Steve Litchfield explores the goodies that Google Local for Mobile brings to any Symbian (or Windows Mobile, come to that) smartphone. Free mapping, aerial photography and route planning for anywhere in the world? Yup, but watch your GPRS bill...
There's always been a huge fragmentation problem with mobile games having to be tested against every possible device configuration, even with the promise of write once run anywhere of Java. So to see Symbian and Microsoft stand alongside Activision, Digital Chocolate, EA, Ideaworks, Konami, Nokia, Montavista, Samsung, SK Telecome, Square Enix, Tau Group and Texas Instruments to define and support an open gaming architecture is promising, but of course it's results that count. Lets see what happens.
Is Python a replacement for OPL on Series 60? Is Nokia on the right track by backing it? Is it easy to get started? And can you produce full standalone applications using Python? Steve Litchfield answers these questions and produces an application as concrete proof.
Neatly transplanted from 3-Lib and enhanced significantly, AllAboutSymbian is proud to present its new Support Knowledgebase (click the link or use the menu tab above).
Opera Mini, the java midlet based version of the popular mobile browser, is now officially and freely available worldwide from the Opera Mini website. We've previously reviewed the free browser and gave it the thumbs up. Full Press Release Follows
A few more Symbian related gems from CES, this time in the new Yahoo! Go service. The mobile sync section is just a small part of the service, but the Series 60 client allows you to keep Contacts, Photos and Email messages in sync with your Yahoo! account. There is also a client for Yahoo Messenger, allowing you to use Yahoo IM on your phone. In addition Yahoo Go Mobile acts as a shortcut, via bookmarks, to allow you to access many Yahoo Mobile services including games, and information (news, weather, finance movies). We'll have a more in-depth look at this next week once we've had a play.
We don't normally mention software for Windows Mobile devices, but this little gem is worth pointing out (thanks, Richard). Kai's Auto Soft Reset is a scheduling macro for Windows Mobile that will reset your device once every 24 hours to "keep it running smoothly." Discuss...
Opera has come to an agreement with Google that they will become the 'default partner' for their mobile internet browsers, with heavy integration of Google in the home screen of the browser. Is this going ot be enough to kill off the rumours of a Redmond/Oslo courtship? Didn't think so!
Steve Litchfield's discovered that Opera Mini's now alive and working and has been playing with it for a couple of days. Here's his review. Summary: it may change the way you browse on your smartphone - it will certainly chop your GPRS bill down to size...
The url http://m.gmail.com/ shows that even the decision on the namespace is right - Google's Gmail service now has a web based mail interface for small screen devices. While POP3 access has always been available, it has never been 100% reliable. While you'll still need to watch the data charges from your carrier, it should be no problem for any mobile web browser to get your mail.
Mobile Email and how to recieve it is an area which a lot of companies are working on, with mobile data and email being seen as the best area for growth in 2006. Visto are now asserting that "Microsoft has infringed upon multiple patents Visto holds regarding proprietary technology that provides enterprises and consumers with mobile access to their email and other data," and have started legal proceedings against the Redmond based Microsoft, who see email as a central plank to their mobile platform. Three patents are specifically mentioned in the full press release which follows.The issue of mobile email is a very important issue, as can be seen by Visto's other announcement of a licencing deal with NTP.
Futuremark has announced the new SPMarkJava06 benchmark for evaluating handheld devices performance in running Java applications. The benchmark includes test for the latest Java functionality (MIDP 2, CLDC 1.1, JSR 184). Read on for a quick overview and results from several Symbian devices.
As part of a new series in brief tutorials, Rafe's penned this how-to showing you how Mass Storage Synchronizer can be used to copy music from iTunes to a memory card (which you can then put in your Symbian smartphone).
Keeping track of Nokia's Open Source projects is a new site, opensource.nokia.com. It provides a single jumping off point for projects such as the new S60 browser, the Maemo Table Linux OS and S60 Python to name a few. Worth bookmarking if you're a developer.
Steve Litchfield explores the goodies that Google Local for Mobile brings to any Symbian (or Windows Mobile, come to that) smartphone. Free mapping, aerial photography and route planning for anywhere in the world? Yup, but watch your GPRS bill...
