E90 owner Attila Katona has a problem. Since upgrading to the E90, he's found that most native S60 games don't make good use of the device's huge screen. With that in mind, here's a record of his mission to seek out games, from any source, that do use the E90's display more effectively.
You'll remember Nokia's newish Sports Tracker widget, whereby you can embed your journeys and media into your web page? Well, following on from the news that Sports Tracker itself can handle videos (taken along the exercise route), the official widget has now been upgraded too. The current name is now 'Maps+Photography+Video' - something snappier is desperately needed.
The Doctor Who brand may conjure up a vision of a game that's rather different to the one reviewed here. Top Trumps Doctor Who is a new commercial game for mobiles and we couldn't resist setting our resident time lord expert onto it in order to evaluate..... evaluate... evaluate...
In this article Steve explains, step-by-step, how you can use your Nseries phone to create a time-lapse video using the sequence mode of the camera application and a quick bit of video editing. He has also included a quick example of his own, but we would like to see your examples too.
The European Commission has announced unconditional approval of Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech. Nokia can now proceed with the final stages of acquisition, which are expected to be completed quickly. Trolltech's Qt, a cross platform graphics/GUI tookit, is the principal reason for the acquisition and will be an important part of Nokia's cross platform development strategy.
I can't really believe I'm writing a news story about Calculator, but it's so ubiquitous and built-in to well over 100 million S60 handsets, so.... News from Nokia Conversations is that Calculator is about to get replaced - by a ported version of the Calculator in Nokia's even-bigger-selling Series 40 handsets. The update should appear first in Beta Labs for us all to try, apparently.
If you've ever wondered what use Nokia's built-in IM (Instant Messaging) application was, then you're in good company. However, the truth is that it just needs TLC and a good online gateway. As 'Talk about Nseries' reports, Mobjab is a new service that lets Nokia's IM integrate with a number of popular IM systems, including AOL and Windows Live Messenger.
Over at All About N-Gage, we've been reviewing Snakes - no, not the recently released N-Gage official 'Snakes Subsonic', but the existing N-Gage-compatible Snakes original, looked at in the light of the current N-Gage platform releases. In short, Snakes was just about the perfect game when Ewan reviewed it a while back and it still holds its own today, at every level. And sets the bar high for N-Gage games themselves.
Symbian's annual show, the Smartphone Show will take place later this year, October 21st to 22nd, at Earls Court in London. New this year is the Mobile DevFest a developer focused event from Symbian that runs in parallel to the main show. Symbian has issued a 'call for papers' for developers who are interested in speaking at the event. Fame and glory await.
Just to prove they were listening during all those S60 Summit seminars, Rafe and Ewan focus in this feature on S60's Web Run-Time (WRT), which was heavily promoted at the event. They cover what it is, where it's going and what it will mean for developers and end users. In addition, Rafe recorded this podcast, talking to Ganesh Sivaraman about WRT and all things widgetey.
Nokia are really pushing on with development of Maps 2.0 at the moment. There's a flashy new promo video on the main Nokia Maps page, plus a new build of the software: v2.0 build 2204 - can you spot anything new or changed?
There's a great post by Daniel Rochas over on Forum Nokia, posted yesterday, discussing the pros and cons of using Python for developing applications for S60, with links, resources, caveats and more. In short, Daniel thinks that Python 'brings back the fun' into development. Also of note on the same site is a new and interactive eLearning tutorial for PyS60. Both highly recommended.
You'll recall that the Nokia E90 Communicator recently received a major official firmware update, to v210.34.75, as reported by me here. This brought the E90 into a pretty mature state apart from the fact that Web's Flash integration seemed horribly broken, but only for some people. Read on for my investigation...
If you run N-Gage games on a Nokia N95, its multimedia keys automatically turn into gaming keys equivalent to those on the N81 or N96. There still seem to be a lot of people unaware of this, or even claiming that we're mistaken, so we've done a very short video showing this feature in action. Click here to see it...
FOAM, or Find On A Map, the mobile phone tracking system that works on all S60 smartphones, has just had a big update, the version on the main FOAM web site now supports the internal GPS of the Nokia N95, N82 and E90 (etc), plus there have been several major web site-side functionality improvements since our review last year, including location alarms and 'geofencing'. The optional donation is now more of an enforced donation, but it's still incredibly cheap for what it provides, keeping track of your entire family or workforce to within GPS accuracy.