Although we don't normally comment on vapourware, there are many old Palm OS fans who feel they can't move over to a modern smartphone because they have one or more specific Palm applications they can't live without. Enter StyleTap's CrossPlatform product - they're promising it'll see a full release on S60 and UIQ in early 2008.
Also officially launched at the Smartphone Show was Epocware's Handy Calendar. This replaces the built-in S60 Calendar and adds many new functions. The press release is below. Comments on sync compatibility and functionality are welcomed!
The slightly predictable mess that's Microsoft's altering of their Office file formats (to XML) has left smartphone owners in the lurch. But at least there's light at the end of the tunnel with today's Smartphone Show announcements: Dataviz has announced Documents To Go Premium Edition version 4.0 for UIQ 3 smartphones and Quickoffice has announced Quickoffice Premier 5.0 for S60 3rd Edition, both offering full Office 2007 editing. In other news, Quickoffice has announced a partnership with SoonR, dubbed Quickaccess.
Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show Nokia showed S60 running with a touch interface. The touch interface will support both finger and stylus input, has full multi lingual support, has support for tactile feedback (haptics) and is backwardly compatible with the existing S60 platform. Read the full story for and to view the video showing S60 Touch running on some concept devices.
Google has created a version of its Google Maps application for S60 3rd Edition phones. Google Maps is now a native Symbian OS 9 application, which gives better overall performance compared to Java version. As an added bonus, the application now supports the use of the internal GPS in relevant phones; allowing you to see your current location. Read on for plenty of screenshots and a quick run through of the features.
Web portal, proxy service or online RSS reader? Sometimes the boundaries can get a little blurred. Ewan takes a detailed look at Mippin, launched yesterday, and finds it surprisingly useful.
If you happening to be visiting Finland and own a Nokia phone running S60 3rd Edition then David Dewhurst has just the application for you. Flash Finnish is a free Flash Lite game designed to help you learn Finnish. It currently has basic vocabulary, numbers and colour, but more additions are planned after the beta test.
Jukka Silvennoinen, creator the very popular YBrowser, a free file manager for S60, has gone one step further and released much of the core code in Open Source form, together with examples of how to plug-in your own code. All details and downloads here.
Jaiku, the activity streaming and presence service (also referred to as micro blogging), has been acquired by Google. The terms of the acquisition has not been disclosed. While Jaiku is often used via the web it also has strong mobile features (including a native S60 client) and the idea of presence is a very important part of the Jaiku message.
Telefónica and Nokia have announced that the two companies are to work together on Internet services. Nokia will customise its multimedia menu on Nseries devices to enable easy access to both Nokia (e.g. Nokia Music Shop, N-Gage) and Telefónica services. The announcement is significant because its puts Nokia's own service offering on an equal footing to those provided by an operator. Read on for more.
Nokia Beta Labs has released an interesting application, Device Status, which lets you access a variety of information and which can be helpful in solving support issues. There is an application for S60 devices which collects information about your phone and a companion PC application which allows you to more easily view the information about your phone as well as collecting information about your PC.
Guest writer Asri al-Baker has been trialling the brand new CorePlayer ports for both UIQ 3 (on his Sony Ericsson P990i) and S60 3rd Edition (on his Nokia N95). How well does this hallowed media player stand up to video and audio tests on both Symbian interfaces? Can it really play any media file in any format, codec or resolution? Find out in his CorePlayer Mobile review.
Guest writer Asri al-Baker has been trialling the brand new CorePlayer ports for both UIQ 3 (on his Sony Ericsson P990i) and S60 3rd Edition (on his Nokia N95). How well does this hallowed media player stand up to video and audio tests on both Symbian interfaces? Can it really play any media file in any format, codec or resolution? Find out in his CorePlayer Mobile review.