I'm sorry, I just can't help it. It's 'The Emperor's New Clothes' all over again. But.... "What's the fuss all about?" Push email. The term has become a tick box feature that every new smartphone HAS to have before it's taken seriously. No push email? No good for a professional then. What rubbish. Read on, and then have your say in the comments!
I've been adding to and fleshing out my original Nokia N93 'TV out' showcase - see the revised 'Powerhouse in your pocket' feature. And, of course, everything mentioned in this piece will now also apply in equal measure to the upcoming N95 and other top-end future Nseries devices.
Ewan provides over a dozen pointers for would-be successful hobbyist programmers and small developers who'd like to create successful applications and games.
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.
Thanks to the E-series blog for updated versions of two very informative posts (and their comments) detailing the twodifferent ways to listen to Internet radio on your Wi-Fi-enabled S60 3rd Edition smartphone (so the N93, N80 etc are also 'in'). For a more chatty intro to the subject, see Krisse's intro here on AAS.
Eagle-eyed observers may have noted the changed toolbar on the site, with 'Media' added. The new Media section houses regular and semi-regular audio and video content, all of which you can listen to or watch online, in your browser, or (if you prefer) use the provided RSS feeds to subscribe in iTunes or S60 Podcasting or similar, to make sure you never miss new content.
The Press Release makes it sound so simple. Mission Impossible 3 is now available on MiniSD (alongside the DVD release) to watch on the N93. Now the questions can start. What exactly does "copy it off to your PC" imply? That there's no DRM on the file? There must be, as Nokia point out you can't watch it on your PC or from another memory card. What movie format is used? One might also ask "Why not just buy the DVD and convert it to MiniSD yourself?"
Our resident game emulator expert krisse reviews MasterGear, bringing the old SEGA Master System and Game Gear and their titles to S60 3rd Edition. Summary: it works well and will bring the memories flooding back. Also, don't forget to check out our updated guide to S60 3rd Edition game emulators.
