Recently added to Nokia's Download! for some devices, Brain Genius is actually widely available for all phones and smartphones. How does this daily mental exercise work and how has it been implemented on the Download! version? Find out in my review of Brain Genius.
Symbian's developers are making a big push into China (reports Daniel Shen at the Digitimes), with an expansion to almost 300 staff expected at their R&D Centre in Beijing. The market in Asia for smartphones is one that most western handset manufacturers have been eyeing over the years, and I'm sure that 'let's try to be big there' has been the downfall of a few companies along the way.
Ewan and I look at MosKillto, a new commercial demo of an accelerometer-driven shooting game. In our review, we look past the simple gameplay to appreciate the genre's history and its future. Oh, and add in a flamethrower and some zombies and you've got us hooked...
Nokia have announced the immediate availability of the Nokia Music Store in Ireland (Nokia Press Release) As with the UK store, you're going to need to have Internet Explorer to make full use of the service. To entice you in Nokia are offering a number of vouchers, some 24,000 of them giving up to 10 Euros of music. And everyone gets a free Tom Baxter track.
C-Net's Tom Krazit sat down with Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford a couple of days ago and the resulting interview is now online here, talking about elegant computing, USA market share, Google's Android and the iPhone, among other topics. Recommended reading!
More Convenient! More Productive! More Fun! Announced at CTIA in Las Vegas, the new version of Opera Mini, v 4.1, certainly sounds like it's at home with the lingo of the city of flashy lights. This is a beta release, but nevertheless with a speed increase of up to 50% and the ability to save pages and content without invoking any other application on your device, Opera Mini continues to provide strong competition to on-device browsers. Screenshots and more details below.
It's.... AAS Insight 19 (aka AAS audio podcast 68), mainly concentrating on the news of UIQ 3.3 and what it will mean, but also chatting about the split of Motorola, the v21 update for the Nokia N95 Classic and the usual software spots. Here's the Insight 19 listening link, here's the RSS feed for you to subscribe for the future.
Symbian announced two new OS technologies today at CTIA: Symbian SQL and an advanced Location Based Services (LBS) architecture. The first will allow the use of much larger data sets by smartphone applications and the second will simplify the development of genuine location-sensitive apps and services. The full press release is below.
Trippo popped its head above the software parapet a few days ago when it got added to Nokia's Download! service for the N95 8GB. But it's available to all and is in the AAS software shop. The big question is, can it live up to its claims? Ewan's been reviewing Trippo and both he and I were gobsmacked at how good the service is - and also at how expensive it might work out.
Having had a bit of a re-jig of some of the attributes in my all-singing, all-dancing interactive smartphone-choosing Grid, I proudly present it to the masses on AAS for approval. And yes, by plugging in different profiles, I've managed to get it to pick everything from Apple iPhone to Nokia E61i. See what it now picks as your best option. Did it pick your current smartphone? Your next intended phone?
If you thought that Symbian Signed was too many hoops to jump through to get your game onto a UK handset, just wait till the British Board of Film Classification gets involved (BBC News and other online sources). Released later today, the Byron report will recommend that any video game will be forced to carry cinema style classification (currently only games depicting sex or gross violence are certified).
Motorola today announced that it had commenced a process to split itself into two seperate companies: a mobile device business and a broadband and mobility solutions business (reflecting current divisions within the company). The move seems likely to avoid a direct sale of the mobile device business, but a joint venture with another company remains a distinct possibility.
Launched in October 2007, Mippin has managed to not only get over the initial ‘what is this service?’ that every Web 2.0 property has to deal with, but has continued to gain users and presence in its first six months. I caught up with VP of Product Management Prashant Agarwal at the recent SXSW Interactive festival, where he demoed two of Mippin’s latest features to me – Mippin Video and Mippin Today.
PDA Essentials magazine, issue 73, is now out in the UK. Of specific interest is an interview with Mark Loughran, sales director of Nokia UK, in which he states that Nokia should sell 35 million GPS-enabled smartphones this year. That's er.... a lot. Mark mentions the 6220 Classic as important in achieving this goal. More from issue 73 below, including their Sony Ericsson W960i review.
Yep, it's that time of the week. Your generic mobile reading is over at Situational Marketing - Carnival of the Mobilists 116.
