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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fans of my ad-hoc, freeform encyclopaedia of trivia should note that the 2009 edition, v2.4 of Trivopaedia is now online, in Mobipocket or iSilo versions for all PDAs and smartphone platforms. There's also a raw, 1MB, uncompressed online version, should you feel the need. If you fancy help tidying up the code or adding data, please get in touch!
Nokia Easy Meet is a mobile collaboration tool, which has been put together by NRC (Nokia Research Centre) as a research prototype, and made available to end-users via Nokia BetaLabs. Easy Meet allows you to easily share and view content around a given subject (meeting). For example, it could be used to share a PowerPoint slide slow during a voice conference call. The advantage of Easy Meet, compared to many other solutions, is that mobile users are able to fully participate in the viewing and sharing of content.
In All About Symbian Insight 66 (AAS Podcast 124) we talk about the N-Gage platform's newest addition - Worms World Party. Then there's discussion of Google Maps 3.0.1, BBC TV streams, device colours. We finish with a discussion of the joys of older devices. You can listen to AAS Insight 66 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Interesting to see Nokia still developing their Friend View application in the light of the elephant in the room, Google Latitude (though as even that can't seem to get traction, what hope has Friend View got? - discuss). The latest build of Friend View has background notification features, in that you can leave it lurking away in the background and it will ping you when a friend gets within a customisable distance from your current location. See this Beta Labs Friend View post for the full explanation and some handy shortcuts.
Manikantan is a keen (Python and) Flash developer and has produced a prototype app, Translator, for S60 3rd Edition phones that leverages Google's recently updated language translation engine. A nice Web 2.0 example, even if it's not very polished yet. See below for screenshot and download link.
Nokia's application store, Ovi Store, is now accepting content from developers, and will launch in May. In our latest developer feature, Richard Bloor speaks to Eric John, Director of Media Product Marketing for Nokia Services, to discuss the developer proposition offered by Ovi store. There's questions on operator billing, supported content types, platform support and more.
