In previous articles, I've been more than happy to praise the S60 Music player. Unfortunately, it has just not kept up with the changing pace of technology. On the N95 and N95 8GB vintage devices, the music app was far better than the leading MP3 players of the time, notably the iPod Nano. But the iPhone music app has vaulted over the S60 app.... what could the Espoo Engineers learn from Cupertino Coders?
There's a nice piece by Chris Meadows here talking about the future for Mobipocket and its previously ubiquitous ebook reader software, now that Amazon have not only bought Mobipocket but are competing against it vigorously with its own Kindle hardware and software. In fact, it's looking increasingly as if Amazon bought Mobipocket simply to put paid to a competitor. Yet there's nothing else decent to fill the vacuum on S60 and Symbian. Read on for some thoughts and links.
In All About Symbian Insight 68 (AAS Podcast 126) Rafe and Steve talk about the upcoming Ovi Store in relation to Widsets, N-Gage and uploading content, before sharing their recent device purchases. Steve explain why he prefers his device with an Xenon flash and Rafe talks about 3's and Orange's service strategy. You can listen to AAS Insight 68 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Digital Chocolate's Cafe Hold Em Poker has arrived on the N-Gage platform, but how good is it? Ewan Spence passes judgement in the All About N-Gage review, and discovers lessons both for the game's developers and for the N-Gage platform as a whole.
Every week seems to bring new themes for our smartphones, many of which introduce us to ever wackier and more artistic sets of icons for the applications we're familiar with. In this rantfeature, I argue that there's efficiency and elegance in keeping icons close to the originals, keeping the workload for our poor beleaguered eyes and brain down....
Nokia has launched (via Beta Labs) a new web-based service and Web Runtime widget, entitled Green Explorer, aiming to help you live and travel in more eco-friendly fashion through tie-ins with green organisations and community involvement. See below for some screens, notes and links.
Nice find by Mike Macias here - FreeTimeBox is a Symbian Signed utility that adds the current time to the E71's menu bar, E71x-style. You can also apparently blacklist certain apps where you don't want the time to appear at this location on the screen, thankfully.
DChoc Cafe Hold Em Poker is now available in the N-Gage application's showroom section. Just go to the N-Gage application on your device, go to the Showroom tab, select "Options" and then "Update Now" to see it in the latest games list (alternatively you can select "Show All Games"). To find out more about the N-Gage platform including a list of compatible phones, try reading the All About N-Gage FAQ.
The Nokia Beta Labs blog recently announced Nokia's latest beta offering - 'Here and now'. This is a context-aware (location) shortcut to services. Currently 'Here and now' provides local weather and events listings. It currently works only with S60 3.2 devices (N79, N85, 6220c etc.), and is currently still in development, but will be pre-installed on a number of upcoming Nokia devices. Beta Labs is asking for your feedback to help shape the future direction of the application. See below for screens and thoughts.
In 'Mobile Development - For Everyone', our latest developer feature, Richard Bloor talks to Amer Hasan, Senior Manager, Apps & Developer Programs at Vodafone, about Betavine's £20,000 widget competition. The article explains how Vodafone sees widgets reducing the barriers and costs of development and the importance of open standards in choosing which widget platform to use.
With the advent of Google Latitude, Nokia Chat, Nokia FriendView and other similar services, Steve Litchfield ponders their future, wondering why they haven't taken off as fast as he'd originally predicted. Part of the reason, he suspects, is that the typical demographic for such mo-lo-so applications is fairly restricted, i.e. most of us either know exactly where our main contacts are or don't need to know.
Mobbler, a last.fm client for S60, has been updated to version 0.4.4. The new version supports the new Last.fm Web Services, which is an official API / integration route, and should improve stability. Other new features include improved album art support, the ability to disable scrobbling, a sleep timer (perfect for using music to send you to sleep), and the ability to view you Last.fm data.
Nokia Easy Meet is a mobile collaboration tool, which has been put together by NRC (Nokia Research Centre) as a research prototype, and made available to end-users via Nokia BetaLabs. Easy Meet allows you to easily share and view content around a given subject (meeting). For example, it could be used to share a PowerPoint slide slow during a voice conference call. The advantage of Easy Meet, compared to many other solutions, is that mobile users are able to fully participate in the viewing and sharing of content.
Following on from today's review, word reaches us from Mojo's Studio that Twittix has been updated to v0.92. The interesting addition is the "introduce" feature which lets you point two of your Twitter friends to each other. The full change list is here
In All About Symbian Insight 66 (AAS Podcast 124) we talk about the N-Gage platform's newest addition - Worms World Party. Then there's discussion of Google Maps 3.0.1, BBC TV streams, device colours. We finish with a discussion of the joys of older devices. You can listen to AAS Insight 66 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.