There are more than enough news sites and commentary around for you to read on your phone. What I need is a snack sized piece of fiction to get me thinking, make me smile, have my heart fly, and entertain me on a daily basis. If you do as well, www.cellstories.net is for you, providing a new short story every day, laid out to work on your smartphone's small screen.
While the location based information provided by Google’s Latitude system has always been available on Google Maps for Mobile, hooking in to the system from a desktop computer has always needed you to go through a clumsy route using iGoogle. Well, no more, as you can now see where your friends are on this standalone web page.
There's a great post here by Ari Partinen with tips on taking better portrait photos with the N8, specifically looking at how he achieved the professional shot reproduced below, with nothing more than the Nokia N8 and some white material (as a reflector). Well worth a read and, if nothing else, shows what Xenon-lit fill-in flash can do to improve smartphone photos - even in broad daylight.
A couple of interesting links of interest in the last 24 hours over on Nokia's official blog. Nokia’s new devices and the environment looks at some facts behind progress at keeping phones and their packaging as 'green' as possible. I guess when you're selling over a million phones a day then you have to really worry about the impact you're having on the planet! Also of interest was this drum-thumping post on entitled Nokia ranks number one as mobile Web platform, referring to new stats from Opera that show that in the top 20 tech-capable countries, in 16 of them a Nokia device was the leading phone used to browse the web. Some quotes below from each.
Symbian have announced the line up of the Application Developer Track at the upcoming Exchange and Exposium in Amsterdam next month. With notable contributions from Nokia and Orange, the event is well on course to its goals of sharing experience and knowledge throughout the community.
Never mind the current crop of misleading 'N8 vs ???' camera comparisons that have popped up on the web over the weekend - to do camera phone tests properly you need patience, a good eye and some knowledge of the art. While waiting for part 2 of our own review of the Nokia N8, which will indeed look in gory detail at its camera, check out Vaibhav Sharma's excellent look at a specific use case - taking the N8 out and leaving a DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) camera at home for general purpose daylight photography.
Here’s one reason why Nokia need to keep pushing the “story” of the Ovi store. A recent post on Game Theory by Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins critiqued the Android app store and highlighted three main issues… such as carrier billing, returns policy and competing download routes for applications. Issues that the Ovi Store specifically, and the Symbian platform globally, are already addressing. Some thoughts below...
OK, so Google's headline stretches the truth a little - the photos of Antarctica aren't actually from a StreetView car - for errr.... obvious reasons! And, of course, on some continents coverage is a lot more patchy than others. But, regardless, kudos to the Google team for their untiring work to bring the visuals of the world to the (mobile) masses. Some quotes and links below.
As Engadget puts it, "the other shoe just dropped" for anyone hoping that Samsung might yet be planning a Symbian^4 device or two in the future. In an email out to registered developers and on the Samsung Mobile Innovator web site, the company says that it "will discontinue its Symbian support service from December 31st 2010". Sad news from the company that brought us the i8910 HD, among other interesting and powerful designs.
If you’re looking to build up your badge collection in Foursquare (including the recently released official Symbian version) and are in London next week, you might want to pop along to The Jewel Bar on Glasshouse Street. London cultural website Londonist is hoping to get 250 people or more to check-in at the Bar, and those that do will earn the Super Swarm badge!
NyTeknik, a weekly Swedish technology newspaper, is reporting that Jan Uddenfeldt, Sony Ericsson's new CTO, said that the company "have no plans for new products with Symbian". While this is not a definitive statement, it would appear to rule out any Symbian^3 handsets from Sony Ericsson and leave longer term plans uncertain. It follows on from the recent news that Samsung also has no current plans for Symbian handsets.
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Both Gartner and IDC recently published predictions of where the smartphone world will go over the next four years, in part backing up each others conclusions, but with some divergence. Pulling out the trends and actual figures needed a little more digging, but I've averaged the two sets of predictions and filled in (and interpolated where necessary) to give you a chart that's a lot easier to take in. Are both Gartner and IDC infallible? Certainly not, but the combined chart should give a more balanced prediction than the current fashionable 'Symbian is toast' rhetoric...
The Ovi Blog has posted the news today that a large swathe of Nokia's self-published game titles in the Ovi Store are now available free of charge. Some of these titles were already free, but its a nice reminder and there are some fun titles in the mix, including one of my favourites, Big Roll in Paradise.
Coinciding with Nokia World and the current season are a number of promotional videos from Nokia that highlight aspects of Symbian^3 that we haven't seen before on All About Symbian. Ahead of review devices arriving that actually run the new version of the OS and interface, I thought it would be useful to embed some of these videos below, for viewing over your morning coffee. Take the marketing spin with a pinch of salt in each case, but there are useful demonstrations of how the relevant parts of Symbian^3 will work.
Never more than in the last year or so, smartphone enthusiasts have been decrying Symbian and advocating switching to an Android smartphone or Apple iPhone. "Enough is enough" they cry, "I'll be able to do so much more if I switch!". Errr... no. Not really. Having used many Android phones and having been using the iPhone and other iOS devices over the last two years, I've come to the conclusion that the grass really isn't greener on the other side of the fence - it's just a different colour altogether.
