Why not come along to another of the AAS Pub Meetings? Lots of drink, chat and fun people to meet. W're having another prize raffle, another Guest Speaker (who we'll announce later this week) and another Mystery Star Prize Bag. The fun starts at 6.30pm at the Dover Castle, London. Update: The guest speaker will be from Sendo and will be demoing the Sendo X. More details tomorrow.
AllAboutSymbian Gallery now has a Regular Photo Contest. Each fortnight a category will be selected and you upload photos from your phone to the Gallery. Winners Photo is displayed on Main Gallery page and selects next category.
If this is the only technology based web site you visit, you may have missed the news that the N-Gage has been cracked. What this means is that someone has created software that allows you to take an N-Gage game, whip it onto a normal memory card and then wham-bam-thankyou-mam, you have it on your regular Series-60 Smartphone. Sounds like good news for consumers? Nokia doesn't think so, so if you're the dodgy geezer who did this thing, you better watch your back because Nokia has a warrant with your name on it (you can also read about it here).
ARCchart is an independent research and consulting firm focusing on all aspects of the wireless communications sector. They have produced a report entitled Symbian Dissected, analysing the company, the OS structure and the competative challenges facing the platform. Read at ARCchart.com
Rumours of Nokia plans to buy Psion have been published in varioussources following a newspaper report this Sunday. This has obvious implications for ownership of Symbian. Nokia and Psion have a combined shareholding of 63.3%. The news should be treated with caution at this stage, with no confirmatory evidence from Nokia or Psion and some analysis suggesting such a move is unlikely.
AppForge have announced the forthcoming availability of Crossfire. Crossfire is AppForge’s mobile and wireless application development environment for Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the .NET Platform. Developers can write .NET platform-based applications which can then run on Series 60 and UIQ.
Digia (a designer and integrator of Symbian OS for phone manufacturers) has announced profits for the first three quarters of 2003 thanks to the success of Symbian OS. Read the full press release.
Nokia have today announced a new class of Symbian device the Series 90. This is the first touch screen Nokia category and they have announced their first product running this, the 7700. This is not the anticipated new communicator as it does not come with a keyboard. Its an innovative device however. For press releases see comments.
In a press release today, Pointsec Mobile technologies has announced it is to release Pointsec, it's high security, cross platform system, onto the Symbian platform. They say "Using on-the fly, user-transparent encryption, Pointsec for Symbian OS automatically encrypts all files before they are stored on a device and automatically decrypts the files again when they are opened, without any need for user intervention". The actual releases will be coming in December; first to the Nokia 9200 series and Sony Ericsson's Symbian based smartphones.
A beta of GapiDraw, a graphics engine for Smartphones and PDA's which is intended for developers has been released for Symbian. Series 60 and UIQ devices are currently supported.
Oh, the good old days, when arcade games beeped and graphics looked like things made out of toilet rolls on Blue Peter... kids today will never appreciate the purity of the games we played when we were growing up. Electronic Gaming Monthly decided to find out what the modern twelve year old makes of the classics... Read on...
In this 3G Newsroom article it says. "Future LG handsets would be installed with Microsoft's Windows Mobile software in the most expensive phones and Symbian software in mid-priced models, Yi said. LG is looking to introduce their first model late next year based on Symbian software." I'm not sure why Microsoft will be more expensive but there you go.
So who else was with Rafe at Mobius? A rather, ehrm, one-sided review of the attendees and their websites can be found at MS-Mobiles. Should we be happy that "This website never publishes reports from the conference and is always spreading hostile anti-Microsoft propaganda. Besides this it is a low traffic website" or worried that the editor hasn't looked here, here or here?
In this Register report it says that Dell have abandoned their plans for a Microsoft based smartphone. One of the reasons they give is that Microsoft's operating system is unlikely to gain any significant market share against Symbian.
