Following a successful event in 2008 (see our report here), Vodafone's Betavine labs have announced another Over The Air event, to take place on the 25th and 26th of September at Imperial College, London. Betavine will be joined by Lonely Planet and OMTP to present the 24 hour hacking and coding event, where new ideas are presented in the first few sessions and everyone else starts a single day burst of coding to present their ideas and hacks.
A nice bit of detective work by Devin has revealed that Files on Ovi (now just Ovi Files), always the least sexy of the Ovi services, has changed from a commercial into a free service. Possibly driven by poor take up, Nokia has simply made it free for all and is quoted as saying that existing unused subscription periods will be refunded. Interesting. I'd like to see them make pedestrian navigation free for all next in Ovi Maps - now that would put the cat among the (ahem) apples and blackberries...
Solving a charging problem chez Litchfield, I was struck by the realisation that all chargers are not made equal. If this seems obvious to you then feel free to skip this chatty tutorial, but otherwise you might like to read how I sped up the charging time on my Nokia N86 by a factor of almost four simply by using the (ahem) right mains charger. Item of trivia: mains charging of a modern smartphone can be up to twelve times faster than microUSB trickle charging - quite a difference.
The Symbian Foundation today announced the first details of Symbian Horizon, an application-publishing program, which aims to reduce the barriers developers face when taking their products to market and thus increase the profitability of creating Symbian applications. Symbian Horizon will place applications in a number of partner app stores including Nokia's Ovi Store, Samsung's Application Store and AT&T's MEdia Mall, effectively acting as an application publisher on behalf of developers.
Nokia has released their Q2 2009 results. Profits were down 66% year on year, but this was ahead of market expectations. Nokia cut its prediction for H2 2009 profitability and market share for 2009, which has driven down its share price. However the underlying results are encouraging, given the economic climate, although some concerns remain in the high end of the market. Converged devices sales (smartphone) were up at 16.9 million, compared with 15.3 million units in Q2 2008 and 13.7 million units in Q1 2009. The 5800 shipped 3.7 million units, while Eseries and Nseries shipments were 4.7 and 4.6 million respectively.
As we've already mentioned, All About Symbian recently had to be restored, after being hacked, from an overnight backup. While we lost some forum postings, a regular backup strategy meant that we didn't have to roll back too far to get to a working state. What would happen if something catastrophic befell a Symbian phone rather than a Symbian web site?
Following on from my camera/camcorder series here on AAS, here's a look at the pros and cons of adding focussing to video capture in Symbian smartphones. What should a manufacturer do? What's the best way forwards? Is continual auto-focus practical yet? Is initial focus necessarily better than a preset focus? The pros and cons may surprise you...
Zum Zum is a lovely mix of arcade action and Tetris-like clearing strategy. While it's been done on countless platforms before, this version of the genre game Zuma, according to Ewan Spence, doesn't make any mistakes in providing a good conversion to the S60 platform.
Last night a message was posted by hackers to an existing new story on the front page announcing that the site had been hacked and that the databases had been deleted and user information copied. There was some additional damage to the forum database. The issues have now been fixed, but almost all forum posts (including news comments) from yesterday (July 14th) have been lost. I would like to apologise for the data loss and any inconvenience caused. More information will be added to this thread.
The Symbian Foundation today announced it is establishing a new office in Japan. The aim is to improve its support for it Japanese members (who include the operators NTT DOCOMO and Softbank Mobile and the manufacturers Sharp and Fujitsu) and bolster engagement with the developer community. The Symbian Foundation also have offices in London, San Fransisco and Helsinki.
In All About Symbian Insight 79 (AAS Podcast 141), we share news of Symbian^2's release and the first Symbian package to move from SFL to EPL. Then there's a mention of Nokia Android rumours, leading into a discussion about Maemo positioning and Qt. Finally we talk about a recent post from Robert Scoble. You can listen to AAS Insight 79 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Ewan takes a brief look at Tommi Laukkanen's new, free Mobile Task Manager, a no-frills to-do-list/project manager that still manages to knock spots off the built in S60 function. It's Java-based, but don't let that put you off, this is one lean and efficient concept app - let's hope it continues to evolve.
In their own different ways, the Nokia N86 8MP and the Apple iPhone 3GS represent the pinnacles of their form factor. The one is the classic one-handed 'phone', the other is the classic two-handed 'PDA/tablet. Yes, never mind that over-simplification, in the feature below I look in detail at every aspect of the two devices and try to see where comparisons can be drawn. I'm not looking for an overall winner, but am genuinely interested in the areas in which each device and form factor wins out. [Updated with notes on the N86's 'real' digital zoom and a demo link]
