Mobimate have updated their Traveller's Utility Worldmate for 2009. The major addition is a dashboard like home-screen that provides an overview of the most popular functions inside Worldmate, including flight tracking, weather and your current location, as well as the familiar Worldmate icons allowing you quick access to the world clocks, currency conversion tool and the comprehensive flight scheduling tools.
If you are into microblogging, in particular, if you love twittering and using Symbian, this is the app you are looking for. Gravity v1.00 by Mobileways is now released, the first fully-featured and native Twitter client for the S60 platform (3rd Edition and 5th Edition). It supports multiple accounts, Twitter Search, Laconica, TwitPic and wraps everything into a gorgeous looking interface. Screens and more info below, while Ewan will be having a more detailed look at the app later this week.
If you go to the official N-Gage Need For Speed website and click on the "Competition" pack of cards near the bottom left corner of the site, you should receive instructions on how to claim a free activation code for Mile High Pinball, Reset Generation or Pro Series Golf. This contest opened unofficially earlier in the week and some people had trouble getting their code to work, but hopefully they've fixed things now that the compo page has officially opened. Incidentally, if your activation code begins with the number 0 (zero), make sure you enter 0 (zero) and not the letter O.
If you go to the official Need For Speed Undercover N-Gage site, you'll see a competition section labelled "coming soon". Try clicking on the words "coming soon", and you'll see a contest which tells you how to get free activation codes for Pro Series Golf, Mile High Pinball or Reset Generation. According to the n-gage.com NFSU game page, the code you require is NE3D 4 5P33D, though the prank form says NE3D 4 S433D. (via mavilacivert on the Arena forums) (UPDATE: It appears that the competition has been taken down as the "coming soon" link no longer works. We suspect they activated the link too early, as a lot of people couldn't get the codes to work.)
Astraware is selling Astraware Boardgames and Astraware Solitaire at the reduced price of $5 each until the end of this month. The games are available for Symbian S60 3rd Edition and UIQ3, and can be purchased at the reduced price from astraware.com: click here for their S60v3 section, and click here for their UIQ3 section. (Astraware's parent company Handmark is also having a sale until the 29th of March, with a "buy one, get one free" offer using the discount code "DEMAND".)
Long-time readers may remember we gave Lonely Cat Games' card game Mau Mau quite a positive review, and for those who don't know it's basically Uno played with normal cards. Well, it now appears that the game is available free of charge from LCG's website for all S60 editions and UIQ2 as well. Just download the file from the download page, then head on over to the free unlock code page and use your phone's IMEI. (UPDATE: Apparently there's the old annoying "expired certificate" problem with this file, but you should be able to get round this by altering your phone's date settings to March 2008 instead of March 2009. You can then alter the dates back to normal after installation.)
In All About Symbian Insight 63 (AAS Podcast 120) Rafe gives some insight into iPlayer, Steve talks about YouTube's S60 client application and both talk about their views on Samsung's Omnia HD. You can listen to AAS Insight 63 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Reported widely today is a new over-the-air update to Nokia's GPS-uber-utility, Sports Tracker. v2.05 (up from v1.83) brings better touch support (map zoom icons, more reliable finger swipe screen transitions), plus N79-like support for the Polar heart rate monitor and (on compatible devices) the integration/backup of accelerometer-based step counting. You can get v2.05 by going into the application and using 'Check for updates'.
As we mentioned last week, Canada's CBC has set up an online OPML podcast directory which can be used to browse all their audio and video podcasts on an S60 device's Podcasting application. One of the CBC's tech blogs has posted an article explaining how the directory was made, using the Macintosh-based NetNewsWire feed reader. However, you can use other readers on other platforms too, and we recently published a similar OPML directory how-to using Google Reader instead. For those of you who just want to browse the CBC podcast directory on your S60 phone, see our "how to add directories to S60 Podcasting" article which also covers the BBC and NPR directories too.
Samsung Mobile Innovator has announced the availability of the Qt for S60 Garden technology preview device DLL installation files with Samsung certification. This enables the Qt for S60 demos , as well as applications created with Qt for S60, to run on Samsung S60 phones.
Hot on the heels of their new Mobile site, YouTube has now also released an official (native) S60 client application. It is compatible with most S60 3rd Edition phones. The video quality is good, and looks to have been optimised for QVGA screen resolution. There's a basic interface to browse and search through YouTube's extensive video catalog. All videos are shown in full screen, but widescreen videos are shown in a 'letter-box' format. Read on for more information and screenshots.
The Nokia E71 today received a firmware update to 210.21.006 from 200.21.118. It is currently available for both Asian and European SIM-free models. Other markets and operators variants will likely follow in due course. It is a relatively minor firmware updates with a few bug fixes and minor application updates.
EA's racing game Need For Speed: Undercover is out now on the N-Gage platform. You can find it in your phone's N-Gage app: to see it go to the showroom tab, select Options, then Update Now. (For a list of compatible phones and other info, see the All About N-Gage FAQ.)
Nokia will be holding a four-hour question and answer event for publishers and developers interested in the upcoming Ovi Store on-phone content shop. The registration link and more details are available below.
Anyone who is personally or professionally involved with podcasts might want to read this All About Symbian guide to creating online podcast directories using RSS feed readers. The addresses of these directories can be added by end users to the Nokia Podcasting application (which comes as standard on all current Nokia S60 devices). As we've previously noted Canada's CBC, the United Kingdom's BBC and America's NPR all have online OPML podcast directories which can be easily accessed through the Podcasting app.