Here are some pictures I captured at Day One of CES in Las Vegas including a look inside the Nokia Multimedia (Nseries) Tent and some pictures with brief comments from Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo keynote address this morning. More detailed commentary will be coming in due course.
AAS chief Rafe Blandford weighs in with his official predictions and challenges for 2007, along with an assessment of what he got right and wrong from last year's predictions piece. Essential reading for anyone in the industry or who is interested in where the Symbian OS world is going. Plus, a bonus preview of the front cover of Symbian magazine, Dec 2007...
I've a feeling I could be spending quite a bit of time on S60.com's latest official blog, Mobile Security, by Neil Barclay. Welcome to the blogosphere, Neil! And, on the subject of the S60 blogs, the latest Voice of S60 is now up, featuring AAS favourite Tommi Vilkamo.
In audio podcast no.8, Ewan Spence interviews PsiLoc and Bitween, two long time developers working in the Symbian OS world. Applications featured include Remote Control, Wireless Presenter and Mobile Fax.
Well, that's saved you an air-fare and taxi/hotel. All the presentations from the whole of the Nokia World event are now online in PDF form. Some very interesting stuff here and you get to view content from all the streams, not just one. Here are the PDFs for day one and day two.
After years of saying 'No', top handheld games producer Astraware has finally admitted that Symbian OS is on its radar, planning to produce at least a handful of titles for S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3 in 2007. Let's hope it's earlier rather than later.
Nokia has commissioned a survey by Nielsen Entertainment which interviewed 1800 users of mobile phone games from China, Germany, India, Spain, Thailand and the United States. The results are available in a press release and suggest that people will enjoy using Nokia's Next Generation gaming platform which is due for launch in the first half of 2007. Perhaps the most interesting is the average gaming session length: 28 minutes, which is far longer than is usually thought the case on phone games, and implies that the average phone gamer plays with as much dedication as they would on a portable console.
You may know John Holloway as the guy behind ZingMagic (and before that Purple Software), but he actually goes back to the very beginning of the Symbian story, working at Psion. Ewan caught up with him at the Smartphone Show and covered a huge range of issues and anecdotes. Great stuff, catch it all in AAS podcast number 3.
The huge photo-sharing site Flickr is now properly mobile again. http://m.flickr.com/ now works from any smartphone, letting you browse photo streams without incurring huge bandwidth penalties. Well worth bookmarking from your smartphone browser. (Via SymbianOne)
OK, I said I was going to shut up about over-hyped security software, and judging from comments by one security developer on-camera at the Smartphone Show, it seemed that they'd learned their lesson. But here we go again... and again....
Nokia is going to be one of the main sponsors of GDC Mobile, the phone game part of the Game Developers Conference. GDC and GDC Mobile take place in San Francisco from the 5th to the 7th of March 2007. Nokia's Next Generation gaming platform is due to launch across a range of S60 3rd Edition smartphones some time in the first half of 2007, so a March sponsorship of a major gaming event would seem to be well-timed.
