In All About Symbian Insight 88 (AAS Podcast 150), Rafe and Steve talk about the release dates for some upcoming devices and preview the Nokia 5730. Rafe reports back from the Ovi Developer Day and Steve shares news of the latest Nokia 5800 firmware and upcoming firmware for the N86. There's also discussion about the Ovi Store and Vodafone 360. You can listen to AAS Insight 88 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
I was fascinated to read of the continued progress of some of Symbian's 'Wiki books' over on the Symbian Blog today. Essentially, these slightly niche guides and reference texts are being created in collaborative style by a number of authors, all contributing online into a 'wiki', a hypertext shared document. The 'wiki books' can then be electronically massaged into free electronic 'ebooks' or even passed over as needed to an on-demand book printing service. And it goes without saying that content can be kept up to date a lot more easily than with conventional '100% paper' titles.
Following on from Ewan's musings as to what would happen when the first Comes with Music subscriptions came to an end, pointing out some of the complications and pitfalls, Music Ally is reporting that Nokia is emailing people offering a free extension by up to 3 months, taking them potentially into 2010. This is likely because licensing terms and arrangements (amazingly) haven't been finalised yet - so Nokia seems to be taking the financial hit. Watch this space.
Breaking cover yesterday was the UK's newest MVNO (mobile virtual network organisation), Giffgaff. Piggybacking on the infrastructure of O2, it's going to be publicly available before Christmas and promises to be the first “people powered mobile network.” I sat down with the 'gaffer' of Giffgaff, Mike Fairman, to find out a little bit more, starting with that idea of being people-powered. Read on.
As the recession continues to bite, will there be any innovation in the mobile market in the near future? I don't just mean at the top level, where smartphone users (no matter the OS flavour) will try out every single application they can, but in the marketplace where hundreds of thousands of phones are bought every day. How will new services prosper in the modern environment? Read on for my thoughts.
Sorry for the urgent 'stop press' item, but I've noticed that my domain manager company has gone out of business and that my old smartphones-show.com domain had lapsed. Can I ask any (lovely, friendly) AAS readers with web page or blog links to 'The Smartphones Show' or 'The Phones Show' to check where any links point to? The best URL to use is simply 3lib.ukonline.co.uk - Many thanks!
Yes, another year has passed and the annual Symbian bash is upon us. But with a slight twist, with the Symbian Foundation now well established and with the whole ecosystem, like much of the rest of the mobile industry, definitely in something of a state of flux. SEE (Symbian Exchange and Exposition) 2009 is free to attend and easy to get to. But what's on offer this year, what should you look out for? Steve Litchfield provides a few pointers...
Business Week have released their latest "Top 100 Global Brands" and not surprisingly telecommunications and IT companies are riding high in the list. Nokia is in fifth place and the highest placed non-US company, just behind IBM (#2) and Microsoft (#3), while Google has climbed up to #7 while Apple pops in to #20.
Back in July I reviewed Mobile Task Manager, a Java powered To-Do list and was pleasantly surprised at the flexibility it offered. I also hoped it would continue to improve. Well developer Tommi Laukkanen has released v1.2 with plenty of updates and a handful of bug fixes, mostly focused on prioritising your to-do's to make the best use of your time. You can download the free app here.
Nokia has been named as the world's most sustainable technology company according to the 2009/10 edition of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Already rated for several years as the leader within the Europe and Communications categories, this year Nokia was also chosen as "World Technology Supersector Leader", making it number one across the entire global technology sector. See below for extracts from the press release.
Standing down today and retiring from his role as Chairman of Psion Teklogic is the spiritual Grandfather of Symbian OS, Dr David Potter. He founded Psion in 1980 with £70,000 of his own money, and over the next twenty years grew it to be one of the leading mobile computing companies, and in the process laid the Foundations for the current smartphone with the spinning out of Psion Computers as Symbian in 1999.
PC owners might want to check out the latest beta of Ovi Suite 2, now apparently getting closer to final release. This latest beta has better support for photo sync between desktop and phone, plus many other minor fixes. It's a 90MB download from here if you want to keep bang up to date.
Next week Imperial College London will be hosting the second "Over The Air" event, where developers, programmers, companies and other interested parties will gather to hear about the latest innovations in smartphone technology during Friday, and then work through the night and into Saturday to hack together new applications using those ideas. it's a mix of Scrapheap Challenge and cutting edge mobile development. The draft schedule has just been announced, and free tickets are still available.
There's an interesting piece over on Reuters today, interviewing Symbian's David Wood and summarising the current smartphone market rather well. David is (understandably) optimistic that Symbian can hang onto its 50% market share in the coming years. Worth a five minute read.
We keep being told that Near Field Communication and wireless is the future - that's certainly the case in this fun video from Jack Schulze and Timo Arnall. Called "Nearness" it's a Wile E Coyote hodge podge of mechanisms and gadgets to create movement from nothing. Enjoy!
