In which I explain perhaps the all round best way to keep your data safe and your disruption to a minimum when it comes to repair, replacement or firmware upgrade time. I also propose it as a possible way to restore operation to a 'broken' phone. Comments welcome if you've lived or died by a variety of backup and restore procedures. Can you add to this feature?
NS-Basic, the Palm OS-sourced BASIC language toolkit which has recently been ported to work under StyleTap on S60 and UIQ, has been significantly reduced in price, apparently to attract hobbyist developers rather than just corporates. The new entry price is $99 (about £50) and the 'Pro' version (which includes things like proper application signing) is down from $700 to $300 (£150). Still quite a lot of money, but hopefully now practical for a lot more people. For examples of what a StyleTap-hosted NS Basic application looks like, see RMR Software's S60 catalog.
Ewan starts a new series of personal articles looking at how different people set up their S60 smartphones. Specifically, looking at what's on their active standby ('Home') screen. He kicks off with mobile cyber celeb James Whatley. You can comment on James' choices below, or indeed on the article series as a whole.
Yes, those clever chaps at Nokia are still trying to confuse us by offering more and more overlapping PC-hosted connectivity applications. :-) Communications Center just hit 2.0, incorporating a lot of feedback from the v1.x release. The software adds to the functionality of four of the standard PC Suite modules, namely Phone Browser, Text Message Editor, Contacts Editor and Multimedia Factory. Here's the download link if you want to give it a whirl.
Possibly my most link-packed news post ever, but.... The Phones Show 66 is now live, with a video preview of the OLED-equipped Nokia N85 and video of the 5800 XpressMusic in action (Hi-res version RSS feed). It sparked comments on YouTube too, with Paul commenting that in Japan they have phones like the SoftBank 920sc, with OLED screen, 3x optical zoom AND Xenon flash. I'm impressed. And viewer Micky turns out to be making videos of his own, prototyping a wearable N95 body-cam. And I haven't even had breakfast yet...
One of the cornerstones of modern social networks is the status message, “what are you doing right now,” and other similar examples. Once you join your second network, keeping these updates current is usually a mess of API accesses, or using third party services such as Ping.FM (the recommended approach). Now you can forget about typing your updates, as voice to text purveyors SpinVox announce a new service with Ping.FM to let up to 30 networks know what you're up to.
Some interesting noises from the music industry over the weekend, and this morning's Guardian ties it in with Nokia's Comes With Music (Discord Over The Phone). In short, musical artists are worried that the labels will not pass on enough of the proceeds from online music back to them. To that end, they have launched the Featured Artists Coalition. But what does this mean to the digital music landscape? Read on for my thoughts...
In the latest part in my phone camera series, I put the five top camera-equipped smartphones to the test, evaluating their still photo results under a variety of scenarios (landscape, night, dim, macro, etc). Which really is the best? And will the winning phone be made in Finland? I look at the Nokia N82, N95 and N93, plus the Samsung G810 and i8510... [WARNING: Broadband essential, the article includes a fair number of example images]
In an extended edition of the All About Symbian Podcast (Insight #42) we reflect on the announcements out of last week's Nokia Remix Event in London. There's some a general discussion of the tone of the event, but the meat of the podcast focuses on Nokia's first S60 touch handset, the Nokia 5800 MusicXpress, before moving on to Nokia's new Comes with Music service.
...In the UK Mobile Choice Consumer Awards, apparently. It won best phone and best smartphone, although best camera phone was also Symbian OS-powered, the awesome Samsung i8510 - of which more in an editorial tomorrow. 'Reader's choice' went to the iPhone - of course(!) Here's the full list of winners.
Only two and a half weeks until the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, then. Which promises to be the most interesting one for years, what with the Symbian Foundation and competition from RIM, Apple, Google, etc. Anyway, there's a new Flickr group set up for you to share photos taken at the show, you might want to bookmark it and contribute your own photo-finds. There will also be an official AAS photo stream from the event, as usual, of course. More details to come...
Mobile magazine is reporting that Sony Ericsson intends to close its flagship London store, quoting 'market conditions don't make it appropriate'. A shame, but you may remember my sorry experience there a while ago. It's not really surprising that the store failed to make a profit, in all honesty.
Google has soft-launched Picasa Web Albums for S60, making available an optimised version of the service via their usual m.google.com starting page. There are some screenshots below. You can play slideshows, comment on other peoples' media and, of course, organise your photos into albums. Note that not all the functions seemed to work as I wrote this - maybe some switches have yet to be thrown!
All you can listen to, including Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell! Comes With Music is here and it's time to bring out the Cassandras and explain why it's such a bad idea. We don't have any Cassandra's to hand though, so Ewan will have to suffice.
Today sees the formal unveiling on S60 5th Edition. The new version of S60, built on Symbian OS 9.4, adds touch enablers to the platform, which means it is possible for licensees to create devices that use finger touch and/or stylus interaction. Other additions and improvements include the new sensor framework (adds easy integration of sensors, such as accelerometers into the platform) updated web technologies (WebKit version updated, Flash Lite 3 as standard) and enhanced multimedia functionality (support for widescreen displays, image and video editors as standard). Read on for more details.
