According to a Nokia press release, the E75 QWERTY sliderphone is now making its way into shops, and may even be available already in some areas. As mentioned in previous stories, the E75 features Symbian S60 3rd Edition FP2, a 2.4 inch QVGA screen, side-sliding QWERTY keyboard, GPS, 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.5G HSDPA and Wi-Fi support. It's also the first Eseries device to be compatible with the N-Gage platform. The full release is below.
The Flahorn icon pack has become somewhat legendary in the Symbian world, featuring in a load of PiZero themes, and the man's done it again, this time with a theme for S60 3rd Edition phones that emulates the icon set and general look of the new S60 5th Edition phones. Why buy new hardware when you can simply pretend?...
Manikantan is a keen (Python and) Flash developer and has produced a prototype app, Translator, for S60 3rd Edition phones that leverages Google's recently updated language translation engine. A nice Web 2.0 example, even if it's not very polished yet. See below for screenshot and download link.
Nokia's application store, Ovi Store, is now accepting content from developers, and will launch in May. In our latest developer feature, Richard Bloor speaks to Eric John, Director of Media Product Marketing for Nokia Services, to discuss the developer proposition offered by Ovi store. There's questions on operator billing, supported content types, platform support and more.
Yesterday marked 'day one' of the Symbian Foundation. This announced the commencement of the beta testing of its new web site and that 81 companies have applied for membership (50 of which are first time endorsers). The new logo of the Symbian Foundation was also unveiled: Symbian, in stylised letters, underlain by a yellow heart. Read on for more.
Infamous tech news site The Register has been taking a look at the new Nokia E75, concluding that "It's a beautifully compact do-it-all smart phone with slimline Qwerty keyboard. Could this be the end of the Communicator?" The Register's closing para on the E75 was: "But with good email and browser services, document creation and viewing, a decent camera and music player, aGPS and N-Gage games, plus access to loads of additional Symbian apps, this all adds up to a very powerful phone both for work and in-between jobs." Rafe and Ewan now both have E75s and our own coverage of this qwerty newcomer is imminent.
There's been a lot of talk about Gravity, the Twitter client for S60, most of it very positive, and Ewan backs this up with a detailed and lavishly illustrated review, finally awarding it a rare AAS Mega-App award for a score of 90% or over. And yes, it hadn't escaped our notice that a second Twitter client for S60, Twittix, was released yesterday. We'll get Ewan onto that, too, don't worry.
In this comment piece, 'Should Gravity come down?', James Whatley shares his thoughts on mobile application prices. Have on-device stores, such as iPhone's App Store and Android's Marketplace, changed consumer's perception of the pricing of mobile applications? What constitutes reasonable value? Read our first Whatley Wednesday, then share your thoughts in the comments thread.
Nokia has released version 1.1 of its next-generation smart email system. Nokia Messaging 1.1 includes much wider language support, Windows Live Hotmail support, support for up to 10 IMAP folders and HTML formatting in emails (at last). To download it, go to email.nokia.com in Web on your S60 phone. Note that support for the 5800 and S60 5th Edition is coming in 'May'.
Nokia's long-demonstrated Point and Find service seems to have appeared in very early beta form, with many known bugs and issues, for most (but not all) S60 3rd Edition phones and for UK and USA regions only. Point and Find uses your device's camera to identify product barcodes and movie posters, linking through to relevant Web URLs. See here to get/try the beta and here for CJ's coverage.
In All About Symbian Insight 63 (AAS Podcast 120) we briefly cover the N-Gage news out of GDC (1 million profiles, accelerometer Bounce and device support). Steve and Rafe mull over the importance of the underlying changes in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, before chatting about the importance of homescreens, with reference to TouchWiz on the Omnia HD. You can listen to AAS Insight 64 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Gameloft's soccer simulator Real Football 2009 has been released on the N-Gage platform. Just go to the application's Showroom tab, select "Options" and then "Update Now", and it's also available in the "All Games" section. As always, a list of current and upcoming N-Gage compatible phones can be found on the AAN FAQ page.
Mobimate have updated their Traveller's Utility Worldmate for 2009. The major addition is a dashboard like home-screen that provides an overview of the most popular functions inside Worldmate, including flight tracking, weather and your current location, as well as the familiar Worldmate icons allowing you quick access to the world clocks, currency conversion tool and the comprehensive flight scheduling tools.
AT&T today officially confirmed that they would be carrying the Nokia E71 on their network in the form of the E71x. The E71x comes in black and, in contrast to the E71, runs S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 (S60 3.2 on Symbian OS 9.3). The phone supports the US 3G bands (850/1900 Mhz) and retains the WiFi connectivity and GPS from the E71. It comes with a variety of AT&T services including AT&T Navigator (turn by turn GPS navigation), AT&T Music, XM Radio, CV-stream, Xpress Mail, Mobile Instant Messaging and Video share. The E71x will cost $99, on a 2 year contract, after a mail-in rebate ($50).
In a regular new feature, here's a round up of the rest of last week’s mobile development news. This week FleaC, Rhomobile, and froglogic are in the news and there's a reminder of the Betavine Widget 2009 competition.