In the second part of a Friday game double-bill, Attila Katona reviews Robo, also for (nearly) every Symbian OS platform known to man. It's a level-based puzzler in isometric 3D and Robo is really rather good in its cute, pixellated way.
It seems I just can't keep up with the news today! Google just upgraded their free Maps for Mobile client (www.google.com/gmm on your smartphone) to v2.0.3, adding a 'virtual GPS' feature (thanks Stefan), in which your location on non-GPS devices is estimated based on cell tower information. Google is an amazing company. Also (unrelated), they're investing in green energy in a big way, yet more brownie points from me.
Calling all Flash Lite programmers- to promote the upcoming launch of the Playyoo Games Portal, they are offering a prize fund of $25,000 (with $10,000 to the winner) for your Flash Lite games. Playyoo is hoping to be a community destination for players and programmers of mobile games, and rather obviously given the competition based around using Flash Lite.
Popular Web 2.0 ‘microblogging’ site Twitter has put in place SMS usage limits for UK users . Each month you’ll only be able to receive a maximum of 250 SMS messages to your handset (although there are no limits on using it over IM or the Web). The change is likely due to the cost of SMS traffic on the parent company; unlike America, UK customers do not pay to receive text, so there’s no opportunity to do a revenue share with the outbound messages.
ShoZu has rightly been applauded for providing a quick and easy route to uploading media (including pictures to Flickr and videos to YouTube) from your handset. They’ve now introduced “round-tripping” into the latest version of the application (downloadable from www.shozu.com ), which allows you to pull down pictures from your Contact’s Flickr streams (not just your own) and also to stream video from your favourite YouTube content.
Nokia Ad Business today announced an agreement with Handmark to provide a mobile advertising solution for its Pocket Express mobile data application. Nokia Ad Business is a marketplace for mobile advertising, it was formed out of the fusion of Nokia's recent Enpocket acquisition together with the existing Nokia Ad Service and Nokia Advertising Connector. We expect to see further such announcements in the future as more services move to an advertising funded model.
It has been informallyannounced that a PHP and MySQL implementation is going to be added to Nokia's Web Server software Raccoon. PHP is an open source scripting language usually used to create dynamic web pages. There will also a number of PHP extension modules that provide access to the core functionality of the phone. Read on for more thoughts.
Version 2.1 of Nokia's free Mail for Exchange is now out, with support for the N81 and N95 8GB, plus auto-configured Heartbeat and with the Company Directory application (supporting the Global Address List lookup feature) now available as a standalone application via its own .SIS file. More details and links below.
Yes, you know all about S60 games and you know about the upcoming N-Gage titles, but what about all those games tucked away in publisher folders inside your Download! application? Medal of Honour, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, etc? In the interests of experimentation, I bought a batch and here report back on J2ME games via Download! Your comments welcome, as always!
I'm still filing this under 'Nokia was mad not to have released the inclinometer plug-in months ago', but.... Aha, someone's produced an app that finally uses the N95's built-in accelerometer to do something really, really useful, day to day. Yep, it's your very own light sabre. Run the app, press the d-pad button and challenge a new iPhone owner to a duel (via Ricky Cadden).
After one of the longest beta test programmes I can remember, Opera Mini 4 finally got finished. Head for mini.opera.com on your phone or www.operamini.com on your PC. Highly recommended. Some more details below, but essentially it's a proxy-based web browser that runs under Java but compresses content hugely and thus saves time and money.
In one of the most significant announcements of the year Nokia and Vodafone today stated their intention to launch a range of Nokia handsets with both Nokia's Ovi services and Vodafone's own integrated suite of service. Nokia's Ovi services include Nokia Maps, Nokia Music (including the Music store), Nokia Photos and the N-Gage gaming platform. Additional web based services are also likely to emerge over the next 6 months.
Both Ewan and I caught up with David Quin from ALK at the recent Smartphone Show, to find out about the new CoPilot Live 7, becoming available for both S60 and UIQ. My video podcast was something of a lighting disaster and has been scrapped, but fear not for Ewan has a complete interview with David in AAS audio podcast 44.
