News reaches us from Norway that Opera, the mobile browser that many people turn to on a variety of mobile platforms, now has 105 million active mobile users every month. Made up of 90.4 million on the (mostly) java-based Opera Mini and another 15 million on Opera Mobile. That’s a huge achievement, so congratulations to everyone in Oslo that worked towards this. In addition, a new bespoke version of each for Symbian^3 smartphones is to be shown off at MWC next week.
While the BBC News App in the Ovi Store is little more than a web shortcut to open up the mobile site in your browser, it’s a good decision to make an application like this available. Yes, it doesn’t take much to type in “B B C” in the browser, but providing an icon on the screen and in the Ovi search engine, reinforces the idea of content on the phone. It’s also a potential first step to a dedicated BBC News application to sit alongside the iPlayer integration in the UK.
Users of the third party Mail for Exchange service, NuevaSync, may be interested to know that they have added a new feature allowing for read-only synchronisation to mobile phones. Currently, the feature is only available via the NuevaSync Labs page, as it is still in development. This feature will be useful to anyone using NuevaSync and finding that their device is duplicating or modifying data in other undesirable ways. Users have fine control over read-only access, being able to set it on a per-data-type basis, for each device they are synchronising with NuevaSync.
Open up the Ovi Store client on your Symbian^3 smartphone and you should have a mandatory update available, which offers 'full Arabic Support, better installation support for Qt-based apps and numerous fixes', plus a new blue/green startup screen, miscellaneous other small fixes and, significantly, for all phones of all vintages, an upgrade (at Nokia's end) to their Search algorithms.
Nimbuzz have updated their Symbian client to version 3.0.1. This version uses zlib compression, allowing Nimbuzz to use on average 50% less data, and as the headline suggests, a 70% maximum saving has been recorded. Another benefit of end to end compression is that login times are noticeably faster. Also included with the new Nimbuzz update are several new features. Users can enhance their privacy by using the new invisible status mode, and by limiting instant messages to only be received from existing instant message contacts.
Nokia have put in place plans to close the all-you-can-eat version of the Ovi Music store. Originally called Comes with Music, and currently branded as Ovi Music Unlimited, the service was available with a select number of handsets, including the X6 and N97 Mini. Nokia have no plans to supply this handset/service combination beyond the end of this year to the majority of territories.
Skype has announced that it plans to acquire Qik. Qik provides software which allows you to instantly capture and share (live stream) video on a mobile phone. Qik is available for more than 200 mobile phones, including most Symbian devices. Skype say they share "a common purpose of enriching communications with video" with Qik, but Qik's technology, focused around optimising video transition over mobile networks, will also give Skype's mobile aspirations a boost.
Just in time to meet 'released in 2010', Nokia's all-singing, all-dancing Ovi Suite has moved out of beta and into production code, becoming available as a 73MB download via 'Check for updates' in your existing PC or Ovi Suite installations (screenshot below). The main improvements for v3.0(.0.284) are to the Music and Maps modules, but there are also facelifts for most aspects and the inevitable bug fixes.
Over on A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch is taking a closer look at one of the current key elements of the modern smartphone, the web browser. Pulling numbers from the Stat-Counter Service, he not only points out that the leading browser is Opera, but that Nokia’s web-kit effort is sitting nicely on 17% of the global market, compared to Opera and Safari on 22% and Blackberry on 19%. Android, by comparison, is on 11%. What does that mean for website designers?
Nokia’s Beta Labs have updated their “bots” to be compatible with the full range of Symbian^3 devices, alongside some bug fixes and changes to the existing version for the N97, N97 mini and C6-00. The Bots, which are widgets that sit on your homescreen, will firstly record your behaviour, and then present options which should be suitable for you at that moment in time – the Contacts bot will now show you your four most used contacts, not just on overall usage, but on how often you contact people from a certain location.
Marko Ahtisaari, SVP of industrial design at Nokia, was one of the guest speakers at this year's LeWeb Conference. He covered topics from dominant designs of smartphone user interface and collective intelligence with mobile devices. He outlined why he sees that there's plenty of work to be done in the world of mobile user experience, particularly in having mobile devices actually demand less of our attention. In his view, iOS is "beautifully elegant and fantastically constrained", while Symbian and Android actually share the same design pattern but differ greatly in their business models. Read on for a in-depth account of the speech and Q&A session.
Skype have just announced a new version of Skype for Symbian, with a revamped user interface and support for Symbian^3 devices. This new version (1.50 build 15) supports the SILK codec for higher quality calls. As part of the user interface update, Skype say they have improved support for larger screens, and made it easier to add contacts and photos, and make status updates. We have also noted the UI has new instant message notification pop-ups. Read on for screenshots and our initial test results.
Friend of All About Symbian, Asri Al Baker from i-symbian.com, has done it again. As mentioned in this week's Insight Podcast, he has just published two more WRT widgets for launching advanced mobile website versions of Google services. This time he has created launchers for GTalk, Google's instant messaging service, and Google Calendar. These come after Asri's other widgets for GMail and Google Reader (which we reported on here and here). The websites utilised by these launchers are the default views found on iOS and Android browsers, but are available to any mobile browser, if you know the right URL's. Read on for screenshots and more.
Nokia Diagnostics is a little suite of on-device tests to help exercise core functionality of your Symbian smartphone and report back. It's a nice idea, driven by Nokia Beta Labs, and has had a big update (to v1.74) today, but only for S60 5th Edition phones (e.g. N97, 5800) - it seems that the S60 3rd Edition version is no longer to be updated. And Symbian^3 phones are also out of luck - so far - a version is promised for these 'soon'.
Following the news that it would now become a licensing body, the Symbian Foundation has announced that all of its websites will close down on December 17th 2010. After that date, every site under the symbian.org domain, including developer.symbian.org, horizon.symbian.org, ideas.symbian.org and blog.symbian.org, will no longer be online. In addition, it has been said that the Twitter and Facebook accounts for the Symbian Foundation "are also likely to be discontinued". Read on for further details and ramifications.
