AAS fans might like to note that our very own Rafe Blandford and David Gilson have been the guests on The Phones Show Chat podcast over the last two weeks, Rafe in chat 64 and David in chat 63, providing analysis with their own particular slant, notably with much mention of MeeGo, still prominent in the news following the conference last week, but also with masses of Symbian chat as well. Worth a listen to one of them over your lunch-hour? Also, see below for an important URL change for 3-Lib and The Phones Show - my old web server is disappearing up Sky's tailpipe at the end of 2010!
You'll remember that, in addition to Symbian and the low-end Series 40, Nokia also now supports MeeGo, the development of the old Maemo system and Intel's Moblin. The first MeeGo conference was held last week, in Dublin, and you may be interested in this conference roundup over on our sister site, All About Meego, with some interesting and personal accounts of the event from members of the community.
Take one super-knowledgable smartphone fan, steeped in Symbian especially. Put him in Japan and then throw every cutting edge tech demo and every flagship newcomer from NTT DoCoMo at him - and let him take as many photos as he wanted. The result is a great illustrated read from Clinton Jeff, looking at both Symbian-powered and proprietary phones and smartphones, plus a number of new technologies - as usual, some of these will be standard in the rest of the world in a few years time.
There are two online happenings I'd like to draw your attention to today. Firstly, the guys at AutoTrader - who released their Symbian application a week or so ago - are holding a one hour 'Twitter Takeover' at 12pm GMT on their AutoTrader UK account, so if you're looking for improvements to their app or have questions about mobile support then get involved by asking questions. Secondly, the folks at SPB (who make Mobile Shell and SPB TV, among others) are holding their annual web survey on your smartphone preferences and habits - here's the start page for All About Symbian readers - with some prizes for respondents, detailed below.
The official Symbian blog as just published a video taken at SEE 2010, with Terence Warmbier of the Immersion Corporation. This is the company responsible for the haptic feedback hardware found in every Symbian device. Immersion is pushing haptic technology to allow users to discern material textures and spatial sensation, from just a tap of a screen. This technology is already applied to user interfaces and games, but Warmbier also spoke about using haptic ringtones to allow the user to feel who is calling them. Click through to see the video.
Nokia seem to be far more Mac-aware these days - the C6-01 and C7-00 - and even the still-in-womb E7-00 - are all now listed in Nokia's iSync plug-in system, for PIM sync to the Mac's iCal and Address Book. You can find these iSync plug-ins and more at Nokia's revamped Mac software page here. Particularly notable is a veritable flurry of FAQs and tutorials explaining how to do the more common operations with Nokia Multimedia Transfer, and how to connect up a Nokia smartphone to a Mac in the first place.
It’s nice to see that Nokia’s strategy is slowly becoming clear to the mainstream media, as this article in the Wall Street Journal shows. While it does (eventually) get to the point, it starts as many articles do, from a false statement, magnified by Stephen Elop’s new role as CEO. Namely “his first decision was to go it alone and not adopt Android.” A statement that makes for a headline but has no basis in commercial reality.
You'll remember Skyfire, the proxy-based (i.e. like Opera Mini) browser that also managed to somehow transcode flash video as well? Released originally for Windows Mobile and Symbian, it is now being officially phased out, with the proxy servers stopping working at the end of 2010. In something of a tunraround, Skyfire's new 'vision' is based around a local browser on iOS and Android, with a cloud 'booster engine' for handling video and social networking. See below for a surprisingly personal and heartfelt quote from the developers.
Asri al-Baker, from i-symbian.com, and friend of All About Symbian, has just released a Web Runtime widget for all Symbian devices which will load up the iPhone version of the GMail website. This version of the website offers the richest functionality for any mobile platform. Asri reports that this work was actually inspired by a tweet made by myself(!) Thanks for the contribution, Asri! Read on for more ...
You'll know David from his articles for All About Symbian and All About MeeGo over the last 12 months, but if you're interested in knowing more about him as a person then you could do far worse than check out this mini-interview with him over on the Ovi Blog. Did you, for example, know that he has a Masters in Quantum Theory? Must remember to chat to him about string theory and multiverses sometime....
Forget check-in fatigue, the problem with many location based services and networks is this, once you've checked in, there’s nothing for you to do (an argument by many, but let's take Jon Evans recent rant on TechCrunch as one). Putting aside the collecting of badges and bragging rights, the standalone location-based networks are losing market share now the early adopters have got bored. But there is an answer, and some companies are pushing towards it.
There’s no doubt that Facebook is one of the key drivers of content on a mobile platform, and what Mark Zuckerberg has planned for his users will affect the mobile market. So Rob Jackson’s analysis of the announcement at the start of the month on the “Facebook Mobile Platform” makes for interesting background reading.
Limited Q3, 2010 worldwide smartphone platform sales figures are now available, published by Gartner here. Year on year, Symbian-powered smartphone sales are up over 50%, but it's still a sharply rising market and Android's explosion into second place means that Symbian now has a very serious competitor, in addition to being 'down' to 36.6% world marketshare. With Android on the march, iPhone marketshare was also down year on year, ditto RIM and Windows Mobile. See below for some comments and the stats.
After the fiasco where Skype started blocking all IM access to third party Symbian/mobile clients like Nimbuzz and Fring, it seems that ICQ has started doing the same, blocking Nimbuzz, as reported here on the latter's blog. With many IM services already highly proprietary, it seems that the Instant Messaging is imploding before our eyes. Or maybe we'll all end up on Google Talk and Jabber? Comments welcome if you're a heavy IM user!
Yesterday's news that Nokia would be taking over governance of the Symbian project was great for anyone wanting to publish a dramatic headline. However, to call this a failure for Symbian would, at best, be a cursory observation of what this really means for the platform. To many observers, the writing was on the wall for quite some time, and for others, it was the only logical conclusion to the Symbian Foundation experiment. Over the past year, I wrote two articles about the wider adoption of Symbian: "The risk of opening Symbian" and "Does Symbian have a service layer gap?". Now that the governance of Symbian has reverted back to Nokia, it's a good time to review both of these articles to help give readers some context to what the changeover means for Symbian.
