After a certain amount of hoo-ha in the E90 v300 firmware thread, it seems that Blackberry Connect has been upgraded after all to work with the new firmware. See here and select your region and operator and you should see a v300 compatible version of Blackberry Connect v4.0. Panic over, everyone?
Back at last year's AAS Pub Meet (was it really that long ago?), Julie agreed to help me with a comparative review of Sat Nav applications for S60. We've produced odds and ends during the year, but you may be wondering where the promised head-to-head mega-review is. Good question. Read on if you're not offended by the sight of a grown woman (Julie) having a really good rant....
Now this is pretty trivial, but bear with me. Am I so unusual in matching a phone's theme to its body colour and styling? Below the break I've illustrated the idea with the silver Nokia N82, but I'd welcome your comments and feedback. What other device/theme pairs work very well?
Since the dawn of time (ok, about 1995), developers have been looking to replace the default home screen of PDAs and smartphones. Epocware's new Handy Shell seems pretty comprehensive for S60 and so we asked Ewan to install it on his main device and run with it for a week... The result? A narrowly missed MegaApp. From configurability to stability, Handy Shell seems to do a lot to live up to its price tag.
CommonTime recently announced an upgraded version of its mobile solution for Lotus Notes, today it announced support for all S60 3rd Edition devices. mSuite is a solution, similar to Mail for Exchange, which allows enterprise users to access Lotus Notes based email, contacts, calendar and tasks from a mobile device.
Next up in Ewan's series of Desert Island Desktops, taking a look at people's standby screens - this time, Alfie Dennen of Moblog (www.moblog.net) shares his home screen while Ewan applies his degree in mobile psychology to work out what makes Alfie tick...
Resco Photo Viewer has been evolving over the last three years and has paralleled the development of Nokia's own Nseries Gallery in some ways. Which makes it unnecessary for anyone with the latter, but a downright 'MegaApp' must-buy for anyone struggling along on the 'old' S60 Gallery. With a Nokia E90, Steve is hit more than most by a sluggish Gallery and has found the speed of the third party Resco Photo Viewer a revelation. And it's got other tricks up its sleeve too....
In All About Symbian Podcast 96 (Insight #43) Steve, after an E90 firmware update, asks why he can have a better experience than Nokia Software Updater. We also talk about about recent content on All About Symbian before moving on to some thoughts and reflections on S60 5th Edition with some special attention for backwards compatibility.
If you've been following the saga of Nokia's new next-gen email system, note that there's a whole new shiny beta of Nokia Email available, writes the Beta Labs team. There's more localisation, wider compatibility and plenty of minor bug fixes and detailed improvements. There still seem to be some issues regarding Google services though - indeed, the very Email home page doesn't render at all in Chrome, which didn't bode well for me.... In other news, Ovi Share has added a decent Map View so that you can see all your photos in a channel and where they were taken in a single glance.
Ewan back-fills our review section with a detailed look at the third major product in one of his specialist categories: live video streaming. Kyte.TV Mobile Producer impresses from the start and in some ways is the most polished of the three (Kyte, Qix, Flixwagon). [Gentle warning: viewing this review will require you to get up close and personal with Mr Spence.... :-) ]
Ewan starts a new series of personal articles looking at how different people set up their S60 smartphones. Specifically, looking at what's on their active standby ('Home') screen. He kicks off with mobile cyber celeb James Whatley. You can comment on James' choices below, or indeed on the article series as a whole.
Yes, those clever chaps at Nokia are still trying to confuse us by offering more and more overlapping PC-hosted connectivity applications. :-) Communications Center just hit 2.0, incorporating a lot of feedback from the v1.x release. The software adds to the functionality of four of the standard PC Suite modules, namely Phone Browser, Text Message Editor, Contacts Editor and Multimedia Factory. Here's the download link if you want to give it a whirl.
Google has soft-launched Picasa Web Albums for S60, making available an optimised version of the service via their usual m.google.com starting page. There are some screenshots below. You can play slideshows, comment on other peoples' media and, of course, organise your photos into albums. Note that not all the functions seemed to work as I wrote this - maybe some switches have yet to be thrown!
Today, in London, at its Remix event, Nokia formally launched its Comes with Music service offering. Comes with Music (CwM) lets you buy a Nokia device that includes a year of unlimited access (downloads) to tracks from the Nokia Music Store. After the year is up you can keep any previously downloaded music. CwM will launch first in the UK later this month on the Nokia 5310 Xpress Music, with the Nokia N95 8GB and Nokia 5800 Xpress Music to follow in due course. Read on for more details.
Nokia Chat, the instant messaging/Contacts-integrated/GPS-using/Maps-linked(!) utility, has just received a significant bug fixing upgrade, though Nokia Beta Labs promise us that more is on the way. They've also broken the news that Nokia Music for PC has graduated from Beta Labs and is now formally released, though don't download it if you've been testing the beta - you'll need a special upgrade file that's coming later this week by email.