Please excuse the original story on this address, I was going by item numbers in Ovi Store URLs - it turns out that there isn't a strict one to-one correspondance between URL numbers and actual content items. The store simply now has over 100,000 allocated item IDs, many of which never materialised into content. Watch this space for some fuller Ovi Store statistics.
Nimbuzz has announced that it is exclusively releasing an ad-free version of its instant messaging client on the Ovi Store. In addition to waiving advertisements in exchange for a one-off fee of £3.00, premium users also get several new aesthetic settings not available in the ad-supported version. These options are viewing instant message conversations in a chat bubble style, custom colours or images for chat screen backgrounds, and custom font colours for the chat screen. Read on for more.
At a Strategy and Financial Briefing, which takes place at 10 am GMT on February 11th Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, is expected to outline his vision for the future strategy of the company. Rafe will be reporting live from Intercontinental Park Lane Hotel, London, where the event is taking place. You can follow our live coverage using this story or via our Twitter accounts (@aas and @allaboutmeego).
Mbuntu is a flash based application launcher available for all flavours of Symbian, aimed squarely at Ubuntu fans. The application simulates the GNOME-based Ubuntu desktop, with the Jaunty Jackalope wallpaper. From the Ubuntu application menu, users can access all of the phone's core applications, such as: contacts, messages, Bluetooth, USB mode, Web, etc. There are also indicators for WiFi and battery level. Read on to find out more.
There have been various widget-making (i.e. Web Runtime shortcuts, in this case) systems tried out, but AppMe is possibly the easiest so far. Find a mobile-friendly web site you want to go to often (for example, something you'd normally set a bookmark in Web for....), paste its address into the AppMe wizard, choose an icon, and you're halfway there already. Read on for links and a walk-through. The end result: web sites on your menu or homescreen, properly labelled (on the menu) and with the icons of your choice.
A couple of links of interest from Mike Macias that I've just stumbled across and thought you'd like. Firstly, a piece from Mike himself in which he reminds us that there's a one-tap way to bypass Nokia Messaging service and thus gain reliable access to your Gmail account. And secondly, a pointer to a super (and comprehensive) Purple theme from the wonderfully named (for a computer guy) Logon Aniket that's available in customised versions for everything from S60 3rd Edition FP1 onwards.
Open up the Ovi Store client on your Symbian^3 smartphone and you should have a mandatory update available, which offers 'full Arabic Support, better installation support for Qt-based apps and numerous fixes', plus a new blue/green startup screen, miscellaneous other small fixes and, significantly, for all phones of all vintages, an upgrade (at Nokia's end) to their Search algorithms.
Nokia Beta Labs have today announced a new version of Nokia Email for S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 phones. This new release is intended for those who have either had problems with the current version or want to try out the latest features. Most notable among those new features is the ability to display HTML email, just like Nokia Messaging on Nokia's touch screen phones. Read on for our experience of the upgrade.
I can’t resist pointing out another fabulous theme by PiZero I’ve just stumbled over. Called Digiflowers, it’s available for S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 handsets. It works in landscape and portrait mode, looks fantastic and adds an artistic flair to your home screen and desktop. Well worth checking out from pizero.net.
Mobbler, Symbian's Last.fm client, has a new beta version for Symbian^3 users. The new beta supports the new Scrobbling API and menu items for the radio stations recently discontinued by Last.fm have been removed. There is a long list of new features too, like Twitter sharing, artist biography pages, and improved lyrics pages. Also added is support for the new mix radio station created by Last.fm to replace discontinued stations. The Mobbler project is also asking people to install an error reporting agent (ErrRd.SIS) which will help the developers capture bugs in the new beta version.
Asri Al Baker from i-symbian.com and friend of All About Symbian has been at it again with his Web Run-Time Widgets! This time, he has broken away from the Google world and treated us to a launcher for Facebook Touch. For those who don't know, http://touch.facebook.com offers a variant of Facebook optmised for finger-driven mobile browsers. As said previously, there's nothing stopping users from just adding a bookmark to their browser, but these WRT Widgets offer the benefit of an identifiable icon in both the application menu and home screen shortcuts.
Over on A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch is taking a closer look at one of the current key elements of the modern smartphone, the web browser. Pulling numbers from the Stat-Counter Service, he not only points out that the leading browser is Opera, but that Nokia’s web-kit effort is sitting nicely on 17% of the global market, compared to Opera and Safari on 22% and Blackberry on 19%. Android, by comparison, is on 11%. What does that mean for website designers?
The next version of Pixelpipe's social media sharing agent, Send and Share, has reached its final version, and is awaiting approval on the Ovi Store. For a number of months, the Pixelpipe team have been working hard on developing the Send and Share client, regularly sending test versions out to their beta testing mailing list. In a message to testers from CEO Brett Butterfield, this pre-release pattern will be changing and less frequent updates will be sent to testers.
You may remember that Opera Software recently ported their acclaimed proxy-based web browser to (native) Symbian? Beta 1 of Opera Mini 5.1 was great apart from some weirdness when it came to incorporating text input from the phone's own text input system (e.g. virtual keyboard). Now we have Beta 2, with this fixed and doubtless a multitude of other minor bugs quoshed.
Following on from last month’s beta 2 release, Opera has announced the final release of Opera Mobile 10.1, a native web browser for Symbian. Since the beta release, there’s been a further update to the javascript speed increase – now up to nine times faster than Opera 10.0. Along with the server side compression, geo-location plug-in, and their rendering engine, the Opera browser continues to be one of the leading Symbian applications. More, and links, below...