Ooh! Finally catching up on news from the October Press Briefing is Slashdot's rather negative coverage of Nokia's re-targeting of the N-Gage from a single handset to a brand covering the entire Series 60 portfolio. Worth a read to see just what Nokia's marketing department was up against before they had even launched. And also worth it for the comment that Nokia's so called failure has sold more units than all the Microsoft Windows Mobile Smartphone devices put together.
Symbian's SDK-hosted emulators are perennially popular and not just with developers. New on symbian.com is WinTAP, to allow emulator applications to access the Internet through Windows' own connection. It's very technical though, only approach if instructions like 'abld build winscw udeb will then produce the pdd' don't fill you with fear.
Couldn't resist a Link Of Interest to this Engadget entry, showing a (non-Symbian, thankfully) smartphone that tilts and swivels and slides. Some of Nokia's recent designs have come close to this, all we can say is "Don't go there.... please!"
Steve is tickled by the latest trends in the mobile device industry towards qwerty keyboards. He just knew the rest of the world would come round in the end... Read on...
Steve's been sort of keeping you up to date on my journey to the USA at the start of this month, and one place I was at was the Portable Media and Podcasting Expo 2005. I've posted a report on the Expo on my blog, so if your keen to read some non-Symbian stuff, then head over to www.ewanspence.com.
As the subject says, here's the press release. The acquisition is mainly aimed at enterprise connectivity, but this is perhaps also a sync technology boost across the board? Comments welcome.
Futuremark has announced the new SPMarkJava06 benchmark for evaluating handheld devices performance in running Java applications. The benchmark includes test for the latest Java functionality (MIDP 2, CLDC 1.1, JSR 184). Read on for a quick overview and results from several Symbian devices.
The quarterly figures from Symbian, Ltd have ben released today and show a steady growth in pretty much every area. 8.54 million Symbian handsets shipped in Q3 of 2005, 60 different Symbian powered devices, 4500 applications available and 11 licencees developing handsets. But the headline number everyone should start paying attention to is the installed user base, now standing at 48 million Symbian OS users. Which is probably a number the Microsoft Windows team would love to be closer to than an order of magnitude.
Yes it's off topic (but not as much as you think), but Infosync's review of Motorola's iTunes enabled ROKR phone makes interesting reading, given that this is the first phone to make a play for one of the big battlegrounds for 2006, the MP3 Music Phone. Summary? Good battery life, mediocre screen, and lousy earphones.
The Nokia 770 has now gone up on Nokia's online shop for the princely sum of £245. At the moment though, it's completely out of stock. According to Nokia, it started shipping internationally on Monday (7/11/5), so it should be available in high street stores soon. Keep your eyes peeled for the forthcoming AAS review!
Thomas Boys weighs in with a sorry tale of caution and offers some wise words advice to would-be smartphone buyers and sellers on eBay. Read his tale of woe.
Symbian's David Wood has done many wonderful things in his career. But coining 'Platformization' isn't one of them. Sorry. Still, if you'd like to hear the word used in its proper(?) context, here's his latest Insight column over on the Symbian web site.
Ewan passes on the benefit of his experience with a How-To on roaming the globe with your Symbian or Palm OS smartphone. New travellers might also like to check out his generic flying tips over on his blog.
Not a smartphone in the true sense, but the form factor of this new Samsung offering is truly groundbreaking. Maybe this is the shape (and size) of things to come? Engadget's got the details.
As part of a new series in brief tutorials, Rafe's penned this how-to showing you how Mass Storage Synchronizer can be used to copy music from iTunes to a memory card (which you can then put in your Symbian smartphone).
