I had a small lunch time adventure today: I accidentally dropped my Nokia E71 into a raging torrent (the watery kind, not the bit kind). Aside from a chance for some quick sympathy or laughter, depending on your disposition, I thought it might be a good opportunity to refresh some of the actions you can take if this happens to you. I would also be pleased to hear your stories and recommendations for follow up action!
You may or may not remember that Nokia ran a three month programme over the summer, with almost 500 volunteers installing a small monitoring application on their phones (mainly N95s). The results from this programme have now been published and there's a slideshow of results here. No real surprises, but this sort of thing is always interesting (via Nokia Conversations)
The Future of Mobile (FoM) conference is being held in London next week. Monday sees a seminar program with a great range of speakers including Matthew Millar (Adobe) on the Open Screen Project, Tom Hume (Future Platforms) on mobile platforms, and several of our favourite bloggers. The second day of the event is dedicated to a number of workshops; one of which is Symbian focused.
Have you ever looked at a feature on your phone and wondered why the heck it's there? In an editorial on the topic, All About Symbian takes a look at five functions that are perhaps no longer needed on modern handsets, yet continue to be added to new models. Your comments most welcome - should any or all of these functions be unceremoniously dropped?
Here's something to read over your morning coffee. Symbian tech supremo David Wood gave the opening address at the Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco last week, in which he pondered the role of smartphones in 2013, looked at the complexities of modern phone OS and (not unnaturally) referred to Symbian's role in how the future will pan out. It's a lengthy but good read and it's now online in full on David's blog.
Opera Mini just went up to v4.2, in beta form at least, with new Skins support, faster servers, compatibility with the mobile version of YouTube and Opera Desktop note syncing. Opera also announced that Opera Mini is being used by 20 million unique monthly users worldwide. Read on for more.
In our last video interview snatched from the floor at the Smartphone Show 2008, in AAS video podcast 36, I chat to George Henne from NS Basic and Lew Shepherdson from StyleTap about their programming tools and Palm runtime for S60 phones.
Call this a quirky weekend item if you like, but the humble paper clip came to my rescue today and I thought I'd share what happened. After a week trialling the Nokia N96, I'd become really attached to its kick stand, enabling it to prop itself up for comfortable 'by your side' video watching. How could I apply this to my other S60 smartphones? Read on...
Very interested to hear about the Bergamot Project. Their Swim tool has just been released for S60 and enable automated synchronisation (at long last) with your chosen sync server (e.g. GooSync, Ovi). Only thing is that it's unsigned and you'll have to used Symbian's online signing tool to sign it for your specific phone. More comments and links by Ricky Cadden here.
Canalys latest stats are in and their commentary makes for interesting reading. Notable highlights are that the whole market rose 28%, year on year, not surprisingly, with smartphones now comprising 13% of the entire phone market. Nokia (No. 1 still) looks like it's got a fight on its hands generally though, with Apple being the big overall winner, up from 4% to 17%, thanks to the initial surge when the iPhone 3G was launched, while Nokia has slipped from 51% to 39%. Canalys believe Nokia will rally with the 5800 and N96 for Q4 though, and that RIM will rally back into the no. 2 spot with their Storm.
Year after year, handheld and phone companies make the same mistake, releasing buggy and incomplete products to market and then having to back pedal and fight fires for the next 12 months. Back when I was in industry, our company had a motto: "Right First Time". Now, I know phones are complex devices, but there's still got to be a better way. Read on....
In case you haven't got time to read through my AAS reviews of the Nokia N96 and LG KT-610, here are easy-to-digest video versions, courtesy of The Phones Show programme 68, out now. Use the RSS feeds on the page if you wish, or click through to the higher quality version on YouTube. The low-res version is also embedded below.
The application/service Nokia Friend View, which has been made available on Nokia Beta Labs today, is a combined location and micro-blogging application. It allows you to share your location (automatically using GPS or network-based location or manually) with your friends and see where they are, or at least where they were when they last posted a status update/post. Screens, details and thoughts below. Of particular note is that it has both a Web component (for desktop access) and also that it works on any S60 phone and not just Nokia devices.
If you care to go into Download! on your S60 phone and use 'Refresh', you'll see a maintenance note from Nokia saying that the system will be down all weekend. A sign that a major overhaul is afoot? Let's hope so. Comments welcome if you know any more info on this....
There's an interesting little piece by Chris Walters here, talking about his journey from Nokia N82 to the T-Mobile Android G1 and back again - hurriedly, when faced by appalling hardware and build quality. Seems he liked the general interface though....
