Yep, it's Monday, so it must be... AAS Insight day. In Insight 11, Rafe and Ewan are joined by guests Stefan (Constantinescu) and Ricky (Cadden), chatting about Nokia's Trolltech purchase, Motorola's apparent intention to do something with its handset division, all matters Lenovo, Microsoft and Yahoo, plus a look forwards to next week's Mobile World Congress. And all in about half an hour! Impressive.
Lenovo is to sell it mobile phone division to a number of private equity firms for $100m. Lenovo may not be well known for mobile phones outside China (where it is the number 4 handset manufacturer), but trivia buffs may remember its early (now defunct) association with S60. It became the sixth licensee of S60 in 2004 and released the P930 S60 handset in 2005.
OK, I give in. After numerous complaints about the video formats used in my Smartphones Show video podcast, I've reverted to plain old H.263-encoded MP4, which should mean that the show now plays again on everything from a lowly Nokia N70 to a Sony Ericsson P900 and upwards - so virtually everything. Show 52 is out today and includes my run down of the top S60 apps, plus reviews of the Palm Treo 500 and the Blackberry 8310. Here's the RSS feed, if you wanted to start grabbing the MP4s again...
Late yesterday Motorola announced that it was considering a 'structural and strategic realignment of its business to enhance shareholder value'. Motorola is exploring its options in order 'to better equip its Mobile Devices business business to recapture global market leadership'. The company is considering spinning off or selling its Mobile Device division, but no final decision has been made and the mobile phone division may yet be retained.
SymbianGuru (no, not that Symbian Guru) has released a handy freeware solution for one-way-syncing your Google Finance stock data down to your smartphone. My Portfolio runs under Java and works on all S60 3rd Edition devices. for Series 60-3 mobile phones.
The best (also just about the only) database system for S60, HanDBase has had a big update. v4.0 was announced in December and has been going through test builds. v4.00.55 is now online and working well. See below for a changelog, links and some screenshots. Also of note is that the desktop client has also had a big update and looks a lot more modern.
Google has launched a revamped version of its mobile search for select markets. The service is available in the UK, USA, France, Germany and Canada. The new system offers blended results and has a stronger location-based element. Blended results mix in local and news search results with web search results. In practice this means that Google shows the result type that it thinks is most relevant first. Read on for more and lots of screenshot examples.
ShoZu, the one click solution to uploading media from your smartphone has taken a third full round of funding (reports Business Wire). For this Round C, they've taken on-board $12 million from a number of new and existing partners, and allow the company to expand onto more handsets and continue to work with manufacturers to be bundled with handsets.
Joining Rafe, Steve and myself on the latest All About Symbian Insight Show is Stefan Constantinescu from Into Mobile. Discussion this week centers around the differences between the Exx and Nxx series devices - fundamentally the same software, but wildly different smartphones. We also have a reader question submitted by Andrew Currie, asking us about our thoughts on the retail experience of smartphones.
PDA Essentials magazine issue 71 is out today (in the UK) and is notable for a five page 'Real World Test' between the iPhone, the Nokia N95 8GB and a smattering of HTC, Palm and Blackberry models. Tests included 'Outdoors' (contrast in sunlight), 'Pub' (ease of use when err.... inebriated) and 'Bus' (ease of use on shaking transport, possibly one-handed). There was also a seven page 'Smartphones with GPS' round-up. Read on for results and comments!
Ah yes, I was wondering where my Nokia E90 had got to. Krisse has been using it in Finland, comparing it head-to-head with the N810 'Internet tablet'. Here's the first part of this report, covering the physical form factors and all the various communications possibilities. There's no real overall winner, but plenty of food for thought if you've been wavering as to which to get.
Nokia today announced that it would acquire Trolltech a company which provides software development platforms and frameworks. Trolltech is best known for its Qt product, a multi-platform graphical user-interface framework. Qt is used in KDE, the web browser Opera, Skype and Google Earth applications. Nokia intends to use Qt to enable cross platform development environments.
Symbian Press has announced a new developer's title: "Games on Symbian OS", by Jo Stitchbury. Full details here, with availability next month. From the blurb: "...shows the potential for creating mobile games for Symbian smartphones... It covers various aspects of mobile games on Symbian OS, with contributions from a number of experts in the mobile games industry, including Nokia'’s N-Gage team, Ideaworks3D, and ZingMagic, as well as academics leading the field of innovative mobile experiences".
