Following the release of the new M$ rival to the 7650, I happened across an interesting article at The Register. Much talk has been made about the new M$ smartphones. El Reg aren't impressed, nor are they impressed by the rave reviews, finally a level headed opinion. The quote in the title is from Bill Gates himself as mentioned in the article (guess he can't bear to say Symbian).
[quote="Anonymous"]Jeez listen to you lot bitch like a load of schoolkids. Personally I cant wait to place my order for one when my contract is up at the end of this month. I'm fed up with carrying my 92brick and having borrowed a 7650 for a week wouldnt have one if u paid me. Poor quality, no expandability, over-priced under specced software etc etc etc etc. Having read all the reviews and had a look at the smartphone i think its gonna sell and sell big. You have to rememeber that the phone buying public doesnt give a damn wheather a phone is powered by symbian, microsoft or weetabix - as long as it looks good, will meet their needs and impress their mates. Look at the quality add-on software already available for the phone ahead of its launch.. symbian authors take note.
Motorola have been a member and liscensee of Symbian for a relatively long time, but we have yet to see a Symbian device from then. Recently a leak spilled their roadmap for future phones on to the web in spectacular fashion, but what about something closer to the present day. All About Symbian has been investigating - this is what we have found. Update: Changes to reflect news of Siemens U10 and make it clear this is speculative.
Following on from the liscensing of Series 60 Samsung has confirmed its comittment to the Symbian OS by formally announcing it is liscensing the OS. This means the top 5 phone manufacturers in the world have now liscensed the OS.
According to a Canalys Press Release Symbian devices were the top seller in Europe last quarter accounting for 57% of all shipments. This is of course mainly due to the popularity of the 7650
According to this article on EWeek Symbian are concentrating on the OS rather than the UI. Aside from this having been known before (the Series 60 is a Nokia UI and the UIQ has become a SE thing) it does make the decision clearer. The article also mention 4 new UI's will be arriving soon mainly in the Asian market. Read the full story for analysis.
Opera have announced the forthcoming avialability of their browser for Smartphone, but with a difference. It has technology that takes into consideration the size of the screen and fits it to it. The best news is that we'll be seeing this first on the P800 and Series 60 quite possibly as a user install, but more likely as an OEM option.
I would like to apologise for the lack of service (from me) over the last week or so. Thanks to the excellent job of the other admins the site has been updated.
He's been down the pub, he's getting ready for going away for the weekend, it's the middle of the night, and the booze is wearing off..... Yep SwitchBlade is on a ramble again, be afraid, be very afraid.
JABP (Just another Banking Program) has been launched by FreEPOC. JABP is an experiment - the objective has been to write a simple and free financial program which runs on Epoc (of course), IPAQ, Sharp Zaurus, Windows, Linux and Unix. You can exchange your data files seamlessly between different platforms. And of course Jabp will exchange data with Microsoft Money and Intuit Quicken. Oh, and did we say that we expect it to run on the forthcoming Sony Ericsson P800 superphone? Since Jabp is currently in beta it may still have some bugs. It isn't intended to be as fully featured as our well-established and award-winning ABP. Is Jabp worth developing further? Let FreEPOC know.
PMN has an interesting article with Dirk Hoffman form Siemens it discusses why Siemens went for Symbian when they were currently using Microsoft. They say they see Microsoft being the Mobile OS for Corporate software but only in the short term. They expect this to change as Symbian becomes more established. The article also intriguingly mention the new Siemens Series 60 device to be released soon. More details of this device are available to PMN Subscribers along with a more in depth article however I'm not prepared to pay £20 a month to find out.
Symbian and Accelerated Technology have announced the first product in their partnership - XRay an advanced debugger that can look in on what is happening in the kernel. This is specialist software intended for phone manufacturers or very high end developers. It shows the strength in Symbian alliance and developer strategy.
Expected to run on most Java enabled phones, the application allows users to load game images (ROMs) of software for Nintendo's classic monochrome handheld.
