Good news for climbers this morning, as Nepal Telecom announce their plans to extend mobile phone coverage to the peak of Mount Everest. Due for completion by the middle of June, climbers will be able to ditch the heavy (and expensive) satellite phones for the latest light and svelte models... assuming they can handle the temperature.
Every week seems to bring new themes for our smartphones, many of which introduce us to ever wackier and more artistic sets of icons for the applications we're familiar with. In this rantfeature, I argue that there's efficiency and elegance in keeping icons close to the originals, keeping the workload for our poor beleaguered eyes and brain down....
Nokia has launched (via Beta Labs) a new web-based service and Web Runtime widget, entitled Green Explorer, aiming to help you live and travel in more eco-friendly fashion through tie-ins with green organisations and community involvement. See below for some screens, notes and links.
In a move that will surprise absolutely nobody, Nokia's Java-based proto-widget system Widsets is to be closed and the widgets rolled into more generalised form as part of Ovi Store (for both S60 and Series 40 phones). June 1st is given as the Widsets closure date. This move follows similar announcements about Nokia's MOSH file sharing service and (implied) the Download! client on every device.
Nokia's Ovi team are looking for independent voices to give them direct feedback about what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong with Ovi. With research centres in New York, London and Helsinki, anyone in the USA, UK or Finland can apply to be considered. If picked, Nokia will pay travel to the centre within your country and $100 on top.
Apologies to those who already know this, but it was news to me and perhaps to other people too: if you run an internet radio station you can add it to Nokia's online directory of stations for free by visiting this link. The directory is used by Nokia's Internet Radio application currently available on Symbian S60 3rd Edition phones and Maemo internet tablets, and allows people to browse and listen to listed stations on their devices through wi-fi or the phone network. The directory accepts both internet-only stations and internet streams of conventional broadcast radio stations.
Following our observation that the 'price/payment' fields in Download! on all devices had been upgraded and made more sensible, it seems that the main 'Applications' folder in Download! (i.e. the bit that doesn't involve paying Jamster) has now acquired sub-folders, to whit: 'Business', 'Entertainment', 'Social networks', 'Reference', 'Utilities' and 'Widgets'. All interesting stuff, but that Ovi client can't come soon enough for us, with as wide a compatibility as possible. No new apps at this point, but to see the changes, just go into Download! - Applications on your phone.
How important is the OS in your smartphone? This has always been a strong discussion topic, as David Wood points out on the Symbian Foundation blog, but it's not the only issue around Operating Systems. Should we not be asking how important the perception of your OS is, to help drive the market? If that's the case, then Symbian OS and the Symbian Foundation need to make some hard business decisions in the next year to ensure the public know who they are. Read on for my analysis and suggestions.
Reader Andy Cook is another of us wistfully looking back to Agenda on the Psion palmtops. Will it ever be matched? Certainly not so so far. His Nokia 9300 (running Symbian OS and the Series 80 UI) has a slightly stunted version but it's still ahead of all competition, according to this review of the iPhone's Calendar and the third party app Pocket Informant over here on one of my stomping grounds.
In All About Symbian Insight 67 (AAS Podcast 127) we talk about the Nokia's Q1 results - how good/bad are they? We move on to the news that Samsung firmware updates (and a new PC Studio) are on the way, and discuss two Symbian OS topics. You can listen to AAS Insight 67 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
It seems that Nokia will shortly be releasing the first device specific S60 SDK (focussed on the N97) and there has been a lot of talk about Symbian on MIDs, how will this affect developers? Read on for my analysis.
With the advent of Google Latitude, Nokia Chat, Nokia FriendView and other similar services, Steve Litchfield ponders their future, wondering why they haven't taken off as fast as he'd originally predicted. Part of the reason, he suspects, is that the typical demographic for such mo-lo-so applications is fairly restricted, i.e. most of us either know exactly where our main contacts are or don't need to know.
The UK's Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has been commenting on alleged police brutality during protests at the recent G20 conference in London. The head of the IPCC has apparently said that "the widespread use of mobile phones by protesters to take photographs and video footage of the clashes was providing invaluable evidence" in investigating three separate incidents including one death. Many worry about intrusive surveillance putting too much power in the hands of authorities, but perhaps cameraphones are turning the tables?
Whiling away a slow news Sunday, I thought I'd take a moment to round up the Twitter addresses of the AAS team, should you want to follow our ad-hoc notices and thoughts in almost-real-time. I'm @stevelitchfield, there's also @rafeblandford, @ewanspence, @Richard_Bloor and (now that he's started to write here occasionally) @whatleydude. Plus, of course, @AAS, an official AAS account and @allaboutngage for All About N-Gage.
Sony Ericsson today posted its Q1 2009 results and they make for grim reading. Sony Ericsson lost EUR 358 million in the first 3 months of 2009 and shipped 14.5 million devices, a 35% year on year decline, and gross margin dropped from 29% to 8%. The numbers were not unexpected and Sony Ericsson is moving to restructure the business, but it will take time.
