Entertainment is a strong brand story for Sony Ericsson. Announced today, Sony Ericsson Creations leverages that brand story, with the goal of transforming the creative entertainment process into a community. A key facilitator in Sony Ericsson’s new community will be applications to enable the citizen entertainer.
Wild Ducks is a Symbian Foundation project that aims to demonstrate how the recently open sourced Symbian platform can run on open hardware. The project uses the popular Beagle Board as the main board which, together with a modem and few other components, gives you everything you need to make a phone. This allows anyone to build their own Symbian based phones with off the shelf hardware. Over two videos we talk to Arunabh Ankur to get the details on the project and take a look at the project's hardware running Symbian^2. Read on for more.
Python for S60 has been in a state of flux for oh so long, with multiple forks and levels, but it seems we can put all that behind us now with the formal release of the big shiny v2.0 - the dev kit was released today. You may have noted that we reported on PyS60 being made available via Sw update on some 3rd Edition FP2 devices (and above) a month ago. This new kit represents all the other bits developers (and users) might need to write in Python. The announcement, quoted below, also mentions that the source code is being donated to the Symbian Foundation.
Symbian is now open source, which will no doubt attract new developers with new ideas. Any manufacturer can freely use and change Symbian in their devices. It's an exciting future - or is it? David Gilson discusses the potential downside of Symbian being open source.
By now you’ll have spotted the impact that Google Buzz has had on the web; but I was struck by something that had flown past my browser on Monday. It was an article by Zach Epstein on “Know your Cell” about the missed opportunity Google had with Jaiku and its founder, Jyri Engestrom – who up until his departure was the Product Manager for what was to become Buzz. Read on for a few dots-joining thoughts...
Forgive the plug, but I haven't mentioned Phones Show Chat for a few weeks - audio podcasts 24 and 25 are now online for your listening pleasure - around an hour each of myself and Tim Salmon of this parish wittering about Symbian, Maemo and Android smartphones, answering Q&A, and so on. Here's the RSS feed for you to plug into Podcasting, to subscribe, if you haven't done so already 8-)
The Par 3 Golf marque has been established in first the Java and Windows Mobile worlds, and then the iPhone world, for some time, but the ante has been upped by this latest revamp/rename, with more holes, more courses and, in theory, more fun. It's value for money, but it's strictly a bare-bones golf game, with few frills or frolics. And judging from this, my Ovi Gaming review, Par 72 Golf II isn't going to challenge the serious golf games of the handheld world.
Over on their “stories from around the neighbourhood” blog, the Nokia team have spent two days in Colchester, where a trial of the Point and Find information service is going on. By using a mix of GPS on the handset, scannable barcodes and a central database, the theory is you’ll know what’s going on around you and interact with the environment. So how does it work in practice?
Canalys stats are another important data point for the smartphone industry, they usually bring out something of interest. Here, in their 2009 summary, (mirroring Tomi's numbers and our analysis), they give Symbian-powered smartphones 47% world marketshare for the year, with RIM in second place on 20%. With their press release focussing on touchscreen numbers, Canalys points out that 55% of all smartphones sold in Q4, 2009 had touchscreens, with Nokia being the leading touchscreen smartphone manufacturer.
In All About Symbian Insight 104 (AAS Podcast 168), Rafe and Steve start with a quick look ahead to Mobile World Congress and then round up a number of small news items, including multiple firmware updates (N97 mini, X6, 5730, E52), details of a new version of the Ovi Store client, information on Greystripe and the Ovi Store and the lowdown on 1.4 million Ovi Maps downloads. In the second half of the podcast we discuss the big news that the the open sourcing (EPL) of the Symbian platform (40 million lines of code) has been completed four months ahead of schedule. You can listen to AAS Insight 104 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Following on from Strategy Analytics and Tomi's stats for smartphone sales in the whole of 2009, summarised here by me last week, we now have confirmation, courtesy of the USA-based IDC, of the very latest Q4 2009 smartphone world unit sales: again, Nokia lead the market with 38% for its S60-based smartphones, while RIM's Blackberrys are in second place with 20%. Q1 2010 results will be even more interesting, expect these in the first week of April.
While you can argue about what the numbers actually mean, it’s nice to see that the main players in mobile browser are all feeding back changes to the WebKit open-source project. Alongside Nokia (and Trolltech), Apple, Google and RIM are all contributing in some form, as shown in Evan Martin's blog post to the Chromium web
For those of you who use FourSquare (a geo-location social network and game all rolled into one), you might be interested to know that you can check-in to the game via a third party service, Waze. Details are over on SmashPop if you’d happier using this method than SMS or the mobile website.
David Gilson recently performed a big feature on Twitter applications on Symbian and S60. Mind you, thanks to the feedback of AAS readers, he has now expanded his survey to now cover an eye watering seventeen Twitter options for S60 users wanting to get more out Twitter. Gulp. Read on!
Something of an oddball in the mobile world, Snaptu is a Java application that attempts to provide a cosy environment into which you can bring a plethora of online services (Flickr, Facebook, TV listings, News, etc). Ewan, as the main reviewer, wasn't too impressed by the limited functionality within each service or by the clunky Java text input. I was somewhat more positive, as you'll see from my 'PS' - but your comments welcome - are you a Snaptu fan?
