If you thought Nokia were resting on their Sync laurels, then you'd be wrong. Last year's move for Intellisync has been completed, so expect to see the technology brought to the Nokia Phone Suite at some point in the future.
Nokia has produced a 'Mobile Guide to 3GSM'. "Schedules, maps, launch information", but all focussed around Nokia, naturally.... The mobile URL is nokia.mobi/3gsm. Or send an SMS with the message "3GSM" to +358407799890. Telemap are providing, at no cost, Telmap Navigator with Lonely Planet for Barcelona which should enable delegates to find their way around.
One by one the wires and devices are disappearing from your living room. Engadget reports on FCC approval of Nokia's AD-42W Wireless Audio Gateway", which lets the Nokia N91 and other future smartphones supporting Advanced Audio Distribution Profile send music over Bluetooth straight to your hi-fi.
Is Python a replacement for OPL on Series 60? Is Nokia on the right track by backing it? Is it easy to get started? And can you produce full standalone applications using Python? Steve Litchfield answers these questions and produces an application as concrete proof.
TDG Research in this report claim that Symbian will lose market share over the next four years so that 2010 it will be behind both Microsoft (29%) and Linux (25%) with just a 22% market share. While the future is not yet written this particular prediction seems to be a little unlikely. TDG's figures for current market share are also seem mistaken. Read on for more.
Symbian have now provided confirmation of yesterday's news of the Freescale reference design and reduced license fees. The new license fee introduces a new model of either a fraction of the trade price of devices shipping (i.e. a proportion or revenue) or scalable pricing that reduces the cost as more devices are shipped over a one year period (i.e. a more complex version of the current model). The new prices apply to Symbian OS 9 shipments from July.
According to this Reuters story Symbian is planning to develop a reference design using a single chip solution with US chip maker Freescale. This follows similar reference design in partnership with Intel and Texas Instruments. Reference designs are aimed at lowering development times and cost for Symbian phones. Additionally the reports states that Symbian, as expected, will be lowering its licensee fees. The official details of these announcements will likely be made at 3GSM. Read on for more.
Symbian have announced a mobile email validation program to promote best practice for push email solutions. In practise this means Symbian will be working with vendors to insure their solutions have the best possible user experience and functionality on Symbian OS.
Programme 4 of the Smartphones Show is now live. A free TV programme all about smartphones, available online, programme 4 features AAS's very own Thomas Boys reviewing the Nokia N90, while I do a batch of Treo and Series 60 tips and look at the i-Mate SP5.
Neatly transplanted from 3-Lib and enhanced significantly, AllAboutSymbian is proud to present its new Support Knowledgebase (click the link or use the menu tab above).
Symbian's Oren Tversky's interviewed about music on mobiles here, although he misses several important points. Firstly, bandwidth IS still an issue for many people. And secondly, what about syncing music over from your desktop's hard disk, who says it all has to come over the air?
The Carnival of the Mobilists #14 is online here, with the usual round-up of interesting mobile/smartphone articles from round the Web. Happy reading! Meanwhile, as a tease, there's something brand new on AAS - announcement tomorrow...!
The key to mobile serices to many companies is how to get to "Step 3: Profit" as fast as possible. Up till now the only effective route is using reverse SMS services via the operator, but budding entrepeneurs may be interested to read that Paypal is setting up a start-up, tentatively called PayPal Mobile. More at Finextra and MocoNews.
Seem to be something of a buzz around the mobile world this week about location-based marketing. Not a smartphone-specific thing, let alone Symbian, but MobHappy have a good example of how it might appear to the end user.
American readers (and those following news in the country) might want to bookmark their just launched WAP site (http://wap.usatoday.com/). It's a good site, and in conjunction with my perennial favourite (the low bandwidth BBC News website news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm) it's possible to keep up to speed with current affairs in your mobile web browser.
