You may remember Krisse's coverage of the addictive TibiaME, back in the summer - a massive multiplayer RPG for S60? Well, it's now had a big update, with wider J2ME compatibility, a new world, new features and over-the-air graphics upgrades. Krisse brings us a full report on what's new in TibiaME and what still needs work.
Adobe has finally made its Flash Lite 3 beta available for S60 3rd Edition, although both it (and I) stress that this is intended to be for developers only and isn't a consumer-focussed browser-integrated player. Comments welcome below on what Flash Lite 3 can and can't do in its current state (e.g. playing multimedia content). (via SymbianOne)
Hmm.... other bloggers keep reading my mind. I had an editorial on Nokia N95 firmware half done and now Stefan Constantinescu has not only produced a very interesting article detailing this and throwing in other observations of N93 and N95 8GB, but he's also given the power user's verdict on the brand new N82, with which he declares himself 'in love', despite a number of design defects.
In the second part of a Friday game double-bill, Attila Katona reviews Robo, also for (nearly) every Symbian OS platform known to man. It's a level-based puzzler in isometric 3D and Robo is really rather good in its cute, pixellated way.
It's been around for a while for S60 and UIQ (in all varieties), but Krisse brings us a detailed review of scrolling shoot 'em up Blazar in the modern age. That'll be the 'we're all kicking our heels, seeing what else is out there, waiting for N-Gage to be properly available' age, then....
With a veil of secrecy around it that rivals the darkness of Apple’s PR department, Project White Rock, the multiplayer experience for N-Gage due out mid 2008 has had good feedback from the testers (according to this report on Pocket Gamer). If the testing team, who get the 'most repetitive job in the world' award want more, then this bodes well for Nokia.
Forum Nokia has released a tool, primarily aimed at developers but of interest to power users trying to work out where that extra 10% of battery capacity is going. Nokia Energy Profiler works with all applications, built-in and third party and should identify any culprits!
Aha! Nokia PC Suite just added Vista Calendar sync, along with a more 'modern' (read "slower and uses more RAM"!) interface and extra drag and drop file capabilities, plus the usual bug fixes. Get the new v6.85 here. (via Vaibhav)
The award winning MMplayer is a multimedia player with support for various media formats such as OGG, AVI, MP4, MPEG, etc. Previously available for Palm OS 5 only, it has now been ported to Symbian UIQ 3 and S60 3rd Edition. Head over to its official web site for more information and download. Some screenshots after the break.
It seems I just can't keep up with the news today! Google just upgraded their free Maps for Mobile client (www.google.com/gmm on your smartphone) to v2.0.3, adding a 'virtual GPS' feature (thanks Stefan), in which your location on non-GPS devices is estimated based on cell tower information. Google is an amazing company. Also (unrelated), they're investing in green energy in a big way, yet more brownie points from me.
Apologies for linking to an AAS comment thread already half-linked below, but an AAS user has been doing battery benchmarks for two N95's, one with old v12 firmware and one with the new v20 with DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling), it seems that for low-CPU tasks like music playback, the battery is used more efficiently, with the underclocking resulting in 20% longer battery life from the BL-5F.
We reported that this didn't work at first when we tried with the new v20 firmware for the Nokia N95 Classic. They've flicked the switch at the Nokia Music Store (UK beta) now and N95 owners can join in the browsing and downloading fun. Even if I did spot far too many 'N81' references flashing through the URL popups 8-)
We mentioned the RAM-hungry Widsets in our RSS piece above, but thanks to Stefan for pointing us towards a fascinating tutorial on how to get started with next generation widgets, those that are pure XHTML, CSS or Javascript and which run on top of S60's Web runtime. This is how widgets should be done. Recommended.
