Our very own Rafe Blandford joined Tim Salmon and I (about 25 minutes into the 80 minute show) yesterday to record Phones Show Chat 72, worth a listen if you'd like to hear Rafe talking about not just Symbian, but all platforms and all phone tech. There's plenty of Symbian content in Phones Show 130 too, released this morning - skip over the Dell Streak review and you'll get a peek at my 'gear', plus a short spot about the 'gone but not forgotten' Nokia 7710 - remember that?
Mobile Roadie is coming to Nokia, announced their CEO Michael Schneider at the recent MIDEM conference (reports Mobile Entertainment). If you’ve not come across their apps on iOS, Android and Blackberry, then you won’t have seen one of the music industry’s quiet successes. Providing a turn-key environment for groups, bands and performers to create their own applications, Mobile Roadie has helped 1,500 applications reach smartphones around the world. Now the biggest platform, target-wise, beckons them.
There's an interesting article over on The Wall Street Journal trying to explain why Angry Birds has been such an amazing hit in the gaming world. Their thesis looks at the idea that we humans are hard wired to enjoy solving parabolas, the trajectories made by something propelled against the influence of gravity. Video games have long exploited our bias for ballistics; for example, look back at the hit series of PC games, "Worms". Read on for quotes and comments.
Andrew Orlowski continues to look back on the history of Symbian over at The Register, this time through an interview with Charles Davies, former CTO at Symbian and Director of Psion for more than two years. With hindsight, it’s possible to spot the correct decisions made by Symbian, and also where the problems arose, which he looks at here. The same is true of every company, and while the Symbian Foundation experiment is winding down, the OS itself is still very much alive on modern handsets.
Nimbuzz have updated their Symbian client to version 3.0.1. This version uses zlib compression, allowing Nimbuzz to use on average 50% less data, and as the headline suggests, a 70% maximum saving has been recorded. Another benefit of end to end compression is that login times are noticeably faster. Also included with the new Nimbuzz update are several new features. Users can enhance their privacy by using the new invisible status mode, and by limiting instant messages to only be received from existing instant message contacts.
Nokia have put in place plans to close the all-you-can-eat version of the Ovi Music store. Originally called Comes with Music, and currently branded as Ovi Music Unlimited, the service was available with a select number of handsets, including the X6 and N97 Mini. Nokia have no plans to supply this handset/service combination beyond the end of this year to the majority of territories.
Nokia's Ovi Store got a few upgrades today, notably a fuzzy search system incorporating 'Did you mean?' functionality for coping with spelling errors - all too easy to do when typing in application names and getting pluralisation or punctuation wrong. Nokia has also added Arabic and Hindi support to the Store for Series 40 users, a significant boost to potential application sales and distribution in the Middle East and India, with Arabic also rolling out to Symbian users as well very shortly.
Nokia are proud of the Ovi Store, it’s gaining traction, there are more downloads every day, and I don’t begrudge them the right to shout about any success whenever they want. So the list of “Top Ovi Store Games” on the Conversations Blog is exactly what I’d expect. And hopefully Nokia are fully aware that we're going to look at this post and ask the question “nice list, but how about some context?”
Developers looking to experiment with the latest Qt Mobility API should direct their attention to Nokia's Qt Labs, where a technology preview release of Qt Mobility 1.2 was announced during the Christmas break. The primary focus of the 1.2 release is delivering backend support for MeeGo. However, there are also some new features, which will be of interest to both MeeGo and Symbian developers. A beta release of Qt Mobility 1.2 will follow this technology preview at the end of January.
Nokia has just announced that interested parties can now make requests (by email) for FTP logins for its hosted Symbian Foundation content. This information includes: source code of the current Symbian platform, documentation, and PDK's. This has been announced via the new Symbian blog (hosted by Nokia) at symbian.nokia.com. The blog post also reports that Nokia is working to make more available via the Symbian website. It also encourages Symbian developers to look at its sister site Forum Nokia for information about current development frameworks, C++ and Qt.
There's a superb article published today over on Mobile R'n'R by Rita el-Khoury, listing the ten things you should do first with a new Symbian smartphone to ensure you get the very best experience, from replacing the browser and social clients to automating and customising the look and feel. This is one to bookmark and recommend to friends who are eying up the likes of the Nokia N8 and C7, methinks....
I haven't linked to the Phones Show Chat podcast for a long time, but show 70, released a few minutes ago, ended up being something of a Symbian special. We'd invited James Burland on, of Nokia Creative fame but latterly a big iPhone fan, to try and 'up' the iPhone content, but it turns out he's a recent Nokia N8 convert, so there's an especially strong Symbian flavour to the show, which runs to 1 hour 10 mins. Also in the show are musings on Nokia breaking America (or not) and discussion over ever-increasing screen sizes.
An interesting question from Jeff Pulver on his blog – should our phones have a “dumb” mode that allows nothing but phone calls to come through? The goal of course is to reduce needless accidents as people text, browse and generally use their phone to communicate and distract them from driving (see also AOL’s The Last Text campaign).
Skype has announced that it plans to acquire Qik. Qik provides software which allows you to instantly capture and share (live stream) video on a mobile phone. Qik is available for more than 200 mobile phones, including most Symbian devices. Skype say they share "a common purpose of enriching communications with video" with Qik, but Qik's technology, focused around optimising video transition over mobile networks, will also give Skype's mobile aspirations a boost.
A recent post of the Nokia Beta Labs blog indicates that Nokia will be discontinuing its augmented reality test-bed application - Nokia Point and Find. However it goes onto say that the underlying augmented reality (and visual search) technology will be incorporated into "the future of key experiences like Maps and Search". The technology may also become available to third party developers, presumably through a service API or similar provision.
