It's AAS video podcast 23, in which I get the lowdown from Joe Odukoya from Symbian on ScreenPlay and FreeWay, and then I sit down with Boaz Zilberman, founder of Fring, to hear about why his VoIP and chat service is different to the competition.
In AAS audio podcast 38, Ewan Spence gets round a Smartphone Show table with mobile trends expert Robert Harmsen and developer Sander van der Wal. 25 minutes of interesting chat!
Nokia today published its results for Q3 2007 (July to September). Based on this time last year, they show an 85% rise in net profits, a 28% rise in net sales and a rise in global market share from 36% to 39%. Nokia sold over 111 million devices during the quarter of which 16 million were converged devices (smartphones running S60).
Also on Symbian's stand at the Smartphone Show was this video demo of the new Demand Paging feature in Symbian OS 9.3 and above. Among other things shown was a dramatic reduction in RAM requirements for most apps and well over 30MB free RAM on the testbed vanilla Nokia N95. See below for the embedded video.
Symbian has announced two key technologies for the next generation of Symbian OS-powered smartphones, ensuring that superfast mobile broadband and complex interface, video and gaming requirements won't be a problem for the smartphones of 2008 and beyond. Read on for the full press release about the new ScreenPlay and FreeWay and for official reaction from Symbian licensees. And we'll have a video podcast up shortly with a full interview.
The publishing arm of Symbian, Symbian Press, has announced two new titles for developers; Mobile Python, by Jurgen Scheible; and Developing Software for Symbian OS, Second Edition, by Steve Babin.
Symbian has announced a number of changes to the Symbian Signed program at today’s Smartphone Show in London’s ExCeL center. Joining the existing ‘Certified Signed’ and ‘ Open Signed’ areas of the program is a new ‘Express Signed’ service, which should be welcomed by a large number of smaller developers.
Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show Nokia showed S60 running with a touch interface. The touch interface will support both finger and stylus input, has full multi lingual support, has support for tactile feedback (haptics) and is backwardly compatible with the existing S60 platform. Read the full story for and to view the video showing S60 Touch running on some concept devices.
Sony Ericsson, Motorola and UIQ Technology today announced that Motorola has taken a 50% stake in UIQ Technology. UIQ Technology was previously wholly owned by Sony Ericsson following its purchase from Symbian earlier this year. This represents a very significant endorsement of UIQ by Motorola and underlines Motorola's plan to expand its high end multimedia portfolio using UIQ powered phones.
There's a big new version for Gmail's Java application for mobile phones, released quietly yesterday. If you click on a contact in Gmail Mobile 1.5, you'll see full details, including their photo, and if you entered the phone number in your contact's details, you can call them directly from Gmail Mobile. More improvements listed below.
You'll have spotted our own Flickr 'live' photostream from the London Smartphone Show (above) - as the action starts tonight and rolls on through to Wednesday, we'll keep it stocked with interesting snaps. One tradition of Symbian's own show coverage is a 'quirky', sideways look at the show from two of its employees, Freddie and William - here's theirphoto blog.
What more timely moment for a Carnival of the Mobilists than right before the annual Smartphone Show? And, just to confuse people, my Smartphones (i.e. plural) Show is the Carnival host this week. Lots of good reading in Carnival 95, if (as the editor) I do say so myself...
BT has launched a developer competition aimed at encouraging the creation of innovative applications and services for WiFi enabled devices. The competition will formally launch at next weeks Symbian Smartphone Show. The overall winner will receive £1000 prize money.
Walking around this year's Smartphone Show in London, one thought suddenly struck Steve - where were the 'anti-virus' vendors? Is it possible, Steve dares to hope, that the virus hype from developers has finally, finally gone away? Has this part of the Symbian OS world finally grown up?
