My Phones Show 67 just went live, with a hands-on preview and thoughts on the S60 5th Edition-powered Nokia 5800 XpressMusic ('Tube'), plus a cross-platform feature analysing 'Which phone should you buy?'. Note also the RSS feeds for the standard and hi-res versions of the show, for your feedreader, browser or iTunes. And yes, Rafe's official AAS preview of the 5800 is coming soon, don't worry....
'As Live' from the 2008 Symbian Smartphone Show, here's All About Symbian Insight no. 44, hosted by Ewan Spence, with Rafe Blandford and Steve Litchfield; guests include (but not limited to ) Nigel Clifford, Stuart Clark, Andrew Grill and James Whatley. 40 minutes long and plenty of gossip, info and fun...
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...
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.
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.
Next up in Ewan's series of Desert Island Desktops, taking a look at people's standby screens - this time, Alfie Dennen of Moblog (www.moblog.net) shares his home screen while Ewan applies his degree in mobile psychology to work out what makes Alfie tick...
You may remember my own four part article series looking at connecting an S60 phone to an Apple Mac? Symbian Guru's Dotsisx has written up her own experiences along similar lines and with similar 'Nokia, must do better' conclusions, here (part 1) and here (part 2).
Over on All About N-Gage we've had various news items over the past few days, including confirmation from Nokia that game transfers ARE still possible through customer service (despite the misinformed words of a few service reps recently), there's been an updated version of the game Pro Series Golf to fix compatibility problems with the updated N-Gage app (and it also now works on the 5320), and we've had a bit of a nostalgic wallow as it's five years since the original gen N-Gage launched.
Having multiple 'tabs' open in a browser is something we take for granted on a desktop computer. And it's not unknown on other handhelds. But Nokia has traditionally tried to discourage people from using multiple browser windows on S60 phones. Is this justified and what's the easiest way to create and use extra windows in Web?
In which I explain perhaps the all round best way to keep your data safe and your disruption to a minimum when it comes to repair, replacement or firmware upgrade time. I also propose it as a possible way to restore operation to a 'broken' phone. Comments welcome if you've lived or died by a variety of backup and restore procedures. Can you add to this feature?
Ewan starts a new series of personal articles looking at how different people set up their S60 smartphones. Specifically, looking at what's on their active standby ('Home') screen. He kicks off with mobile cyber celeb James Whatley. You can comment on James' choices below, or indeed on the article series as a whole.
In the latest part in my phone camera series, I put the five top camera-equipped smartphones to the test, evaluating their still photo results under a variety of scenarios (landscape, night, dim, macro, etc). Which really is the best? And will the winning phone be made in Finland? I look at the Nokia N82, N95 and N93, plus the Samsung G810 and i8510... [WARNING: Broadband essential, the article includes a fair number of example images]
There's a new version of the N-Gage app available for all compatible phones which (amongst other things) fixes the infamous 10,000 points bug. You can download the new version straight onto your device by opening the app, selecting "Options" and then "Check For Updates". Alternatively you can download the new version onto your PC and then install it manually, which you can do from the official website's "Get N-Gage" section. You can read more about the new version over on the official forums. (via the Official N-Gage Blog)
Today, in London, at its Remix event, Nokia formally launched its Comes with Music service offering. Comes with Music (CwM) lets you buy a Nokia device that includes a year of unlimited access (downloads) to tracks from the Nokia Music Store. After the year is up you can keep any previously downloaded music. CwM will launch first in the UK later this month on the Nokia 5310 Xpress Music, with the Nokia N95 8GB and Nokia 5800 Xpress Music to follow in due course. Read on for more details.
In the latest AAS Insight podcast, Rafe, Ewan and I cover a range of issues, from the latest hardware (N96, and lots on the T-Mobile G1 running Android and how it fits into the current Symbian (and to some extent iPhone)-dominated landscape) and upcoming N-Gage titles.