The UK High Court has over-ruled a decision by the UK Intellectual Property Office in regards to their application for a patent for their method of indexing library functions (reports IT Pro). The UK-IPO had turned down this application, although the European Patent Office had granted it (the UK office does not recognise patents which are 'nothing more than a computer program,' where Europe does), hence their appeal to the High Court. While the case is concluded, the UK-IPO office has indicated that it will appeal the judgement.
New mobile site GoMo News is going to be making a historical splash at the upcoming CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas - they'll be based in a classic Airstream Bus at the Hard Rock Cafe; with tech demos, and live interviews on site and streamed over the internet. More at www.gomonews.com, and of course we'll be taking a good look at CTIA here on All About Symbian as well!
Dubbed the 'poor man's N95', how does the budget Samsung i450 stack up? Pretty well for the price, actually. Rafe'll have an in-depth textual review here soon, but in the meantime I've done a video review in Smartphones Show 55, out today. There's also iPhone AppStore/Download! chat from AAS regular Matt Radford and a video version of my push GMail walkthrough.
Never mind the debates about which is best: clamshells, candybars, sliders, and so on. There's a wider debate going on - how large should a smart mobile device be? I argue that once you get beyond a certain size, you lose the 'take it everywhere' usefulness, you sacrifice robustness and you fail to achieve mass market sales.
Ha. I said that zany position art 'genius', Nokia N82-toting Stavros should have his own TV show - and now it's happened. Move over Ali G and Alan Partridge. See below for the details.
EMI has confirmed it's in talks with Nokia to offer its portfolio of songs as part of the upcoming "Comes with Music" program, scheduled to become available later this year with selected devices. The world's largest music label, Universal, signed up for the program last December. (via IntoMobile)
Google is seeing a massive increase in mobile internet devices using their services (reports Reuters). And while the obvious answer is 'people are using the web on their phones!' I don't think that's the case. More like Google has signed enough deals for search plug-ins and 'go on, set Google as the browsers default homepage' that they are grabbing a bigger share of existing traffic.
Ewan's been the perfect use-case for ShoZu, the media uploader, while he's been away on his 'Seesmarch' - lots of photos and video, flat rate data and a desire to share stuff with the world. Here's his report/review of the new ShoZu version 4. Suffice it to say that the application scores very highly indeed, with only a few small caveats.
In Insight #17 (AAS Podcast 66) Rafe, Steve and Stefan talk around Apple's recently announced SDK and Application Store and what Nokia and Sony Ericsson do in this area. We also talk about our favourite form factors where we recognise that device robustness is the most important factor.
You've got to love high end comparisons like this - Abul over at Symbian in Motion has put together a great photo shootout between the Nokia N82, the N95 and a Casio Exilim (also 5 megapixels). The shots are selected well, there's apposite comment and there's even a linked Flickr gallery with many more comparison photos.
The Widsets 2.0 beta (update: now live on main site too) site recently went live which means you can now download and test the latest version of the Widsets client. New features include better integration between Widsets and the rest of the device including the ability to initiate a phone call or open a browser window. Widsets is a way to get web content on your mobile via widgetisation. Read on for more.
Continuing his quest to find great time fillers for his transatlantic trip, Ewan's been looking at another Java game, Silver Ball. It's presented well and has classic gameplay, but it's let down by clumsy sound control and some overlong screen transitions.
