James Cracknell, a double Olympic gold medalist, is rowing, cycling and swimming the 1,431 miles between the UK and Africa in a 'Cross-Continent Challenge' as part of the Sports Relief fundraising efforts. He's being guided by a Nokia N82 which he's also using to listen to music and send picture messages to his website.
The fine chaps over at Nseries WOM World are holding a get together at the Old Crown in Holborn (London) tomorrow (Wednesday 5th). Further details are available here on the WOM World site or on Facebook here. Festivities include camera tossing and a mysterious competition.
Following on from our textual preview of the Nokia N78, here's a comprehensive hands-on video preview of the device, covering all the major areas using video and pictures from MWC 2008. The N78, as the entry level Nseries device, looks set to replicate the sales sucess of its immediate predecessor, the Nokia N73. Video (podcast 27) below the break.
Nokia has announced at CeBIT that it will make Microsoft's Silverlight (think Flash clone) available for S60, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering 'next-generation' media experiences and rich interactive applications. Microsoft will demonstrate Silverlight on S60 during the opening keyote at their MIX08 conference on March 5 and availability to developers is intended to be later this year. Read on for more details and analysis.
Nokia has announced the 6650, an S60 phone which will be available exclusively to T-Mobile International Customers. The 6650 has a 2 megapixel camera (with LED flash), integrated AGPS, a microSD card slot to supplement the 30MB of internal memory, FM radio and HSDPA connectivity. Rather than using Nokia's own Ovi services it will use T-Mobile services. The 6650 will be available in the third quarter on a number of European T-Mobile networks. More details below.
Nokia has announced the launch of a new S60 smartphone, the '6124 classic', in conjunction with Vodafone in most markets, calling it a 'compact multimedia device offering Vodafone customers faster and easier access to all of Vodafone's high speed Internet and entertainment services'. It is good to see this sort of collaboration happening and to see S60 hitting the true mainstream yet again. Read on for more information.
It's Monday and it's time for our new Insight podcast. In number 15 (aka AAS podcast 63), we look at news, geotagging privacy concerns, recent handset designs from Nokia and Ewan reports on truly mobile software. Give it a listen on the way home from work. Here's the RSS feed if you want to subscribe regularly.
CorePlayer has been inching up to a major new release, 1.2, for a while now. Registered users can upgrade to a special 'preview' version of 1.2, which includes better support for file type associations, streaming video, plus support for Speex and GSM audio. (via p@sco)
In times of inconsistent quality, it's good to reflect back on devices that have oozed quality, charisma or style, and sometimes even all three. In "Top 10 - Classic Smartphones", I count down the significant stars of the Symbian OS world from the last 7 years. Controversial? Biased? Probably. But I'll bet there are four or five of these on everybody's own personal top 10 from the same period! Comments and your own picks are more than welcome!
NS Basic, the cross-platform Basic programming language that was announced for Symbian OS at last year's Smartphone Show, seems to be finally coming together. NS Basic has now put a page up, listing it as 'coming soon' and with a bullet list of features. It'll work with both S60 and UIQ, too, which is good to see, though it's apparently implemented on top of the StyleTap Palm OS emulator for Symbian. If you've got as many concerns over performance as I had, check out their benchmarks page too.
Thanks to SWB for reminding us that Symbian's Open Signed Online starts next week for those without Publisher IDs, in beta at least and with some throttling limits in place. We haven't been featuring every last 'unsigned' utility that's flooded the blogosphere in the last 3 months because, basically, the self-signing has been too hard for the average user. Will the new system improve matters? Comments welcome.
Vodafone have confirmed, following initial reports that the Samsung i560 would be taken up for the UK as a Vodafone exclusive, that they "won’t be ranging this device. This device was tested with our new Sat Nav software and we weren’t happy with its performance." This was the only one of Samsung's new S60 smartphones that we had a hope of seeing in the UK, although the i450 and i550 are available in Germany and Italy.
Great to see the Nokia N82 getting some professional TV coverage, here on G4 on their Gadget pr0n (sic) show. Despite the American focus(!), the presenters seemed to get the hang of the N82's strengths - well worth a watch. (via Lonely Bob)
Oxygen Software have been plugging away at their Phone Manager product for years, and they've just announced a major revamp, rebrand and relaunch. OxyCube is released yesterday and is compatible with a wide range of handsets and provides syncing and file browsing functions. (via SymbianOne)
Apparently there's a new firmware update out for Nokia 6120 Classic owners, taking you to v4.21, reports Ricky. There's UDP too, so you shouldn't have to worry about backups and restores. Better to back up just in case though?