The simulation game Sims 2: Pets has now gone live on N-Gage, you can download it directly to your phone from the N-Gage application's showroom. Naturally we'll be bringing you a review in due course. Now, where did we put that dog lead?
More accelerometer fun for Nseries owners, this time in the form of pyWuzzler. As the Euro 2008 Football Championship reaches its final stages, it's time for some Football on the phone, with a difference. It's an implementation of 'Bar Football' with your players on sticks that spin, on your phone! Gooooaaaaaaallll!!
Ah yes, the irresistable urge to make a play on words for a review of a utility with this sort of name. Quite appropriate really as, ultimately, Hi-n-Bye is more of a geek-toy/tech demonstrator. Still, within its niche, this accelerometer-driven telephony aid is immaculately programmed, a model app in many ways - and it's battery-sensitive too.
In this beginners tutorial, I share a little of my sat-nav experience, hopefully of help to anybody suffering from slow GPS locks, especially under S60 and Nokia Maps, and frustrated by the apparent 'unreliability' of mobile navigation software. Here's how to make sure your GPS locks are faster and how to speed around Nokia Maps.
In AAS Insight #28 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss some of the news from the past week including Trolltech, Mail for Exchange 2.5 and the Symbian Smartphone Show before moving on to the general waffle topics: firstly S60's increasing integration with the PC and web, secondly smartphone statistics and definition.
Thanks to Ed at the Eseries blog for writing up the new version of Mail for Exchange, v2.5 - if your company uses Exchange 2007 then you're in for several brand new features, including handling of 'follow up flags' and control over 'out of the office' notifications.
You'll remember Nokia's newish Sports Tracker widget, whereby you can embed your journeys and media into your web page? Well, following on from the news that Sports Tracker itself can handle videos (taken along the exercise route), the official widget has now been upgraded too. The current name is now 'Maps+Photography+Video' - something snappier is desperately needed.
In this article Steve explains, step-by-step, how you can use your Nseries phone to create a time-lapse video using the sequence mode of the camera application and a quick bit of video editing. He has also included a quick example of his own, but we would like to see your examples too.
I can't really believe I'm writing a news story about Calculator, but it's so ubiquitous and built-in to well over 100 million S60 handsets, so.... News from Nokia Conversations is that Calculator is about to get replaced - by a ported version of the Calculator in Nokia's even-bigger-selling Series 40 handsets. The update should appear first in Beta Labs for us all to try, apparently.
Just to prove they were listening during all those S60 Summit seminars, Rafe and Ewan focus in this feature on S60's Web Run-Time (WRT), which was heavily promoted at the event. They cover what it is, where it's going and what it will mean for developers and end users. In addition, Rafe recorded this podcast, talking to Ganesh Sivaraman about WRT and all things widgetey.
Nokia are really pushing on with development of Maps 2.0 at the moment. There's a flashy new promo video on the main Nokia Maps page, plus a new build of the software: v2.0 build 2204 - can you spot anything new or changed?
FOAM, or Find On A Map, the mobile phone tracking system that works on all S60 smartphones, has just had a big update, the version on the main FOAM web site now supports the internal GPS of the Nokia N95, N82 and E90 (etc), plus there have been several major web site-side functionality improvements since our review last year, including location alarms and 'geofencing'. The optional donation is now more of an enforced donation, but it's still incredibly cheap for what it provides, keeping track of your entire family or workforce to within GPS accuracy.
Heck, maybe I should just start a PiZero fan club or something - his latest theme is Leopard (yes, that Leopard) - see below for a majestic screenshot taken on the Nokia E90. The theme wasn't really designed for such a wide screen, but it looks like it can adapt to anything!
As you'll have noted from the recent post about the new features in the released Nokia Maps 2.0, cell-id-based location has been added to the existing GPS support. Andrew over at London Calling has a definitive set of musings as to where this has come from and on how big a deal it will be to keep this extra ID database up to date. (via this week's Carnival of the Mobilists)
Just a quick note for those that hadn't spotted the differences in the screenshots in my free-nav article above. Google Maps for Mobile 2.1 for S60 has just been released, with a selection of improvements. Read on for details.