With the advent of the N86, James Burland, host of the N95 Nokia Creative Awards, has just published the very last set of superlative photos taken on the most iconic smartphone of our time. Clever stuff, the winning entry is nothing short of sheer genius...
On Monday Vodafone launched its Summer of Widgets competition. Every week through out July and August Vodafone will be giving away three prize bundles (consisting of Samsung NC20 netbook and a Nokia N96) to the developers submitting the best widgets. Widgets must be developed using the Opera widget runtime for S60 and be uploaded to the Vodafone Widget Developer Platform. Read on for more.
Are you a panorama sort of person and do you feel left in the lurch by Nokia buying up the makers of Panoman? Not worry, for Scalado and RAVITEQ have teamed up to produce Autorama, a quick way to produce auto-stitched panoramic photos with next to no Photoshop elbow grease required. Here's my review of Autorama, one of the new arrivals in the Ovi Store on your Nokia 5800 or N97.
The (seemingly) device-of-the-week, the Nokia N86 8MP has just received a big firmware upgrade, to v11.043. This brings official Ovi Store compatibility (with Ovi web site shortcut and option to download the dedicated client), camera tweaks and the usual early firmware bug fixes and improvements. Try updating over the air (*#0000# on the home screen, though it didn't seem to be on the servers for the UK yet) or via Nokia Software Updater. No need to back up (but hey, it can't do any harm). Watch this space for any extra comment or reports.
Nokia just added a Nokia N86 iSync plug-in to its download area for Mac owners looking to sync PIM data to their smartphone. iSync is free and works seamlessly to transfer Contacts and Calendar information to Address book and iCal on the Mac, even between multiple devices. Here's the iSync download page. PS. Note that the N97 is still not supported.
With Rafe indisposed, Insight #78 could have been a double header between Steve and Ewan, but that wouldn't be rock and roll enough, so James Whatley (The Really Mobile Project) joins us to chat firmwares, betas, messaging and travelling technology. Listen in on the fun or subscribe via the AAS Podcast Feed.
You'll hopefully have been following our review series on the Nokia N86 8MP - here's part 3: "Other features and Wrap-up" for your enjoyment and education. It's fair to say that the N86 is a stonkingly good camera phone, but how well does it fare as a top end smartphone, where are its weak points and can it compete with the touch-heroes of summer 2009? See also Part 1 and Part 2 of this review.
Just a short note to say that, as expected, the E71's cheaper sister, the E63, has also gotten itself a firmware update, this time to v200 firmware update (via Nokia Software Updater), adding in Ovi Contacts. Screens and comment over at The Symbian Blog.
Over on the Lazarus like Mobile Industry Review, the other Ewan in mobile has posted an ambitious yet simple plan to save the Ovi Store from itself. Simply put, Nokia would create three enclaves of coders (in London, San Francisco and Paris) and give them a monthly stipend of £3,500 and as much coca cola and pizza as they can eat. As long as they code one application every eight weeks, the proposed 100 developers per warehouse get to stay. Total cost? Roughly £2.34 per handset. That's quite high, but this is a fascinating idea that should be taken seriously.
In All About Symbian Podcast 138, Rafe talks to Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation. The interview covers a wide range of topics, including the Symbian Foundation's planned application arena, the universal web runtime, the forthcoming Symbian Exchange and Exposition, Qt and the Symbian Foundation, the challenges of openness and open governance, and more.
An updated firmware, version 300.21.012, is now available for both the Nokia E71 and E66 (previous version was 210.xx.xxx). This is a major firmware update for the Nokia E71 and E66, it includes updates to Mail for Exchange software and email wizard, adds Internet Radio and social networking bookmark widgets, and improves overall performance. The new firmware can be downloaded and installed via Nokia Software Updater.
Yep, it's another update to Google native S60 YouTube client, to v2.2.6, though note that this seems to be more about increasing compatibility - there are no performance improvements, you still can't log in to YouTube and it still doesn't work full-screen on the Nokia 5800. Ah well, at least it shows the development team is active! You can grab v2.2.6 via m.google.com on your phone.
Ovi Contacts, originally Nokia Chat, integrates the standard S60 contact list with a proprietary instant messaging and presence/status system. It has just had an update that brings it close to formal release status and includes much wider compatibilty, including support for the Nokia N97 and 5800 XpressMusic. The next step, presumably, is to start building this into more phones (the Nokia 5630 XpressMusic, Nokia 5730 XpressMusic and Nokia 6720 classic) already have it. Data-phobes should note that Ovi Contacts requires an online connection and will consume a small amount of bandwidth. Maps lookups are integrated into Ovi Maps.
It's official. After months of beta testing, Nokia has released Ovi Maps (née Nokia Maps) 3.0 to the world for most (but not all) S60 3rd Edition FP1, FP2 and S60 5th Edition phones. The download is a 20MB Windows installer, so you do have to own a PC, but there's a little note on the Ovi Maps download page saying that Mac support is 'coming soon'. I certainly hope so. See also Rafe's preview of this release, here on AAS.
Faced with a dead Nokia N86 that refused to charge, I didn't panic - armed with the luxury of some of other devices to hand, I was able to get the N86 and its battery revived and working properly. And, in the process, learned that all Nokia's batteries are electrically interchangeable. Maybe these concept will save the day when your precious S60 phone appears to have died? At the very least, add this to your 'Things to try' check list!