After just being nominated for a BAFTA (really), Ewan's off to the USA again, this time to Seattle and then Mobile Monday in San Francisco, followed by Los Angeles and the Portable Media and Podcast Expo. AAS and AAP readers in the States might like to keep abreast of his movements via his blog and schedule a meet?
In which Steve realises that your smartphone should always help and never get the way of real life, performs a subtle U-turn and muses the fact that there's really no such thing as the perfect mobile device for everybody. Read the editorial...
Keeping track of Nokia's Open Source projects is a new site, opensource.nokia.com. It provides a single jumping off point for projects such as the new S60 browser, the Maemo Table Linux OS and S60 Python to name a few. Worth bookmarking if you're a developer.
Perception is everything when looking at the relations between companies. Ed Colligan (Palm, inc) is putting more distance between Palm and Symbian - after all, he sees Nokia as 'owning' Symbian, and the American carriers all wanted Microsoft enterprise devices. And Symbian's thoughts? "Microsoft is more of a distraction factor," said David Wood, Symbian executive VP of research - naturally, as Symbian are pushing into the mid-range now (report from Datamonitor).
Steve Litchfield road tests ROK TV, finds it works fabulously well and then discovers the chasm it could make in your monthly GPRS data bill... Summary: great technology demonstrator but the network operators need a rethink.
Throwing around quotes about the damage Music Phones might possibly do to the mainstream music ("If piracy on the internet was a tidal wave, this is going to be a tsunami") really doesn't explain the problem. The Guardian reports on the next evil to infest our phones from a number of music executives. Obviously they're forgeting that a 5mb mp3 file over GPRS will probably cost more than buying the next Clone Boy Band album. Further commentary at MoCoNews and Ringtonia.
So are the problems facing the Mobile Games Industry (see Mobhappy) simply down to not treating mobiles games as seperate from console games? Tom Hume thinks so, and addresses the original points over at his blog: "Mobile device will always be an inferior game platform. Sorry, I don't buy that; or has my chess-set been obsoleted by my Gamecube because it's only got a resolution of 8 x 8?"
If you owned a Psion palmtop back in the late 1990s, you'll have heard of the Psion-sponsored PocketInfo web site, with useful spreadsheet 'applications' and documents. It has now been relaunched, with a large proportion of the content now available in native Nokia 9300 and 9500 Communicator format. More over at PocketInfo.
DoCoMo has recently unveiled it's new 902i Series of phones. Today Symbian announced that four of these six phones, the D902i (Mitsubishi), the F902i (Fujitsu), the SH902i (Sharp) and the SO902i (Sony Ericsson) are powered by Symbian OS. Features across the range include memory card expansion and multi-megapixel cameras.
While the Motorola ROKR isn't a phone we normally cover, Wired's latest article, The Battle For The Soul Of The MP3 Phone, should be required reading for everyone even remotely interested in the big mobile battle of 2006 - the music playing phone. Why did Motorola and Apple make the decisions they did? Why have the 100 tune limit? And don't miss Nokia's N91 making a shadowy appearance - even without the open source P2P software demonstrated in the article it's looking like the phone to beat.
According to the latest (Q3) figures from Canalys, Nokia shipped over seven million Series 60 and Series 80 smartphones in the recently finished quarter, with over half the worldwide PDA/Smartphone market. Sales of standalone PDAs declined markedly again and Sony Ericsson's nowhere to be seen, though that should change when the P990 starts to become available.
Every 6 months Orange run a developer event which is a mixture of technical sessions, networking and fun. Rafe reports back from the most recent event at Opio, France on what the Camp offered to the attendees.
Tom Hume's posted some interesting thoughts on the downside of the long tail (a business model particularly suited to internet and software - more info here). His job involves a large amount of working porting applications to mobile phones, and the cardinal rule of "always test on actual hardware" is the problem. As Hume puts it " 'Write once, run everywhere.' Stare into the mirror and say it's name three times - it doesn't appear, it's just a fairytale."
The Symbian Community Newsletter is always interesting, but in the wake of The Smartphone Show, this one's a must read, with lots of interesting hyperlinks.
Mobile Innovation, a leading technology consultant and integrator for the Symbian OS, has been acquired by Macromedia. Mobile Innovation have been directly or indirectly involved with many of the Series 60, Series 90 and UIQ smartphones currently on the market.
