Steve and Rafe have been thinking about the reach of S60 smartphones, wondering if many users need to know about S60 itself and justifying the low sales of many third party applications, before concluding that the platform itself is more for operator and manufacturer benefit.
Steve shows how easy it is to publish your thoughts to the world with this 'How to' on blogging from your smartphone, using nothing more than the built-in Contacts and Messaging applications.
Steve reviews TrafficTV, which claims to give any smartphone owner in the UK access to traffic hold-up information and exclusive roadside CCTV images from trouble spots. Summary: surprisingly useful and genuinely clever, but only within its coverage area.
You may have heard about Widsets and widgets and the fact that they're something to do with Nokia? Rafe explains all and reviews the current Widsets application. Is it compelling for smartphones or just a way of extending non-Symbian features phones?
Steve compares the important, but often ignored, metric of standby time between a i-mate JAM (Windows Mobile 5) and a Nokia 9500 (Symbian OS 8). He comes away with an interesting result which may bear on purchase decisions for true mobile warriors.
The onslaught of major S60 titles ported over to Symbian OS 9 and S60 3rd Edition seems to have started in earnest. With v3.20, the much-recommended SmartMovie is now fully 3rd Edition-compatible, as well as fixing rebooting problems on Series 80 and 90 communicators.
We've been adding to the AllAboutSymbian Support section. It's now got hundreds of well-crafted(!) entries and is well worth a trawl if you hit a problem with your smartphone. All Symbian OS-powered platforms are covered.
There's a new release of Opera Mini now available. Version 2 of the most popular mobile browser in the world adds favourite-speed-dial, better navigation and extra search engine selection. The full press release follows.
Hey, listen up! There's a whole new release (1.69) of OggPlay on the loose for all S60, Series 80 and Series 90 users. So that's basically the whole Symbian world apart from UIQ users (who are still on 1.1). S60 3rd Edition users read on...
Another blast from the past, perhaps, but if still have any old Psion 5mx, Revo or Series 7 netBook palmtops, note that Opera has now been made freeware for each of these. See PScience5 for the appropriate ZIPs and instructions.
Opera Mini, the proxy browser that I declared in my review would 'change the way you browse, the sign of a killer application' seems to be going from strength to strength, according to Opera's latest press release and observing a number of industry deals, ranging from added-value branding and support from Onspeed Mobile to a variety of redistribution deals. Opera Mini currently serves up over 4 million pages a day to mobile and smartphone users.
SmartMovie, always a competent (though quirky) video conversion system for Symbian-based devices, has recently embraced the terrific CoreMP4 codec and boasts much better performance. Steve Litchfield reviews the result, tested in this case on the Nokia 9500 and N70.
Perhaps stung by criticism of the slow frame rate of previous versions, Lonely Cat Games has released a whole new generation of SmartMovie for all Symbian-based devices, with a new MPEG-4 codec and claims of far better performance, up to 25 frames per second in some cases.
In an open letter to developers, Steve Litchfield muses on the unique requirements of software on the smartphone (compared to the limited restrictions when run on a standalone PDA). Nobody ever said this would be easy, but hard work will reap rewards.
