I've been reviewing Magi-Lines, one of ZingMagic's latest round of puzzle and strategy game conversions. It may not have 3D baddies or swooshing sound effects, but Magi-Lines is as brain-stretching as puzzle games go and it works superbly on every single Symbian-based platform.
Here is the second AAS Week in Review. Recognising that it's easy to miss a few days and fall behind with what's new on All About Symbian, we do a weekly round-up of new contents and news on the site in the last 7 days. If you're really pushed for time, this is the weekly list of articles and links to check out.
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?
According to an interview on Gamasutra, Nokia is planning to launch its next generation of games across its latest S60 smartphone range in the Spring of 2007, and a number of "gaming-oriented" smartphone models will also be made available later, possibly in 2008. The gaming models would still be S60 smartphones, as the original N-Gage was, but they would have landscape screens and hardware accelerated graphics. The fate of the N-Gage name is unclear however.
Proudly presenting the first AAS Week in Review. Recognising that it's easy to miss a few days and fall behind with what's new on All About Symbian, we're going to do a weekly round-up. If you're really pushed for time, this is the weekly list of articles and links to check out.
Christopher Rydberg, our regular N-Gage hard core reviewer, has played X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse to death and delivers a very positive verdict for all N-Gage gaming fans.
So the media welcome Sony's online distribution of old PlayStation games, but have poured scorn on Nokia's attempt to do the same with old N-Gage titles? Ewan points out this contradiction and looks forward to vindication of Nokia's strategy when the 'N-Gage platform' becomes mature.
The allTunes mobile client, which allows access to the allTunes music service (a service similar to iTunes), has been updated. The new version allows access to full song previews, account log in, and full track music download. The allTunes client is available for S60 1st, 2nd and 3rd Edition and UIQ 2.x phones.
Despite our review from a couple of days ago, you don't need a separate application to keep track of World Cup events online - in this overview, Ewan describes the links to use to get the same information within your browser for an even lower cost in terms of GPRS data.
Nokia has made all its current gen first-party N-Gage games available for purchase via a download service. The games are paid for on Nokia's Software Marketplace website, downloaded to the user's PC, then transferred by the user to a MMC memory card, after which they work exactly as if the games had been bought at retail. This is strictly for the currently available for the original N-Gage and the N-Gage QD. It's not related at all to the Next Gen gaming platform (or any NSeries devices) due to appear in the first half of 2007.
Forgive another pointer to my 'Calculate your perfect smartphone' Grid, but a Javascript error was spotted, meaning that neither 3rd party software not Cost was being included in the final scores. You might want to try the grid again when you've got 5 minutes to spare...
Suddenly a lot of things that we've been watching over the last year or two have fallen into place in regards to Nokia's mobile gaming strategy. Why did Nokia persist with N-Gage for so long? Why did they spend so much money on their E3 stand? Ewan analyses their strategy and comes up with a compelling argument for N-Gage-compatible smartphones outselling PSPs and the like in the next 12 months.
Power users of S60 smartphones look away now. The rest of you, here's my tutorial on getting started and productive with Nokia's S60 predictive text system. If you're already a T9 wiz then why not print it out for your partner, colleague or mum, or anyone else still clutching on to multi-tap input and afraid to take the leap?
