Last week an Eclipse PluginFest was held at Symbian's London offices. The PluginFest aims to test the inter-operability of Eclipse based development solutions and demonstrates one of the key advantages of using an Eclipse based development tool.
If you're into trivia, pub quizzes or fact finding, note that my free Trivopaedia (... a trivia enecyclopaedia) has had a huge update and is now up to v2.2, with over 300 entries. It runs inside (the also free) Mobipocket Reader for all Symbian OS-powered smartphones. Comments welcome!
Don't ask us why it's taken this long, but you can now vote on the best articles of the month from August to November 2006 at the Carnival of the Mobilists website (just scroll down a bit, you'll see the four voting forms to represent the four months, and you don't even have to register to vote). All About Symbian has a nominated article in the October poll.
Two interesting Friday tech stories from the good old BBC: the advance of GPS into smart mobile devices (bringing us back to the Nokia N95 and its successors), and the takeover of the Internet by botnets, with 50% of all warez apps containing trojans (yes, the Beeb is mainly talking about PCs, but take note if you frequent the same sites and think twice before downloading cracked Symbian OS apps)...
Nokia's results are in for the last quarter of 2006, you can read the full press release here. In short: Nokia's sales are up to record levels, their market share has remained at 36%, S60 models are increasingly playing a part in the entire company's lineup, not just from its Multimedia division (who sold over six million Nseries smartphones in Q4 alone) but also the main Mobile Phone division (the 5500 and 6290 are mentioned in the report as highlights of the quarter) and the business-oriented Enterprise division (who make the Eseries).
Ways of getting a qwerty keyboard into a mobile device just keep getting stranger and stranger and more fragile - this (non Symbian) attempt is the HTC Athena. Here's hoping for a more elegant design from upcoming Symbian-powered devices at 3GSM in 3 weeks.
HanDBase, a long standing PDA and smartphone database solution, with full PC interoperability, is now officially available for all S60 3rd Edition smartphones. In addition to creating and maintaining your own custom databases, there are thousands of ready made database 'applets'. See also Krisse's review. The full press release from DDH Software follows.
It's All About Symbian podcast number 11, in which Rafe chats to Ewan about his experiences at CES 2007 in Las Vegas, along with comment on the iPhone and a brief look ahead to 3GSM in three weeks time.
At Nokia World Alastair Curtis talked about some of the concepts behind the Nokia Design philosophy. As a glimpse of the future he showed some concept videos, which Nokia has now made available via YouTube, exploring the potential areas for mobile hardware design and accompanying software might go to. Read on for more.
Obstacles to Innovation is an excellent post over on MobHappy which asks what are the obstacles to innovation in the mobile industry. There seems to be a constant flow of good ideas, but there are only a limited number of true success stories. The potential of mobile seems almost unbounded, but it seems that much of the time obstacles to innovation are stifling the realisation of this potential.
This was from a few weeks ago but we all missed it. According to Telephia, European smartphone use is now up to almost 9% of the whole phone market - Italians apparently lead the way, with one in five phones being a smartphone. Here's the full article. Via Nordic Wireless Watch
