In All About Symbian Podcast 96 (Insight #43) Steve, after an E90 firmware update, asks why he can have a better experience than Nokia Software Updater. We also talk about about recent content on All About Symbian before moving on to some thoughts and reflections on S60 5th Edition with some special attention for backwards compatibility.
Ewan back-fills our review section with a detailed look at the third major product in one of his specialist categories: live video streaming. Kyte.TV Mobile Producer impresses from the start and in some ways is the most polished of the three (Kyte, Qix, Flixwagon). [Gentle warning: viewing this review will require you to get up close and personal with Mr Spence.... :-) ]
While the desktop computers got their 'browser war' in the nineties, it never really took off in the mobile space. Not that we're restricted to one browser - Opera, Skyfire, WebCore/Safari and various proxy powered java browsers are all available to us – it's just that there was never a bloodbath or legal threats. Anyway, Mozilla may be joining the browser party sooner than we think, according to reports in The Mercury News (via MoCoNews).
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.
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.
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!
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.
Today, in London, at its Remix event, Nokia formally launched its Comes with Music service offering. Comes with Music (CwM) lets you buy a Nokia device that includes a year of unlimited access (downloads) to tracks from the Nokia Music Store. After the year is up you can keep any previously downloaded music. CwM will launch first in the UK later this month on the Nokia 5310 Xpress Music, with the Nokia N95 8GB and Nokia 5800 Xpress Music to follow in due course. Read on for more details.
Nokia announced today that it is 'renewing its business mobility solutions and strategy'. Nokia will cease developing or marketing its own behind-the-firewall solutions. Rather than offering its own complete end-to-end solutions, Nokia will strengthen strategic partnerships and will form its enterprise offering by combining Nokia devices and applications with software solutions from companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Cisco.
Even before Apple's iPhone App Store and Google's Android Marketplace Nokia's Download! service was mediocre. Now it looks decidedly sub-standard. In this feature article Tzer2 takes a detailed look at what's wrong with Download, asks whether a third party could step in and gives some pointers about the right way to do things.
Possibly the first of several mobile chat clients to support Facebook chat, eBuddy has taken the wraps off its new Facebook support. It's Java, although Mobile Royale (who tipped me off about eBuddy) coincidentally has a challenge open for someone to write a S60 Facebook Chat client. And has anyone here tried weaving Nokia Chat in with Facebook - can it be done yet?
You may have gathered, over the years, that Ewan's a bit of a Mobipocket Reader fan. Personally, I sit there fuming wondering why the developers still haven't got round to programming a 'Find' function, but that's another rant for another day. Anyway, Ewan's penned a useful beginner's guide on how to make your own ebooks, for reading on the move and for saving huge amounts of excess book-weight when travelling.
"If music be the glue that holds nations together (c.f. the Eurovision Song Contest), then a Social Music Player should be the stuff of Peace Treaties". Or so writes Ewan Spence, wondering if Strands can pull everything from your music experience together? He slips on some lightweight headphones to find out... How good a music player is it, and how integrated is it with the online world?
Google Maps for S60 (and also the UIQ and Java versions) just got more accurate, with news that Google has significantly improved its cell tower location algorithms for its 'My location' feature ("far more accurate") to take into account tower coverage areas - hmmm... I'd assumed that these were already taken into account.... No matter, Google Maps is free, as always, at m.google.com, and this will help anyone without a GPS in their phone or in areas of poor sky visibility. (via Google Mobile)
