The slightly predictable mess that's Microsoft's altering of their Office file formats (to XML) has left smartphone owners in the lurch. But at least there's light at the end of the tunnel with today's Smartphone Show announcements: Dataviz has announced Documents To Go Premium Edition version 4.0 for UIQ 3 smartphones and Quickoffice has announced Quickoffice Premier 5.0 for S60 3rd Edition, both offering full Office 2007 editing. In other news, Quickoffice has announced a partnership with SoonR, dubbed Quickaccess.
Symbian has announced a number of changes to the Symbian Signed program at today’s Smartphone Show in London’s ExCeL center. Joining the existing ‘Certified Signed’ and ‘ Open Signed’ areas of the program is a new ‘Express Signed’ service, which should be welcomed by a large number of smaller developers.
Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show Nokia showed S60 running with a touch interface. The touch interface will support both finger and stylus input, has full multi lingual support, has support for tactile feedback (haptics) and is backwardly compatible with the existing S60 platform. Read the full story for and to view the video showing S60 Touch running on some concept devices.
Nokia has announced that the black N95 8GB smartphone has started shipping across the world, with most of Europe and selected Middle East countries also getting the Spiderman 3 movie preloaded into the large internal flash drive. Reports of sightings welcome.
What more timely moment for a Carnival of the Mobilists than right before the annual Smartphone Show? And, just to confuse people, my Smartphones (i.e. plural) Show is the Carnival host this week. Lots of good reading in Carnival 95, if (as the editor) I do say so myself...
Red Five Labs has announced the launch of a public beta for Net60. Net60 is a .NET Compact Framework implementation for S60 devices. It enables Windows Mobile applications developed using C# and Visual Basic .NET to run unchanged on S60 devices. The current beta is aimed at system integrators and independent software vendors who are interested in using the product.
BT has launched a developer competition aimed at encouraging the creation of innovative applications and services for WiFi enabled devices. The competition will formally launch at next weeks Symbian Smartphone Show. The overall winner will receive £1000 prize money.
Google has created a version of its Google Maps application for S60 3rd Edition phones. Google Maps is now a native Symbian OS 9 application, which gives better overall performance compared to Java version. As an added bonus, the application now supports the use of the internal GPS in relevant phones; allowing you to see your current location. Read on for plenty of screenshots and a quick run through of the features.
Web portal, proxy service or online RSS reader? Sometimes the boundaries can get a little blurred. Ewan takes a detailed look at Mippin, launched yesterday, and finds it surprisingly useful.
If you happening to be visiting Finland and own a Nokia phone running S60 3rd Edition then David Dewhurst has just the application for you. Flash Finnish is a free Flash Lite game designed to help you learn Finnish. It currently has basic vocabulary, numbers and colour, but more additions are planned after the beta test.
Jukka Silvennoinen, creator the very popular YBrowser, a free file manager for S60, has gone one step further and released much of the core code in Open Source form, together with examples of how to plug-in your own code. All details and downloads here.
Next Monday, the day before the Symbian Smartphone Show, is the All About Symbian Pub Meet. It is a completely free and open event and everybody is very welcome to come along and join in. We'll be giving away a Sony Ericsson W950 and a Nokia E61i along with a raft of other prizes. There's also going to be two lightning talks, one from the people behind WOM World (about what they do) and one from Robert Harmsen (Trends in Mobility).
Kuneri today released KuneriLite which is a rapid application toolkit aimed at Flash Lite developers. KuneriLite, which is programmed in Symbian C++, is an extra layer between Flash Lite and the S60 platform which enables extra functionality to be accessed from Flash Lite. KuneriLite also includes a feature to easily create a SIS file for distribution via a Wizard based process.
