Software genius Samir must be burning the candle at both ends, with apps coming out of his ears. YTPlayer (new screenshots below) is a first beta of a full YouTube searcher and player. And it works, within the beta limitations. If any programmer is worth a PayPal donation it's this guy. Go on, make his Christmas.
File this one under 'Cool, but very early days', Nokia Beta Labs has released 'PC Phone', a Firefox extension for your PC that gives you access to your S60 smartphone and its calling, messaging and contacts functions. Comments welcome on what this might eventually turn into!
Nokia recently released a press release about a report it had comissioned, 'A Glimpse of the Next Episode' which talked about the future of entertainment. The main trend identified was the coming of 'Circular Entertainment' (content created, edited and shared within a peer community rather than traditional media sources). Nokia have now released a number of videos featuring discussion around some of the key areas of the report. Read on for more and to view the videos.
Nokia Research Centre has made available, as a technology demonstrator, Activity Monitor for the Nokia N95 and N95 8GB. It uses the accelerometer built into the phone to count the number of steps you take in a given period of time. It then uses the collected data to display various statistics including energy consumed, steps taken and distance travelled. Activity monitor is therefore best thought of as an intelligent 'super' pedometer.
Now that Adobe's Flash Lite 3 has been 'released', ways of accessing YouTube on a smartphone are starting to leak out. Following a really convoluted method, there's been the commercial demo of Mobitubia (mini-site and 9 minute brand new video with appallingly funny English!), and now RotateMe wizard Samir brings us FLVPlayer - although it's currently hard wired to a few test videos and needs further development. Throw in an updated version of Web and it can't be long until the Holy Grail becomes possible, surely?
Yes, yes, it's just another 'news headlines and content' reader, but Nokia do seem to have some high profile content partners for this free venture, so worth giving Channels a try. Of note is that Channels auto-rotates the screen if relevant, i.e. it's accelerometer-aware on the likes of the N95 and N82 - as the blog entry notes , 'this is a sign of things to come'.
The Italians may have a few things that aren't exactly perfect in their economy, but boy do they have style. Following on from my rave write up of PiZero, here's your theme for today, 'Everything Burns' , from P@sco.
The hands-down best S60 theme ever created, PiZero's 'Gold' has had a big upgrade, to v2.0 ! How can you have an upgrade, with bug fixes and version numbers, all for a simple theme? Because this is no ordinary theme and, like most of PiZero's other creations, it's implemented in meticulous detail. Oh, and if you like Gold 2.0, drop him a few PayPal dollars - I did.
Shhh.... don't tell Rafe I told you this ( 8-) as you know, we do like you to buy software through our Handango-run store, so that we get commission to keep AAS going), but... Handango have one of their 'Free App Friday' offers on today only, giving away the S60 Calendar replacement Papyrus - completely free ! Thought you'd want to know, anyway...
Nokia and Telecon Italia today announced that Ovi services will be enabled on Nokia handsets, starting with the N95 8GB and N81, offered by TIM. TIM services will be offered alongside Nokia's Map, Music and Photo services. TIM joins Telefonica and Vodafone who have made similar announcements endorsing Nokia's Ovi vision.
Kudos to programme Barak Harel for coming up with a viable way for mere mortals to 'sign' low level utilities for S60 and Symbian OS. Having started trying to sign RotateMe a week or two ago and given up in frustration, this sort of Windows utility is extremely welcome. You'll still need a Symbian 'key' and 'cer' file, but other than that it's supposed to be totally automatic. Anyone tried it yet?
Nokia has agreed to buy out Avvenu, a supplier of Internet services that "allow anyone to use their mobile devices to securely access, use and share personal computer files, even if their host computer is turned off." Avvenu will become part of Nokia's new 'Services and Software' reorganisation, starting on January 1st. The full press release is below.
