Hot off the press is Nokia's new E52, with specs, photos and video embedded below. The E52 can either be thought of as a massive update to the popular E51 or a traditional number-key candybar version of the bigger E75. Highlights include S60 3rd Edition FP2, GPS, 3.2 megapixel camera, Ovi, Nokia Messaging, 3.5mm headphone jack, USB charging, noise cancellation, Nokia's 1500mAh mega-battery for a full 8 hours talk time, and more. Read on for more.
More Nokia E75 coverage from the blog world, with Rita El-Khoury producing a very insightful little series directly comparing the E75 with yesterday's qwerty favourite, the E71. Here are the parts, in order: Form Factor, Hardware, '3 Jewels', Software, Camera. Enjoy. All About Symbian's own E75 review will be exhaustive and is imminent.
In All About Symbian Insight 69 (AAS Podcast 127) Rafe, Ewan and Steve talk about Bobba, operating billing on the Ovi Store, v21 firmware for the Nokia 5800 and the new N-Gage game - Age of Empires III. Rafe then reports back in detail from the Nokia Developer Summit 2009. You can listen to AAS Insight 69 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Time for the next part in my video review of the Nokia E75 enterprise device. How well does the dual format device cope with going online through the Web browser, and what other internet features does it carry? How does it fare for N-Gage games? And what about left-handed owners? I take a look in part four of the series, below.
Nokia’s Ovi Contacts application for (seemingly) all S60 3rd Edition phones has been updated today, with v1.06 mainly containing reliability fixes, though there's also an enhanced name search function, to help find people to chat to. See also the Beta Labs post on the update.
So much for the quality stamp of being in the good 'ol BBC. Their latest Digital Planet podcast, going out worldwide, starts with an scaremongering piece which claims that the only reason why there hasn't been a mobile phone virus pandemic is that there aren't enough Symbian OS-powered phones out there yet. Completely ignoring the fact that the viruses mentioned are ALL for really old phones and OS versions, involve manual, deliberate installation and are aimed at really naive users. The Symbian Foundation's new PR dept would do well to fire a rocket into Gareth Mitchell, Jason Palmer and self-confessed expert Prof Barasbi, who, patently, haven't a clue what they're talking about. Pah.
Trust CJ to find this little gem - Nokia's Star Trek tie-ins mean that there's now a Star Trek mini-site hosted within nokia.mobi, including a Tricorder application to download. Follow CJ's lead for how to get to the mini-site.
David Wood, writing on the Symbian Foundation Blog, about reviewing the release plans, has highlighted some details of upcoming Symbian releases. Symbian^2, the equivalent of S60 5th Edition Feature Pack 1, will be functionally complete next week and in devices early next year. Symbian^3, for which the majority of the source code should be available, enhances communication architecture, multimedia and graphics functionality, and should reach devices in the second half of 2010.
Symbian ^4 will see the full integration and optimisation of Qt into the Symbian platform. Further proposals includes the 'Orbit' extension library for Qt (replacing AVKON) and a new 'Direct UI' interaction and navigation logic. Put crudely, this means we will see an evolution of the existing S60/AVKON UI to a new Qt-based 'Orbit' Symbian UI for devices coming out in 2011. Read on for more details.
The next version of Nokia’s tool for S60 widget development is currently in beta testing. In ‘A First Look at Nokia WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio 2.0’ I’ve been given the opportunity to preview the new features and find a considerably richer tool, offering support for all the current and forthcoming S60 widget features.
Maps on Ovi, a comprehensive mapping service running on Nokia's web servers and which syncs down to Maps 3.0 running on S60 3rd Edition FP1 and FP2 phones, was initially released for Windows-based browsers but has just gone live for Safari on the Mac (see maps.ovi.com). As with Windows, there's a browser plug-in involved. See below for screenshots and brief comments.
Not exactly a glowing review from me for the Nokia E75 in The Phones Show 80, I end up criticising everything from the small screen to the cluttered layout to the small battery to the bizarre 'folder' icons. Just being honest. Also in show 80 are a top 10 of iPhone gaming and a brief interview with Rafe about the Nokia N97. Here are the feeds for the QVGA and VGA versions for your feedreader.
Google's YouTube team thankfully seem to work at a fair old pace. In this case following up a new client (S60) with several updates to fix bugs. The latest is v2.0.11 and fixes a major bug where videos played at high speed on some devices. You can get the (excellent and free) YouTube client for any S60 3rd Edition phone by going to m.google.com in Web.
Sulake, best known for their Habbo Hotel online community for PCs, have now launched a new online community for S60 devices called Bobba. It's still in beta testing so there may be some bugs, but you can download the Bobba application free from the Bobba.com website, and there are no charges for using the service either (though of course you may have to pay data charges to your phone network). Bobba is compatible with all S60 3rd Edition and S60 2nd Edition devices, including all N-Gage-compatible phones.
Nokia's upcoming launch of the Ovi Store in the US will not, apparently, come with carrier billing – the ability to have any purchases added to your phone bill, as opposed to inputting credit card details into the system. To be fair, no other on-device store has this facility in America, so Nokia aren't being unduly penalised in not having this feature. But it does create another step in the process for the end user, and the seamless experience Nokia were planning on isn't quite in place in that territory. Read on for more.
One of the biggest developers for UIQ, DreamSpring, has followed up its commitment to porting its software to S60 with the announcement of DreamConnect. Think of this as a contact manager on steroids, with with an 'innovative business card layout', plus 'hierarchical categories that let you organise your contacts to accurately reflect your real life relationships'. Sounds interesting - hopefully, given the UIQ heritage, there's a touch version coming for S60 5th Edition.