Mundu Radio is a multi-platform software application for Internet radio, allowing you to stream hundreds of stations from around the world straight to your handset. Which is something that Nokia Internet Radio application can already do for most devices - does Mundu add enough to this mix to make it worthwhile? Ewan fires it up late at night, under the bed covers, to find out...
Just a few quick notes of interest for Nokia N86 owners. Go into 'SW update', in your 'Applications' folder, and you should see an update to Ovi Maps, taking you from v3.0 to v3.1. This represents bug fixes and optimisations. The NokNok guys are also reporting that some N86 product codes are also showing Conversations 9.20, a threaded SMS system that plugs into Contacts, and which was previously only available from Nokia Beta Labs. Nokia also announced today that the N86, its imaging flagship, will shortly go on sale in the US, SIM-free, for $558.
The Symbian Foundation today announced the first details of Symbian Horizon, an application-publishing program, which aims to reduce the barriers developers face when taking their products to market and thus increase the profitability of creating Symbian applications. Symbian Horizon will place applications in a number of partner app stores including Nokia's Ovi Store, Samsung's Application Store and AT&T's MEdia Mall, effectively acting as an application publisher on behalf of developers.
Fans of Spb Software's rather nifty world TV application, SpbTV (AAS shop link, support us by buying this way), should note that it has had a big update. Version 1.1 (download page) for all Symbian/S60 devices adds lower quality streams for anyone on a slow or weak 3G/EDGE connection, adds full support for TV out (making your smartphone into an Internet TV appliance!), plus better startup notifications (percentage reports while index building). Plus a litany of minor fixes and optimisations for a wider range of devices. Recommended.
Steffen Geraner, despite English not being his main language, has put up a lovely little walk through and real world assessment of some of Ovi Maps 3.0's 'extra' features, including speed cam warnings, tunnel handling and 3D buildings. Worth a read. Maps 3.0 is turning into a pretty huge product - look out for more features on it here on AAS over the summer.
In All About Symbian Insight 79 (AAS Podcast 141), we share news of Symbian^2's release and the first Symbian package to move from SFL to EPL. Then there's a mention of Nokia Android rumours, leading into a discussion about Maemo positioning and Qt. Finally we talk about a recent post from Robert Scoble. You can listen to AAS Insight 79 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
For all those with phones running S60 3rd Edition or 3rd Edition FP1, you might want to grab Birdstep's SmartConnect utility, which is now free. This removes the "access complexity" and combines all your Wifi and 3G access points into one access point, effectively mimicking the Destinations feature of S60 3rd Edition FP2 and beyond. The supported phones are listed below, along with a download link.
Ewan takes a brief look at Tommi Laukkanen's new, free Mobile Task Manager, a no-frills to-do-list/project manager that still manages to knock spots off the built in S60 function. It's Java-based, but don't let that put you off, this is one lean and efficient concept app - let's hope it continues to evolve.
At last, at long last, the popular Twitter client Gravity has gained large fonts, for use by those like me who (ahem) have less than 20:20 vision in our advancing years. You'll need to go online in Gravity, move to the start page and click on the 'alpha' (and 'experimental') version 1.20 build 5570, but don't worry, it works just fine. You also gain, as shown below, the ability to have a different (e.g. a white) theme/backdrop, again greatly aiding visibility. v1.20 works fine on all S60 3rd Edition and 5th Edition phones.
We've teamed up with Nokia N-Gage to give away a Nokia N96, a license for the N-Gage game Million Dollar Poker and a few Nokia goodies. All you need to do is answer a simple question and give us your name and contact details. Million Dollar Poker is the most recently released N-Gage game.
Telexy Networks has launched Network Commander, a collection of useful network utilities for Symbian OS. A while back Telexy released a piece of software called SymSMB - basically it allowed Symbian devices to connect to network shares via Wi-Fi. Very clever, but they encountered a small legal issue with a large Finnish phone maker. To cut a long story short, they shouldn't have been doing two jobs at once. Naughty. So SymSMB was pulled from sale, sadly. But there's now Network Commander and I've looked at it briefly below.
Launched today in Nokia's Ovi Store is a free Bing widget:- you'll recall that this is Microsoft's next-gen answer to Google's main search site. Offering Web, Mobile web, News, Images and Videos, the tabbed interface gives you results almost instantly, since content is cached for each tab/data type. Some screens and comments below.
On Monday Vodafone launched its Summer of Widgets competition. Every week through out July and August Vodafone will be giving away three prize bundles (consisting of Samsung NC20 netbook and a Nokia N96) to the developers submitting the best widgets. Widgets must be developed using the Opera widget runtime for S60 and be uploaded to the Vodafone Widget Developer Platform. Read on for more.
Are you a panorama sort of person and do you feel left in the lurch by Nokia buying up the makers of Panoman? Not worry, for Scalado and RAVITEQ have teamed up to produce Autorama, a quick way to produce auto-stitched panoramic photos with next to no Photoshop elbow grease required. Here's my review of Autorama, one of the new arrivals in the Ovi Store on your Nokia 5800 or N97.
Nokia just added a Nokia N86 iSync plug-in to its download area for Mac owners looking to sync PIM data to their smartphone. iSync is free and works seamlessly to transfer Contacts and Calendar information to Address book and iCal on the Mac, even between multiple devices. Here's the iSync download page. PS. Note that the N97 is still not supported.