It's all very well standing there smugly with your new Nokia N or Eseries phone, knowing that it's functionally superior to your friend's Apple iPhone. But when you both turn on your devices, it's the iPhone that people gather round, partly because of the larger screen, but also partly to watch its party tricks. Watching these tricks, you might well ask: 'Why can't my S60 phone do that?' Chances are, it can, with a few software caveats...
An awesome application just got much, much better. Wavelog just hit the big v2.0 (v2.01, in fact). It's a native S60 client for Blogger, Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla, with ancillary support for YouTube and Picasa uploads and insertions. There's more about Wavelog on the Telewaving web site.
The much-awaited Nokia N85 is now available in Finland, and it also seems to have now gone on sale in France too. It's already been available in Italy for a short while now, and presumably should get a continent-wide rollout as the month goes on. The package deal of the SIM-free model varies from country to country, but most people seem to get a voucher for some free Nokia Music Store tracks, a free Nokia Maps subscription and a free N-Gage game.
S60.com are giving away (look under 'My exclusives') another of their periodic 'exclusive' themes. This time it's the rather dynamic 'Sporty' - one for your collection, at any rate!
Nokia Beta Labs brings us news of an update to Communication Center 2.0, with bug fixes and optimisations in all areas. Good stuff, though my previous comments about a fragmented PC-side software portfolio remain!
On monday it's time for the Evening with S60 London. However as things do not kick off until 7:30pm and as the AAS team are in town we thought we would hold an informal get together before the event in a local pub. So from 5:30pm or so we'll be in the Windmill pub which is just a few minutes away from the Nokia Flagship Store.
After a certain amount of hoo-ha in the E90 v300 firmware thread, it seems that Blackberry Connect has been upgraded after all to work with the new firmware. See here and select your region and operator and you should see a v300 compatible version of Blackberry Connect v4.0. Panic over, everyone?
Back at last year's AAS Pub Meet (was it really that long ago?), Julie agreed to help me with a comparative review of Sat Nav applications for S60. We've produced odds and ends during the year, but you may be wondering where the promised head-to-head mega-review is. Good question. Read on if you're not offended by the sight of a grown woman (Julie) having a really good rant....
Rafe's been trying out Nokia's newest Music service offering, Comes with Music - for real, with a full retail package. There may be some caveats with the system (PC/MSIE-only, DRM-heavy), but overall he comes away very impressed. How is the PC client to use and what's the overall experience like for a new music-loving phone user? Can you retro-fit CwM to an existing handset? What can you do and what can't you do with the downloaded music? Find out in Rafe's definitive Comes with Music review.
In Italian, at least. But we've come to trust p@sco's judgement and here, after a week or two of real world use, he pronounces the Nokia N85 as both 'very, very beautiful' and the 'top' Symbian-powered phone in the world, even trumping the Samsung i8510 and Nokia N96 overall. If you can read Italian then you're in for a treat.
Take Nokia USA, 30 Nseries still and video finalists, plus pro director Spike Lee, and what do you get? An arty music video, entitled 'Humanity'. Ostensibly showing off what sort of footage you can grab on Nseries smartphones. Which is all very well, though if someone could explain to me what the song 'Love is not the enemy of life' means......
Now this is pretty trivial, but bear with me. Am I so unusual in matching a phone's theme to its body colour and styling? Below the break I've illustrated the idea with the silver Nokia N82, but I'd welcome your comments and feedback. What other device/theme pairs work very well?
Since the dawn of time (ok, about 1995), developers have been looking to replace the default home screen of PDAs and smartphones. Epocware's new Handy Shell seems pretty comprehensive for S60 and so we asked Ewan to install it on his main device and run with it for a week... The result? A narrowly missed MegaApp. From configurability to stability, Handy Shell seems to do a lot to live up to its price tag.
In part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 of this series, Steve Litchfield looked at specifics of camera performance in the phone world. Now AAS guest writer Dirk Snoyt takes up the theme of camera phone flash research and gets all technical on the theme of colours. If you'd like to suggest a topic for us to cover next in the series, please comment!
CommonTime recently announced an upgraded version of its mobile solution for Lotus Notes, today it announced support for all S60 3rd Edition devices. mSuite is a solution, similar to Mail for Exchange, which allows enterprise users to access Lotus Notes based email, contacts, calendar and tasks from a mobile device.