There's a fabulously interesting article over at Unwired View, where the author's got hold of the probable tech details of Nokia's multi-touch system, to be seen this year. Even more interestingly, the article goes on to describe a Nokia patent for a touch-less, ultrasonics-based 3D control system. 2008's shaping up to be quite a year!
The Juniper Research paper on mobile music has been getting a lot of comment today (see SMSTextNews and MocoNews) and it's easy to see why. Reporting that the market in 4 years time for subscription music service will reach $3.5 billion for subscription services, and $2.8 billion for downloaded original content is sure to generate headlines. The honest truth is nobody knows what is going to happen with music. What we see today is not the market in six months time, let alone four years. Look at the game-changing Comes With Music program from Nokia. Whoever can guess the right landscape may make money, but for now, Research Firms doing big extrapolations are clearly delivering a profit.
Yup, it's out. A whole new version of the free Yahoo! Go! on-device portal. Version 2 was actually pretty handy, including mapping and routing and support for built-in GPS. Version 3.0 claims better email handling, more news, satellite maps, live traffic. Sounds a bit like Google's portfolio, except that here it's all in the one Java application. Worth a try? Type get.go.yahoo.com into your smartphone's browser.
In All About Symbian Insight # 7 (AAS Podcast #55) Steve, Ewan and Rafe look back at 2007 and pick out their highlights from the year. We cover the Nokia N95, a resurgent UIQ and Nokia's Ovi announcement. In the second half of the podcast we turn our attention to 2008 and make a few predictions.
Amazingly, at 5pm GMT today, Bluetooth will be exactly 10 years old. I have to admit that, apart from music transfers and the odd Nokia Software Update, I hardly use wires in my computing set up at all. Internet comes from Wi-Fi and 3G and the vast majority of device to device transfers (syncs/installs/GPS connections/etc) happen via Bluetooth. Even small kids know that Bluetooth is the free way to send content between phones. Here's the official birthday link - Congratulations, all!
Movement over the weekend for the mobile website designer, with long time AAS friend Russ Beattie's Mowser updating the Wordpress plug-in to sit alongside a newly announced domain mapping tool . If you're running any site (not just a wordpress blog), it's now a simple process to have an automatic mobile version created, and have a convenient URL pointing to it.
Neuros, the maker of the video-to-MP4 hardware encoder that Krisse uses on all the All About NGage game videos, has created an "Unlocked Media" trademark to promote the concept of open standard DRM-Free files that can be stored and played anywhere. Click through for its explanation of the trademark in text and video form .
If you're in any way technical and want to get to grips with the ins and outs of audio codecs and the practicalities of streaming and decoding internet radio then you could do worse than check out Menneisyys' latest cross-platform epic analysis in the forums. Warning: not for the faint hearted!
Krisse is either getting dangerously loose with AAS MegaGame awards or has indeed found a second game in a fortnight to merit the high rating. Sola Rola, despite being built on J2ME, delivers at every turn, with smooth and believable 2D animation allied with great level design. Here's the Sola Rola review, make sure to click through at the end of the review to the video walkthrough, to see what Krisse means.
Craig Loxton, the guy who guested in the latest Smartphones Show, has been busy - he's set up a Symbian Help group on Google Groups , presumably intending to run it much like the old, beloved EPOC Digest back in Psion days. It'll cover S60 and UIQ matters and is open to all.
The BBC's new Technology Blog has made some rather tounge in cheek predictions for 2008 . On the smartphone front, and I quote: Nokia brings out its latest smartphone, the N99. As well as featuring music, live television, a manicure set and a device for getting stones out of horse’s shoes, it offers an ice-cream cornet with a chocolate flake. “And, unlike, the new 3g iPhone,” a spokesman explains, “it is 4g, making the mobile internet work properly for the first time.”
