Yes, you know all about S60 games and you know about the upcoming N-Gage titles, but what about all those games tucked away in publisher folders inside your Download! application? Medal of Honour, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, etc? In the interests of experimentation, I bought a batch and here report back on J2ME games via Download! Your comments welcome, as always!
Red Five Labs has just announced that their Net60 product, which enables .NET applications from the Windows world to run unchanged under S60, is now available for beta testing. By the way, if you don't know what a .NET application is then you don't need the product!
I'm still filing this under 'Nokia was mad not to have released the inclinometer plug-in months ago', but.... Aha, someone's produced an app that finally uses the N95's built-in accelerometer to do something really, really useful, day to day. Yep, it's your very own light sabre. Run the app, press the d-pad button and challenge a new iPhone owner to a duel (via Ricky Cadden).
Despite all the fast 3.5G devices now available, it's still a criminal waste to have to download 1MB of HTML and photos just so you can read 1K of text. Which is why I love mobile portals and transcoders. And the folks at igloo have told me about their portal, which looks very well stocked. And don't forget about two other low bandwidth solutions, Mippin and Mowser, both of which have been updated recently. Happy browsing!
After one of the longest beta test programmes I can remember, Opera Mini 4 finally got finished. Head for mini.opera.com on your phone or www.operamini.com on your PC. Highly recommended. Some more details below, but essentially it's a proxy-based web browser that runs under Java but compresses content hugely and thus saves time and money.
In one of the most significant announcements of the year Nokia and Vodafone today stated their intention to launch a range of Nokia handsets with both Nokia's Ovi services and Vodafone's own integrated suite of service. Nokia's Ovi services include Nokia Maps, Nokia Music (including the Music store), Nokia Photos and the N-Gage gaming platform. Additional web based services are also likely to emerge over the next 6 months.
PDA Essentials issue 68 hits the streets today (in the UK, at least), with a special section on their prestigious annual awards (in conjunction with the likes of Clove and Expansys). Of interest here is that the Nokia N95 got voted the 'Best Smartphone', in a hotly contested category (beating the Sony Ericsson P1i, among others). The Nokia E90 lost out to the HTC TyTN II for 'Best PDA' and, curiously, there wasn't a category for best 'communicator' or 'business/email' device. For more detail, go buy your own copy!
Mobility blogger Russell Beattie often comes up with really insightful articles and this one is a must-read. Coming to the Nokia N95 8GB as someone who's technically literate but not a hardened S60 fanboy, he comes up with some very apposite and constructive criticisms of the modern S60 interface. Plenty there that I'm in total agreement with, too.
