Popular Palm and Windows Developer Astraware (with a number of mobile phone titles, and the promise of S60 and UIQ this year) has been acquired by Handmark, the company announced this week . I've been waiting a long time for the team behind the addictive Bejeweled titles to come to Symbian OS, and they promise it's still happening in Q1 this year! Congratulations to Howard Tomlinson and the team.
Yup, it's out. A whole new version of the free Yahoo! Go! on-device portal. Version 2 was actually pretty handy, including mapping and routing and support for built-in GPS. Version 3.0 claims better email handling, more news, satellite maps, live traffic. Sounds a bit like Google's portfolio, except that here it's all in the one Java application. Worth a try? Type get.go.yahoo.com into your smartphone's browser.
In All About Symbian Insight # 7 (AAS Podcast #55) Steve, Ewan and Rafe look back at 2007 and pick out their highlights from the year. We cover the Nokia N95, a resurgent UIQ and Nokia's Ovi announcement. In the second half of the podcast we turn our attention to 2008 and make a few predictions.
I make absolutely no apologies for another brief emTube news item - a day or two can be a long time in the smartphone world! emTube just hit v1.06 , with many new language variants, new hotkeys, new user/related views, a new seek bar, search result memory, plus several bug fixes, including RotateMe compatibility. Doesn't this developer sleep?
Mark/Space is planning to bring Missing Sync to the Symbian platform. Missing Sync is a sync solution for Mac OS X users, it allows syncronisation of contacts (Apple Address Book), calendar entries (iCal), photos (iPhoto), videos (Quick Time) and music (iTunes) to and from the phone. The software supports all UIQ 3 and S60 3rd Edition phones and will be made available in Q1 2008.
Symbian has announced the improved version of Symbian Signed, which was revealed at the Smartphone Show, has now launched. Symbian Signed now comes in three flavours: Open Signed (for developer testing), Express Signed (instant online signing for $20) and Certified Signed (broadly similar to the previous iteration). Express Signed significantly lowers the cost of signing for most application developers and should result in more applications being made available.
Nokia recently released a press release about a report it had comissioned, 'A Glimpse of the Next Episode' which talked about the future of entertainment. The main trend identified was the coming of 'Circular Entertainment' (content created, edited and shared within a peer community rather than traditional media sources). Nokia have now released a number of videos featuring discussion around some of the key areas of the report. Read on for more and to view the videos.
Describing itself as the world's "first social bookmarking system completely designed and optimized for mobile phone users", PhoneFavs is new and free. In addition to the social bookmark element, there's a mobile link directory and a new "mobilizing" engine which automatically adapts standard web pages for improved viewing on smaller screen devices and, helpfully, has an 'images on/off' toggle. See below for screenshots, links and the press release.
Nokia and Telecon Italia today announced that Ovi services will be enabled on Nokia handsets, starting with the N95 8GB and N81, offered by TIM. TIM services will be offered alongside Nokia's Map, Music and Photo services. TIM joins Telefonica and Vodafone who have made similar announcements endorsing Nokia's Ovi vision.
You may remember Krisse's coverage of the addictive TibiaME, back in the summer - a massive multiplayer RPG for S60? Well, it's now had a big update, with wider J2ME compatibility, a new world, new features and over-the-air graphics upgrades. Krisse brings us a full report on what's new in TibiaME and what still needs work.
