January is traditionally one of the quietest periods of the year for smartphone purchases. However if you are in the market price points have never been lower. For example, the C6-01, the mid tier Symbian^3 handset, can currently be purchased for £210 on PAYG in the UK. Similarly, at the low end of the market, the Nokia 5228 is currently available on PAYG for just £50. This downward pressure on smartphone prices is nothing new.
I can’t resist pointing out another fabulous theme by PiZero I’ve just stumbled over. Called Digiflowers, it’s available for S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 handsets. It works in landscape and portrait mode, looks fantastic and adds an artistic flair to your home screen and desktop. Well worth checking out from pizero.net.
Popping up at the start of the week was a significant alpha version of Gravity. Taking the popular social media client up to version 1.5a, it’s not quite polished and stable yet, so if you want to wait for the hardened version, then check back in January. But if you’re happy with a little bit of peril, then you’ll get a number of new features and improvements, including a portrait qwerty keyboard for touchscreen devices!
Mobbler, Symbian's Last.fm client, has a new beta version for Symbian^3 users. The new beta supports the new Scrobbling API and menu items for the radio stations recently discontinued by Last.fm have been removed. There is a long list of new features too, like Twitter sharing, artist biography pages, and improved lyrics pages. Also added is support for the new mix radio station created by Last.fm to replace discontinued stations. The Mobbler project is also asking people to install an error reporting agent (ErrRd.SIS) which will help the developers capture bugs in the new beta version.
As part of the Symbian Foundation's transition to a licensing only organisation the majority of the Symbian Foundation websites closed today. Together with the departure of the majority of the remaining staff, today marks the end of major operations by the Symbian Foundation. Of course, the Symbian platform will continue under the guidance of Nokia, who have committed to make the future development of the platform available via an alternative 'direct and open model'. Some comments below.
Asri Al Baker from i-symbian.com and friend of All About Symbian has been at it again with his Web Run-Time Widgets! This time, he has broken away from the Google world and treated us to a launcher for Facebook Touch. For those who don't know, http://touch.facebook.com offers a variant of Facebook optmised for finger-driven mobile browsers. As said previously, there's nothing stopping users from just adding a bookmark to their browser, but these WRT Widgets offer the benefit of an identifiable icon in both the application menu and home screen shortcuts.
Anyone who is interested in testing the latest features of Pixelpipe Share Online should now direct their browser towards Nokia Beta Labs. Pixelpipe is the latest third party application to be invited into Nokia Beta Labs for users to get the latest bleeding edge features, and more importantly, provide useful feedback to the developers! To announce their invitation to Beta Labs, Pixepipe CEO Brett Butterfield has written a guest blog post, to introduce the social media sharing agent to the uninitiated.
Putting itself forward as the “real-time home screen” Hiplogic’s *Spark has left beta and the full version is officially launched today. With hooks into your own social networks on Facebook and Twitter, as well as news headlines from PA, Sky and CBS and a new daily deals module (powered by this month’s web darling, Groupon), *Spark certainly makes a strong case for itself. See below for plenty more, including comments, screens, links and an in-depth, exclusive video interview with Hiplogic's CEO, Mark Anderson.
Over on A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch is taking a closer look at one of the current key elements of the modern smartphone, the web browser. Pulling numbers from the Stat-Counter Service, he not only points out that the leading browser is Opera, but that Nokia’s web-kit effort is sitting nicely on 17% of the global market, compared to Opera and Safari on 22% and Blackberry on 19%. Android, by comparison, is on 11%. What does that mean for website designers?
[sarcasm alert] I had to chuckle when I saw this blog post on one of my favourite sites about a third party extension to Android, enabling - shock, horror, amazement - folders, to organise one's applications. Maybe the developers are copying Apple, who famously added folders for applications earlier this year in their fourth iteration of the iPhone OS? That must be it. They couldn't possibly be copying what Nokia and Symbian has had since (ahem) 2002, eight years ago, could they? See below for the appropriate Android 'Folder Organizer' screenshots...
Quaintly described in the press release as "now available on flat pieces of dead trees", Tamoggemon Software, based in Germany, has written a book which "takes C++ programmers and transforms them into lean and mean Symbian coding machines". The book covers all Symbian versions from S60 3rd Edition onwards and covers Ovi Store and Symbian Signed - the only catch is that the book's only available in German so far - the writers are looking for an English language publisher. Photo and a link below.
SPB Online Games launched yesterday for S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3, a collection of 4 instant online, multi-player games (English and Russian Checkers, Hexagon and Reversi). If interrupted, the games can be continued from the spot where they left off. Players can also "share their game experience in the real-time chat service". Mini-review, screenshots and links below.
The All About Symbian X6 seems to be at the back of the list for getting the firmware upgrades. So now that v30.0.003 has hit our handset it likely means that it is available to everyone else in the world. It’s the first update to jump from the twenties to the thirties, and brings new versions of some applications, as well as general improvements for better stability all round.
Nokia Messaging 10.2 and Mail for Exchange have just been pushed out for Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic, 5530 and X6-00. These updates are over-the-air (OTA), and should be available via the Software Update application. Nokia Messaging provides push email to these handsets via Nokia's own push mail service from popular services like Ovi Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. Alongside the Nokia Messaging update, Mail for Exchange has been added to these handsets providing push email and PIM push synchronisation with corporate networks, and third party services like Nuevasync. Read on for screenshots and a brief comment.
Skype have just announced a new version of Skype for Symbian, with a revamped user interface and support for Symbian^3 devices. This new version (1.50 build 15) supports the SILK codec for higher quality calls. As part of the user interface update, Skype say they have improved support for larger screens, and made it easier to add contacts and photos, and make status updates. We have also noted the UI has new instant message notification pop-ups. Read on for screenshots and our initial test results.
