The fine chaps over at Nseries WOM World are holding a get together at the Old Crown in Holborn (London) tomorrow (Wednesday 5th). Further details are available here on the WOM World site or on Facebook here. Festivities include camera tossing and a mysterious competition.
Mitsubishi is to close its loss making mobile handset business with employees being reassigned to other areas of the company. Mistubishi currently makes phones for Japan's NTT DoCoMo FOMA network; the handsets use the MOAP-S (MOAP on Symbian) software platform. Handset shipments to NTT DoCoMo will halt by September. And so we bid goodbye to another Symbian licensee. Read on for more details.
Carnival of the Mobilists no. 113 is now live over at Ubiquitous Thoughts, plenty of post MWC analysis here...
It's Monday and it's time for our new Insight podcast. In number 15 (aka AAS podcast 63), we look at news, geotagging privacy concerns, recent handset designs from Nokia and Ewan reports on truly mobile software. Give it a listen on the way home from work. Here's the RSS feed if you want to subscribe regularly.
CorePlayer has been inching up to a major new release, 1.2, for a while now. Registered users can upgrade to a special 'preview' version of 1.2, which includes better support for file type associations, streaming video, plus support for Speex and GSM audio. (via p@sco)
In times of inconsistent quality, it's good to reflect back on devices that have oozed quality, charisma or style, and sometimes even all three. In "Top 10 - Classic Smartphones", I count down the significant stars of the Symbian OS world from the last 7 years. Controversial? Biased? Probably. But I'll bet there are four or five of these on everybody's own personal top 10 from the same period! Comments and your own picks are more than welcome!
Thanks to SWB for reminding us that Symbian's Open Signed Online starts next week for those without Publisher IDs, in beta at least and with some throttling limits in place. We haven't been featuring every last 'unsigned' utility that's flooded the blogosphere in the last 3 months because, basically, the self-signing has been too hard for the average user. Will the new system improve matters? Comments welcome.
Oxygen Software have been plugging away at their Phone Manager product for years, and they've just announced a major revamp, rebrand and relaunch. OxyCube is released yesterday and is compatible with a wide range of handsets and provides syncing and file browsing functions. (via SymbianOne)
It's not every day that you get direct feedback from the team behind a major manufacturer's software project. Following on from my Maps 2.0 preview, Nokia got in touch, answering some of my criticisms and giving more information about the future of the product. What's going to be added next to Maps, how to plan routes for free, why the satellite images aren't quite there yet, integration with Location Tagger and news of a future web-based map sync tool, it's all covered.
Yahoo!'s (is that even correct punctuation?) woes continue. The search provider has been dropped by leading mobile browser company Opera and Google will be the default search engine for downloadable copies of Opera Mobile for all platforms as of March 1st. Google will also automatically appear as the front page search engine for all Opera Mini users as well. Opera's press release follows.
Ewan's not one to beat around the bush - when he thinks that an application is essentially pointless, he comes right out and says so, here in his review of Yahoo! Go 3.0. In Go 3.0's defense, it IS pretty and it DOES make sense if you're a heavy Yahoo! user, but in essence it doesn't really do anything you couldn't do just as well using Yahoo's mobile site. Or Google's, and so on.
In my de facto role as contact for PDA Essentials magazine, note that issue 72 is out today in the UK (and some other territories), with a feature on the pros and cons of buying SIM-free vs Contract, a review of the Nokia N82 ("Nokia has thrown everything at this phone's internals, but the externals leave a bit to be desired") and, shock horror, a review of an HTC device that lists the Nokia E90 as "cheaper and less featured" - never seen that before!
Short and sweet. Carnival of the Mobilists (no. 112) is hosted over at Taptology. Lunchtime reading. Sorted.
Michael Mace has written an interesting post on his blog Mobile Opportunity about the fall of (native) Mobile Applications. The basic thesis of the post is that native mobile development is declining because of platform fragmentation, issues around certification, and marketing problems. Michael goes on to suggest that mobile development itself is not dead, but that it will increasingly move to the web as a platform. Read on for more.
Nokia in conjunction with Cambridge University today released details of Morph - a concept nanotechnology device. Concepts are, by their nature, somewhat speculative, but nonetheless Morph does offer an intruiging glimpse of possible future technologies. This includes the use of flexible materials allowing for bendable devices, self cleaning materials and greater use of integrated sensors.
