According to a report on Pocket Gamer, a secret workshop for American and Asian publishers and developers on Nokia's next gen gaming platform was held in Santa Monica last week. Perhaps most notable in the article is the incredible list of publishers that apparently attended the event: Disney, Sega, Sony, Universal, Square Enix, Capcom, THQ, Glu Mobile, Digital Chocolate, EA, Tecmo, Namco and Vivendi. The article also claims 3rd party publishers just got their development kits in January, which could suit a Summer launch and Xmas advertising push fairly well (old generation N-Gage titles usually took 6 - 12 months to make). These revelations seem to confirm what All About Symbian exclusively revealed last October. Another event will apparently be held in Madrid next week for European publishers and devs.
In addition to podcasting, street magic and PSP gaming, it turns out that Ewan's not bad at Bridge either - here he reviews ZingMagic's Omar Sharif Bridge for all S60 3rd Edition smartphones.
If you really want to overdose on N95 goodness and full-blooded Symbian enthusiasm, watch Symbian Freak (run by apocalypso from the AAS forums) over the next week, who has just taken delivery of his pre-production N95 and who promises 'not to sleep' during testing(!) His comments are especially interesting as it's all from a strict power user perspective.
Oh yes! The hugely respected cross-platform hypertext document reader iSilo has now entered open beta testing for S60 3rd Edition. Here's v4.33 - if you do install it, be sure to feed problems back to the developers.
TalS of Howardforums posted a video today apparently showing the forthcoming Nokia E65 smartphone, which seems to match all the unofficial photos floating around the internet. Although there's still been no official word from Nokia about the phone, Finnish retailer Lohenette.fi already has the E65 available for preorder with a Q1 2007 release date and a €458 price tag (that's €357 when you take away Finnish sales tax).
If you're into trivia, pub quizzes or fact finding, note that my free Trivopaedia (... a trivia enecyclopaedia) has had a huge update and is now up to v2.2, with over 300 entries. It runs inside (the also free) Mobipocket Reader for all Symbian OS-powered smartphones. Comments welcome!
Since his preview of the Nokia N95 mid week, you've all been bombarding Rafe with questions, some in the forums and some by email. In 'Your questions answered' Rafe attempts to answer them all. UPDATED
Two interesting Friday tech stories from the good old BBC: the advance of GPS into smart mobile devices (bringing us back to the Nokia N95 and its successors), and the takeover of the Internet by botnets, with 50% of all warez apps containing trojans (yes, the Beeb is mainly talking about PCs, but take note if you frequent the same sites and think twice before downloading cracked Symbian OS apps)...
