The popular QWERTY slider E75 has had a firmware update today, to v211.12 (from v210.12), not available over the air for me, but there via Ovi Suite and Nokia Software Update, as a 146MB download. The E75 has User Data Preservation, but backup anyway, just in case, beforehand. The update is mainly bug fixes, listed below.
The popular misconception about camera phones is that the higher the spec level, the better the photos you'll take. While I'll accept that there is correlation there, another big factor is the skill (or, more accurately, imagination and common sense) of the user. In truth, you don't have to own the current top-rated camera smartphone costing megabucks in order to turn out pleasing photos. Check out the sample photos at the top of this feature - I've got a mini-quiz for you...
Last week Qt quietly rolled out the public beta its new developer website, Qt Developer Network, which aims to provide a one-stop portal for Qt developers and consolidate resources that were previously spread across the main Qt website. It also provides a more vendor neutral destination for developers than Forum Nokia, something that could be important in helping drive adoption of the Symbian and MeeGo platforms by manufacturers other than Nokia.
Furtiv, the creators of plugins for Nokia Share Online, have announced (on their blog) a new beta version plugin to upload photos to the popular cloud storage service, Dropbox. This provides the ability for a user to synchronise their files across multiple computers, and so photos uploaded from an S60 phone to Dropbox will be available to every computer a user has Dropbox installed on. Anyone wanting to try out this new plugin just needs to go to http://furtiv.mobi with their S60 browser and select the Dropbox plugin.
Forum Nokia recently took the covers of Forum Nokia Projects (projects.forum.nokia.com), a free service providing online project hosting for collaborative software development, documentation, or any other project. The service is built on top of the open source Trac software and is fully integrated with Forum Nokia. The service includes the usual tools such as source-code browser, wiki, forums, tickets and support for three version control systems (SVN, Git, and Mercurial).
With Rafe off enjoying the British Grand Prix build up, Ewan and I recruited AAS regular David Gilson and The Phones Show Chat co-host Tim Salmon to fill his shoes for Insight 126. Scampering through the week's Symbian-related news, there's plenty to listen to, see below for the full list of topics covered.
The Symbian Podcatcher project has been in development for Symbian^1 (S60 5th Edition) for some time now, but it was announced yesterday, via Twitter, that Podcatcher has finally been backported to S60 3rd Edition. Nokia made the inexplicable decision to remove Podcasting support from their Eseries S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 phones, so the availability of this could be a breath of fresh air for the enterprise-orientated platform.
Several readers have experienced an instability with Ovi Maps 3.4 in recent weeks, resulting in seemingly random reboots, worryingly. The failsafe cure is to disable the new 'Wi-fi positioning' method in 'Settings/General/Positioning' (or 'Location/Positioning' on S60 5th Edition), and it seems like Nokia have identified at least one specific reason for Wi-Fi going doolally, see below for a quote from a service bulletin issued to their Care Points.
Playing devil's advocate, but only to a degree, Steve Litchfield turns the entire smartphone world on its head by rejecting its latest darling - large touchscreens. Ask any pundit in the mobile world about smartphones and you'll get the answer that it's all about touch. About large displays that can be caressed and programmed and manipulated with your fingers. Except that traditional, non-touch form factors have these 2010 'flagships' well and truly beat in many ways - here are the Top 10 Reasons Why Touchscreens Suck.
Thanks to CJ for letting us know of an official, slickly produced tutorial video for Nokia Messaging, demonstrating the vast number of keyboard and keypad shortcuts, on the Nokia E72 and E52 respectively. Here's the video, from Nokia India, or its embedded below for your convenience.
We tend to ignore Nokia's cheap and cheerful Series 40 platform phones here on All About Symbian, but the launch of the new C3 brought, in theory, a handset slap bang into contention with a Symbian-powered smartphone, in this case the E63, itself over a year old now. Which means that a blow by blow comparison should be very interesting - can the £80 C3 (currently a Vodafone exclusive in the UK) threaten the lowly (for the smartphone world) E63?
Steve Litchfield dons his sports gear and trials the new Sports Tracker application with Polar wireless heart rate monitor. Can this new version of an old favourite, in conjunction with some Bluetooth accessory magic, help you improve your workouts, whether walking, cycling or jogging? (Short answer: Yes. With bells on!)
David Gilson looks in depth at Bolt, a Java proxy-based web browser for all phones that claims desktop-class browsing, a degree of social integration and both Flash and HTML 5 video support. This latter seems to be the only feature that really impressed David though, with Bolt's overall operation seeming stilted and clumsy in comparison to Opera Mini, its nearest competitor.
In All About Symbian Insight 125, we welcome David Gilson to the podcast for the first time. This week we round up a lot of news including a rallying cry from Nokia's Anssi Vanjoki, details on SEE 2010, firmware updates for the E71, E66, N97 and N97 mini, SkyFire's market retreat, Nokia 5230 pricing and more. In the main part of the podcast David tell us about his experiences with the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro, Ewan talks about The Big Roll in Paradise and Rafe reports back from a 3UK briefing. You can listen to AAS Insight 125 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Another day, more major firmware updates from Nokia, this time for even older devices, again rolling Maps 3.3 with free navigation into the ROMs - excellent to have. v500.21.009 for the two year old E71 and E66 also brings the very latest editing version of Quickoffice and latest Ovi Store client, plus bumps to Music player and to Lotus Notes Traveler, among the usual minor improvements and fixes.