about the way search matches are still shown in alphabetical order, but Arjen argues that the search match filtering is good enough to do without location-sorted results.
Not directly Symbian-related, but Nokia have just brought out a Macintosh version of their Internet Tablet Video Converter. Are they getting a bit more used to supporting "alternative" operating systems, and when will we see their first desktop Linux app?
Congrats to Russ Beattie and Mike Rowehl, the guys behind Mowser. It may well have looked dead and buried a few weeks ago, but the service has been bought by the dotMobi consortium. Reporting on Dev.Mobi, James Pearce charts out the use of their new toy, namely to drive Opt-In mobilisation of websites, integrating the Mowser Directory, and of course using the (re)formatting technology.
Juniper Research reckon that the advertising spend to promote mobile services will be in excess of $1 billion dollars for 2008 (reports IT Pro), which leads me to think that the total income from the mobile services must be at least $8-$10 billion. Those are some impressive numbers. The usual culprits are blamed for the increase, including better handsets and more bandwidth.
The European Space Agency recently made contact with Giove-B, the second test model for its Galileo series of navigational satellites, with the whole thirty satellite constellation due to be completed by 2013. What makes this relevant to the mobile device world is a statement by ESA on the effectiveness of Galileo combined with the existing GPS system: "Higher accuracy in challenging environments where multipath and interference are present, and deeper penetration for indoor navigation."
Thanks to bery95 for spotting this surprisingly attractive/fun iPhone theme for S60 3rd Edition. I know, I know, I usually hate this sort of thing, but this one has iPhone icons in surprising depth and works well on many levels under S60 (240 by 320 pixel screens, at least).
It's Insight time, covering News, the MOSH ad-sponsored games, Adobe Open Screen Project and we (shock, horror) actually try to answer a user-submitted question, talking about whether Nokia could be more aggressive in the US market. Plus, Rafe reports back from the Nokia Design Studio Day in London. You can listen (and subscribe) to Insight number 23 here.
