In Insight 108, (with Rafe away) Steve, Ewan and guest Tim Salmon chew over the week's news, including Qik Premium, Nokia Nuron, Ovi Mail 2.0, Skype and Terminal mode. Plus, we get Tim's views on where Nokia, Symbian and others need to improve in order to compete with the likes of iPhone and Android competition.
Thanks to CJ for the heads-up that Emoze, the third party push email aggregator that preceded Nokia Messaging, has just opened up its 'Pro' version for free. You can read more about it below and on the Emoze Blog but essentially you get rich HTML, multiple accounts, Gmail, Hotmail and Facebook support, plus a lot more.
Widely reported round the tech world yesterday and fascinating, despite not being Symbian-related, is the announcement of the Olive FrvrOn, a phone with both Li-Ion and emergency AAA power(!) With the Symbian world springing out of Psion palmtops (1994-2000), most of which were powered by AA cells, I can't help thinking what a great 'best of both worlds' idea this is. Let's hope something similar comes to the Symbian (and Western) world sometime soon...
While I've previously pitched the Google Nexus One head to head with the Nokia N97, concentrating on screen size and general capacity, there's another timely and interesting comparison to be made in the smartphone world, centred on metal construction and all-round communications and multimedia ability. Here, I take the industrial designed Motorola Milestone and the Nokia N97 mini - which will stand up to my intensive testing best?
This month saw the start of the Microsoft Browser Ballot in EU countries. As part of the deal with the Competition watchdogs in Europe, Windows users are being presented with a randomised “ballot” screen of alternative browsers, including Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome, as well as the company’s Internet Explorer product. Is there any implication to the mobile market in this decision? Maybe...
According to the official Ovi Blog, the enormous HRS system is beginning to appear in the homescreen of Ovi Maps 3.3 (and beyond), offering hotel searching by proximity to your current location, with navigation to a hotel handled within the application. There's also integration with other phone functi ons, to allow real time availability checking and booking. Initially HRS is appearing in just Germany and Finland, but other countries should see this rolled out quite soon too. Some quotes and screens below.
Yep, that's our very own Matt Radford (late of All About iPhone) writing as a guest over at The Really Mobile Project and talking about a topic close to all our hearts - the cycle of lust-buy-disappointment (and hopefully) enlightenment-productivity that we all go through as part of obtaining our next smartphone. It's a Link of Interest and a good read for your afternoon cup of coffee.
After almost a year of operation, the contacts in Ovi Mail and Ovi Contacts have finally been officially merged, with Ovi Mail 2.0, according to a Beta Labs post this morning. The overlaps between Ovi Mail, Nokia Messaging and Ovi Sync have always been somewhat grey, so at least this clears up one loose end. Some quotes and links below.
Synchronising your PIM data can be a treacherous prospect at the best of times. David Gilson has been risking the safety of his PIM data to show you how you can use the commercial service Memotoo to synchronise your S60 phone with not only Google, but the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn too.
How long would it take you to find some who has “made a success” out of an application store for any mobile device? Not long, I would think, because these stories are picked up and passed around to “prove” that App Stores work. A case in point is this post on Into Mobile, highlighting the success of an app for Google Android with 6,500 paid for downloads, earning $13,000. But is that the way forward? Read on for my thoughts.
Phones Show 104 just went live, with three Top 3s, i.e. my (and the rest of the Phones Show team's) assessment of the top 3 phones in the world, in each of three categories. Overall, three Symbian handsets make the 'chart', out of nine slots. There's also a demo of Vlingo voice recognition on the N97 mini.
In an epic tale of heroism and 'making do', I lead you through a series of hopefully thought-provoking segments, showing that perhaps there's more to a smartphone than feeling compelled to buy the latest £400 hardware. In the process, I point out the potential benefits of one of Nokia's unsung heroes, the E61i, my main smartphone through the summer of 2007 and a device to which I was recently reintroduced. Reality bites home in the end, though, and I conclude that there's an equal acknowledgement to be made in terms of progress made by Nokia and Symbian over the last few years.
Remember all the fun that Apple and Nokia are going through in the US IP courts? Well there could be a little bit of history about to repeat itself with yesterday’s filing by Google. The Mountain View based company have been awarded a patent that covers “using location in an advertising system” by the USPTO. Given the primacy location has in various Ovi modules, this could the next touch-paper for the lawyers in Espoo.
US tech blog Engadget has done a head to head of GPS navigation and maps of the leading contenders in the US, namely Google Maps, Ovi Maps and VZ Navigator for Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Google Maps comes out on top with some very strange caveats (“if you're staying domestic and won't need to be navigating out of any coverage gaps, its hard to find fault in Google Nav”) but it's worth reading the whole article to get a balanced view.
As I wrote six weeks ago, work has been progressing to convert the old open source Escarpod podcast catcher into an application that can be part of the (also open source) Symbian^3 operating system. Now, exclusively, with kind permission, I have much more on the app, appropriately just called 'Podcatcher'. Read on for a detailed walk through, screenshots and a link to download it for yourself, to help test it on existing devices. Note that Symbian^3 itsel f won't appear on devices until at least the summer, but at least we now know that it'll have podcasting functionality, a relief to many in the Symbian ecosystem, including me!
