It's black, it's a candy-bar with pencil-thin keys, it's got Wi-Fi, a GPS and everything else but the kitchen sink. And yet it's not the (black) Nokia N82, we're talking Samsung and their new SGH-i550 reviewed right here. Does it match up to Nokia's N or Eseries? And, with generic S60 on board rather than an extended-for-their-own-use Nokia variant, does the i550 suffer?
A few weeks back, GooSync (online backup host and sync agent into Google) announced support for Tasks, but it couldn't cope with the way S60 3rd Edition bundled to-dos into Calendar. That changed a few minutes ago as a revised Tasks module just went live, handling full S60 to-do synchronisation into GooSync, including categories, descriptions, etc. Seems to work well, though note that it's not available for freebie GooSync users - you need to have plumped for the £20/year Premium service.
No, not that sort of pleasure. We're talking geek pleasure. I respond (hopefully with a voice of reason) to the S60 3rd Edition hackers over at Symbian Freak and to the hyped headlines that have started to appear around the world. And if you've no idea what I'm talking about, just move on, you're not missing much.
This Samsung SGH-i550 image gallery is a teaser ahead of our full review (now published above). The i550 is Samsung's top of the range S60 phone. It has a candy bar form factor and features a large 2.6 inch screen, a 3.0 megapixel AF camera, WiFi and HSDPA connectivity and an integrated GPS.
EA Mobile has released an official version of Tetris for the new N-Gage platform. Is it up to scratch in these 21st century days? Head on over to All About N-Gage's Tetris review to find out.
Ofcom has cleared the use of certain mobile phone based services in flying aircraft, reports the BBC. This isn't the end of the story, as other regulatory bodies (such as the UK's Civil Aviation Authority) will also need to give clearance. In my view, we can expect to see picocell enabled aircraft offer a roaming service (which will allow the Airlines to generate revenue from in-flight calls), and as per existing flight regulations, the service will be switched off below 10,000 feet.
After much expectation in the user community, the Nokia N95 just got its Flash Lite 3/Web runtime firmware update. Although not as big an update as v20 was (which introduced demand paging and transformed the speed of the device, remember), v21.0.016 is still a major firmware and well worth installing. More details and screens below...
PDA Essentials magazine, issue 73, is now out in the UK. Of specific interest is an interview with Mark Loughran, sales director of Nokia UK, in which he states that Nokia should sell 35 million GPS-enabled smartphones this year. That's er.... a lot. Mark mentions the 6220 Classic as important in achieving this goal. More from issue 73 below, including their Sony Ericsson W960i review.
In Insight #18 (AAS Podcast 67) Rafe, Ewan and Steve talk about this week's news (N-Gage First Access closing and Comes with Music). Rafe and Steve discuss their first impressions of the Samsung SGH-i450 and Samsung SGH-i550 (S60 phones) and afterwards Ewan talks about how he recorded and broadcast video on his trip to the USA.
And now on AAS, some facts, numbers and percentages from over the Easter Weekend. One in three mobiles will be smart in five years times, it is one in ten today (ABI Research); Nokia continues to rule the mobile web browser as their webcore based browser takes 0.25% of the total global browser market, the much trumpeted iPhone manages 0.06%) (Statcounter); and staying with the Finns, Nokia's growth in the US market for 2008 will have the lions share, 70%, made up of replacement sales, a slight increase on last year (Reuters).
Dubbed the 'poor man's N95', how does the budget Samsung i450 stack up? Pretty well for the price, actually. Rafe'll have an in-depth textual review here soon, but in the meantime I've done a video review in Smartphones Show 55, out today. There's also iPhone AppStore/Download! chat from AAS regular Matt Radford and a video version of my push GMail walkthrough.
Thanks to Ricky Cadden for pointing us towards the brand new beta of OwnSkin's Professional Theme Creator. It's a 100% online theme creation application for S60 smartphones, i.e. no messing around with Java tools or having to install an SDK. Be patient while it's loading up, it'll take a minute or so to load into your desktop browser but the end result's well worth it. Finished themes can be shared directly or simply downloaded as SIS files for your device.
Will the incredibly popular Y-Browser file manager ever get to the big 1.0? Somehow I doubt it, but in the meantime note that Y-Browser's now up to v0.88, released yesterday, with tweaked design, bug fixes (especially to help SP2 compatibility), menu shortcut accelerators, wildcard file selection, file association settings added, plus a proper plug-in manager. It's all a (fabulous and) free download over at DrJukka.
Officially, the recent N-Gage beta testing phase (aka "First Access") was only open to N81 owners. However, some people managed to find unofficial ways for other phones to take part as well. In recognition of this, the beta test feedback survey has been opened up to non-N81 owners as well, which means they'll also get a free copy of Mile High Pinball when it's released.
Never mind the debates about which is best: clamshells, candybars, sliders, and so on. There's a wider debate going on - how large should a smart mobile device be? I argue that once you get beyond a certain size, you lose the 'take it everywhere' usefulness, you sacrifice robustness and you fail to achieve mass market sales.