If you haven't already, do check out All About N-Gage today as we have a huge wave of news about Nokia's S60 gaming platform. Perhaps most interesting of all is a leaked video of the upcoming Creebies game, a first party title exclusive to N-Gage which seems to be a bizarre mixture of (fluff)Friends, the Sims and Animal Crossing. Also appearing is a "Making Of" video for the N-Gage-exclusive 3D fighting game ONE.
From accelerometer enthusiast(!) Andrew Galpin comes news: "The first of Samir’s two new apps have been released to beta testers. The first one, ShakeMe (video below), allows the user to perform certain actions on their phone by Shaking it, rather than using a keypress. Currently it supports 4 modes, with more to be added in the next release! More below."
At the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Fransisco Glu Mobile and Nokia unveiled a number of new N-Gage games. The Dark Knight ties in with the new Batman movie and sees you fighting to eradicate crime in Gotham city. SPEED RACER, also tying in with an upcoming movie, is a racing game while Super Slam Ping Pong is a fight title in the style of Super K.O. Boxing.
Ahead of our device previews here are a number of image galleries, with the usual commentary, of the 8 Symbian OS powered devices which were announced last week at Mobile World Congress 2008. The Nokia N96 (high end Nseries), Nokia N78 (entry level Nseries), Nokia 6210 (navigation focused), Nokia 6220 (mid tier all rounder), Sony Ericsson G700 and G900 (the first mid tier UIQ 3 phones), Samsung G810 (camera focused high end slider) and LG KT610 (mid tier QWERTY clamshell).
In All About Symbian Insight #13 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss their first impressions of Mobile World Congress 2008. Rafe gives his impressions from the show floor while Steve and Ewan pick out their highlights from the various announcements and cover a variety of news from last week.
Handmark were promising a native S60 version of their information portal app at last year's Smartphone Show. It seems it just went live, at least for UK users. It's a 2.4MB install though, and you need to surrender phone number and postcode info before it'll do anything. As with the original Java version, you get news, sport, dictionary, weather and finance stats for free, but you need to pay for mapping and travel help (via IntoMobile)
Released as a Valentine's present is the latest build of Mobitubia, one of a handful of third party YouTube viewing applications. With the ability to download the FLV videos and watch them while offline, it's a popular choice for a number of you, and it shows the powerful nature of having a fully open platform that third parties can write applications.
Service after service, app after app, solutions keep appearing to offer media streaming (from our own hard disks or from hosted servers) over the air. But what happens when the masses start doing this and the bandwidth runs out? Is putting all our music online really the best solution? When it comes to media that's truly mobile, you can't beat the old school approach, I reckon....
To be filed under 'editorials that I was about to write but someone else beat me to it', Ricky Cadden (moonlighting over at SMS Text News) has issued a few pithy retorts to criticism that the S60 Touch demo at MWC was lame. I completely agree with your points, Ricky, I'd much rather see S60 have touch added as an extra than see a whole new iPhone-wannabe interface.
Yamake has broken cover, in the latest N-Gage press release. A 'game creating game,' players are able to pick and mix their own games from a range of mini-games, add in their own skins, themes, text, sound clips and movies from their PC. These can then be uploaded and shared with the rest of the Yamake community.
Ah yes, Valentines Day across the world and Krisse, a true romantic, has been researching the very best free 'love' themes for your S60 3rd Edition smartphone. If these don't get you in the mood for romance then nothing will!
Push email specialist emoze seems to be improving in all areas. Their free push service has just been extended to anyone with any POP3 account (i.e. no GMail or Exchange needed). And, unlike the GMail dedicated client, this one's native Symbian OS, so it's faster and leaner. Well worth checking out if you've been lusting after push email but didn't know how to get started.
Glad to see the Nokia E90 is not totally forgotten. There's now an official guide (warning: PDF link) to tweaking an S60 application's UI to work effectively on the 800 pixel wide screen of the Communicator. Shows it's not as simple as setting screen width to a bigger number, anyway!
Anyone know whether we should read anything into the fact that emTube's web site has been taken down? Legal action from YouTube about unauthorised access to their streams? emTube (direct YouTube video access) continues to work, but it would be great if someone could fill us in with hard news on this, arguably the best S60 app yet created.
While Rafe's still emboiled in the hustle and bustle of MWC, many others have managed to get out their thoughts on Nokia's two top end Nseries smartphones. The best of these is Vaibhav Sharma's, well photographed and plenty of insights for both the N78 and the N96.