While the Symbian ecosystem has been making a lot of noise at the Mobile World Congress, most of the rest of the mobile industry has also been making its own wave. Ewan takes a little look around the other highlights coming out of Barcelona. Read on...
Slightly different format for the podcast this week as Rafe is in Barcelona. Steve and Ewan pick up the reins to talk about the announcements and products on show at the Mobile World Congress in the AAS Podcast #113. In Monday's recap, they set the scene, talk about the annoncements from Sony Ericsson, and discuss Nokia's Monday morning press conference.
The Symbian Foundation, as well as debuting their new corporate style at MWC, are using a number of social tools to allow you to follow them. The most obvious is their blog at blog.symbian.org which runs on the open source Wordpress system. Alongside this, they have a photo pool at Flickr where anyone can add relevant pictures; a Twitter account for the Foundation; and most importantly for a conference... their own coffee machine on Stand 8A77 in Hall 8.
Sony Ericsson has just unveiled 'Idou', a 'concept' Symbian Foundation Platform phone with a 12.1 megapixel camera, Xenon flash and 16:9 aspect ratio, 3.5" touchscreen. The Idou will go on to become a device, but it is considered a concept because it is at an early stage in its development. Sony Ericsson will release more details, and a launch date in the summer. Read on for more details and our first hands-on impressions.
Someone in Barcelona will be going round all the stands at this years Mobile World Congress (starting on Monday) to see how big the displays are, how much floorspace is being used by each company, how large are the parties... in short, how much money has a company spent on their presence at MWC?
"To compare or not to compare? That is the question." Nokia has protested many times that the 5800 XpressMusic is not an iPhone competitor, but rather a lower-priced alternative - and I agree in this detailed editorial over at All About iPhone. There's no doubting that the 5800 was influenced by Apple's flagship, but the differences in functionality and emphasis run pretty deep, as is obvious as I run through each device's strengths and weaknesses.
We-Fi, the free software networking system that helps you find free and open Wi-Fi hotspots, has now been sanctioned by Nokia and is included in many device's Download! catalogs. We-Fi's a great idea - if it doesn't appear in your S60 phone's Download! then you can also grab it from here. It's also available for Window Mobile, Windows and Mac, by the way, and it's truly international. Can you get involved and help expand We-Fi's hotspot knowledge in your area?
On the Nseries Innovation News Desk, an official blog on Nokia's Nseries.com website, there's a teaser post with a photo taken by a Nokia device. Closer examination reveals that the image is 2448 x 3264 pixels, that's around 8 megapixels, suggesting that Nokia will be releasing a new Nseries device at MWC with an 8 megapixel camera. We'll have to wait until Monday to find out more though.
Google Documents is a wonderful online resource, of course, but up until now spreadsheets have been rather off bounds to mobile users, with just an unfriendly column-by-column view. As long as your phone has a Web-kit-based browser (e.g. iPhone, S60, G1) then there's now a whole new view, with your spreadsheets looking (roughly) as they should and with full editing. Each row can have its elements edited in one go, which is a kludge but also kind of handy. On the downside, the weight of javascript involved does mean that the page isn't that light though, and largish spreadsheets can be slow to open and manipulate. Screens below.
Ewan heads out onto the course with the golfing legend.... but this, curiously, isn't an N-Gage game - it's Java. Surprisingly, this fact doesn't affect playability and, despite somewhat rudimentary graphics, he finds that it ranks with the best golf games on the mobile platform. Here's the review of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09.
Ahead of next week's Mobile World Congress next week Symbian has issued a press release with a roll call of the latest companies who pledged their support to the Symbian Foundation. These include Atelier, Bank of America, Gemalto, HP, Imagination Technologies, Mobica, MySpace, Nanoradio AB, OMRON Software, Qualcomm, SanDisk, SESCA, SiRF Technology Inc, and Virtual Logix. This takes the number of companies endorsing the Symbian Foundation to seventy-eight. Read on for more.
CellPhoneSoft have announced, in a reversal of their previous statement, that they will be ceasing to support and develop their UIQ portfolio with immediate effect. They had pledged resources through to the end of 2009, but with rising levels of piracy and a drop in income from registrations they've pulled the plug.
This could be interesting. We (the writing staff) are under strict instructions from Rafe to not mention leaked products or services. It's long been the All About Symbian policy to discuss the official news and not comment on the rumours – after all, beyond reproducing the same spy-cam picture, rumoured specs and “it's shiny”, there's not much you can add in terms of accurate commentary. But the current wave of leaks should be seen as a good thing, in my opinion. Read on for why...
The webmail component of Mail on Ovi, which was previewed at Nokia World last year, is now live (in beta status, naturally). Along with the webmail component, you can now also use Mail on Ovi on S60 devices by adding the email address to either the built in Messaging application or the Nokia Messaging service. Mail on Ovi had previously only been available via Beta Labs on Nokia's Series 40 handsets. Mail on Ovi gives you a username@ovi.com e-mail account, based on your Ovi username, with a space quota of 1GB. Read on for more details and a short video demo...
In All About Symbian Insight 59 (AAS Podcast 112) we talk about the recent release of Google Maps 3.0 and its inclusion of the Latitude location service. We follow up with a general discussion of 'people location services' and discuss their implementation, utility and surrounding privacy issues. In the last third of the podcast we preview the forthcoming Mobile World Congress event.
