Our friends from MoDaCo have asked us to tell you about a study on smartphones they are running. Respondants are entered in the prize draw to win cash prizes. More details in the full news story.
Symbian's CEO will leave the company at the end of March 2005 (reports Symbian). David Levin will move to United Business Media. He will continue to work as the Chief Executive until then. There's no word as yet on who his successor will be.
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Steve Litchfield has made a start at a Nokia 9500 tips page over at 3-Lib - see what you think. The 9500 is tremendously powerful but also fairly complex for beginners to cope with. Maybe Nokia should put an IQ-warning on it? Hopefully, the tips page will help...
Finally some companies are starting to realise that the power users are the likey to creatue new features, and value, not large programing houses and think tanks (see The Feature). Having free development languges and tools aimed at different skill sets, allowing anyone to create programs, was one of the strong points in the EPOC OS (the predecessor of Symbian OS). It looks like the same lessons are being painfully learned again.
"Advanced Processor, advanced 3G networking, advanced OS (Symbian 8.0a), and enough RAM to only run one app at a time. I am astounded," writes Russ Beattie. The 6630 is a lovely phone and scores in every department expect one, and as usual, that one thing kind of pulls the phone down in the must have stakes. Russ wonders if it is because Nokia are leaving you a reason to upgrade to a newer model in a few months...
Not Symbian news, thankfully, but info about a competitor. There's something of a storm in the Palm OS world about the recent news of PalmSource switching future direction to being a software/GUI company based on a Linux OS. As someone who had a brief love affair with a Palm IIIc about five years ago, which was nice and simple at all levels, seeing the continuing confusion in their OS and the general mess they've since made of most things at a technical level (e.g. VFS), is really rather sad. Interesting reading here for Christmas.
Following on from the Sharp/NTT DoCoMo accouncement last week, Sharp have confirmed they are now licencing the Symbian OS (reports Symbian). Note they're not joining Symbian, but rather just licencing the OS, in the same way Motorola are now doing.
Don't shy away into the Shadows as you can now pick your favourite photos from the 4 displayed * here *. This poll will close on 19th December 2004 & Good Luck to all taking part.
It may be an overused phrase on certain sites, but with Preminet, another small string for the Finns is starting to emerge (speculates The Register). With Preminet attempting to replicate the success of the Brew system, can Nokia use their custom store-front to do the same in the J2ME market? And will they get the leverage of the developers they need?
While the All About Symbian Pub Meet is a distant memory, Herbert went along to a meeting organised by PDATotaal over in Amsterdam and got his hands on a Nokia 7710 for most of the meeting. Here's how he got on...
Swedish 'Mobil' magazine might have well just said that this was Symbian's year. Their awards ceremony was a good night for Symbian (reports UIQ.com). Symbian were "The Company of the Year," the P910 was awarded "Smartphone of the Year" and Opera won the plaudits in the "Application of the Year."
The two reported Trojan programs for Series 60 (Cabir - which tries to send itself via Bluetooth to another Series 60 phone) and Skulls (which replace all the Desktop Icons with Skulls) have been programmed together. Skulls-B uses the Cabir Bluetooth transfer to send the Skulls payload. Some simple hints to avoid this - don't leave your phone's Bluetooth set to discoverable, and confirm any file you recieve over Bluetooth. And if you see an Icon called "Caribe" on your phone, don't run it.
Symbian has announced that Sony Ericsson and Sharp will be using the Symbian OS in their phones developed for the NTT DoCoMo FOMA network. Symbian OS is also used in Fujitsu existing FOMA phones, the Vodafone 702NK (6630 variant) and the first Motorola phone for the network is also announced as using Symbian OS. With this announcement Symbian tightens their hold on the lucrative Japanese high end market.
