The quarterly report of radio audiences (RAJAR) in the United Kingdom has been published, and while most of the data is only available to members, some interesting facts for online radio fans have come out via the BBC News report. The first point is that generally listening to radio has been on the rise, and part of that can be put down to new technology (roughly 15m people using DAB, digital TV or internet). And the number of people listening on their mobiles has risen by 13%.
A quick one for developers, as Brady Forrest points out both the addition of some web badges/buttons for the Google Latitude location service, but also an API to allow apps access to the location data of a user. Available as both JSON and KML Forrest is right that this is a very small first step, but expects more features and functions over the coming months.
You've got to love Ricky and Rita at Symbian Guru, here unearthing (and providing a brief tutorial for) another gem - Pixelpipe, a new plug-in for Share online which widens the photo (and video) uploading compatibility to encompass Facebook, Twitpic, Picassa, YouTube and others. If you've used Pixelpipe then your comments welcome.
In All About Symbian Insight 69 (AAS Podcast 127) Rafe, Ewan and Steve talk about Bobba, operating billing on the Ovi Store, v21 firmware for the Nokia 5800 and the new N-Gage game - Age of Empires III. Rafe then reports back in detail from the Nokia Developer Summit 2009. You can listen to AAS Insight 69 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Federation. No not the evil kind from Blakes 7 or the Star Trek goodie two shoes, but the federation of communications. It's one of the reasons that the internet really started to work. Look at the different operating systems, servers and applications that can all happily talk to each other. Every home, office and school with a router is a small network, connected to a bigger network, and so on and so on all the way up the pipe. So why is IM such a problem? Read on for my thoughts.
Today’s existential question – does a technology exist if there is not a competition to promote it? The Nokia Developer Summit offered us the hackathon and you can now see the outcome and several other summit sessions online. Also, NAVTEQ is getting involved with the European Satellite Navigation Competition 2009.
So much for the quality stamp of being in
the good 'ol BBC. Their latest Digital Planet podcast, going out worldwide, starts with an scaremongering piece which claims that the only reason why there hasn't been a mobile phone virus pandemic is that there aren't enough Symbian OS-powered phones out there yet. Completely ignoring the fact that the viruses mentioned are ALL for really old phones and OS versions, involve manual, deliberate installation and are aimed at really naive users. The Symbian Foundation's new PR dept would do well to fire a rocket into Gareth Mitchell, Jason Palmer and self-confessed expert Prof Barasbi, who, patently, haven't a clue what they're talking about. Pah.
David Wood, writing on the Symbian Foundation Blog, about reviewing the release plans, has highlighted some details of upcoming Symbian releases. Symbian^2, the equivalent of S60 5th Edition Feature Pack 1, will be functionally complete next week and in devices early next year. Symbian^3, for which the majority of the source code should be available, enhances communication architecture, multimedia and graphics functionality, and should reach devices in the second half of 2010.
Symbian ^4 will see the full integration and optimisation of Qt into the Symbian platform. Further proposals includes the 'Orbit' extension library for Qt (replacing AVKON) and a new 'Direct UI' interaction and navigation logic. Put crudely, this means we will see an evolution of the existing S60/AVKON UI to a new Qt-based 'Orbit' Symbian UI for devices coming out in 2011. Read on for more details.
Perhaps a little trivial and off-topic, but I thought readers might like to know how I got on with polishing out the micro-scratches in the camera 'glass' on my Nokia N95 8GB. Using Displex, bought for a song from eBay, I managed to get all the scratches out in under 5 minutes. If nothing else, bookmark this for the future in case your phone's display or camera cover get scratched?
As part of the Nokia Developer Summit, the widely publicised Nokia Hackathon ended with a victory for a Mexican designer, with Rocket, a social location widget that will be featured on the front screen of the Nokia N97. It's not known which social network this is compatible with. There's an extract from the press release below.
You'll know the sort of content covered if you're used to the output of Nokia's own in-house Conversations team, so if you like the stories but would like to catch up with them with the minimum disruption to your daily life then there's also their new Blogbite podcast (RSS link). In five minutes or so (hence the 'bite' bit), two of the team race (and I mean race) through some of Nokia's announcements and oddball stories of the week. You can also listen over the web and it's in the Podcasting directory, naturally.
Launched today is The Really Mobile Project. Rising from the ashes of the Mobile Industry Review, the familiar faces of Ben Smith, Dan Lane and James Whatley, joined by Vikki Chowney. They're promising a video-heavy look at the mobile world, mixed in with the usual writing we have come to expect from them.
In previous articles, I've been more than happy to praise the S60 Music player. Unfortunately, it has just not kept up with the changing pace of technology. On the N95 and N95 8GB vintage devices, the music app was far better than the leading MP3 players of the time, notably the iPod Nano. But the iPhone music app has vaulted over the S60 app.... what could the Espoo Engineers learn from Cupertino Coders?
There's a nice piece by Chris Meadows here talking about the future for Mobipocket and its previously ubiquitous ebook reader software, now that Amazon have not only bought Mobipocket but are competing against it vigorously with its own Kindle hardware and software. In fact, it's looking increasingly as if Amazon bought Mobipocket simply to put paid to a competitor. Yet there's nothing else decent to fill the vacuum on S60 and Symbian. Read on for some thoughts and links.
In All About Symbian Insight 68 (AAS Podcast 126) Rafe and Steve talk about the upcoming Ovi Store in relation to Widsets, N-Gage and uploading content, before sharing their recent device purchases. Steve explain why he prefers his device with an Xenon flash and Rafe talks about 3's and Orange's service strategy. You can listen to AAS Insight 68 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
