The HX series of firmwares for the Samsung i8910 HD continue to roll out, with v5 the best yet, with a number of important fixes and detailed improvements, including, critically, fixing the Java certificate problem and improving battery life. As ever, these firmwares are 100% unofficial, but they're easy to apply* and can dramatically transform this old but still powerful smartphone. Comments welcome if you get a chance to try it on your i8910. Changelog extracts and link below.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to run your own farm? Now you too can be up at the crack of dawn tending to livestock, thanks to Farm Frenzy for S60 5th Edition phones, reviewed here by David Gilson, here on Ovi Gaming. Requiring a healthy degree of mental multitasking and finger dexterity, Farm Frenzy is addictive and definitely one of the better games currently on the Ovi Store.
Nokia has released an update, version 3.04, for Ovi Maps. The new version adds formal support for WiFi as a positioning method as part of an overhaul of the positioning functionality, plus significant performance improvements for search, zooming and map panning, a number of consumer-friendly UI tweaks and the addition of Qype information to the places database. Read on for more details.
In an entirely self-centric link-of-interest, I thought these brief items might be of interest: The Phones Show 111 is now out, with a tour round my Psion collection and a commentary on how these led to the modern Symbian age, and with a feature on getting better photos from your smartphone camera; there have also been three new devices added to my smartphone-choosing Grid; and don't forget the Phones Show Chat audio podcast, about an hour each week - PSC 39 featured Andy Lee, a Blackberry expert, Tim and I were keen to talk to him about comparisons with the Nokia E72.
You'll remember that Ewan did a four part review of the Nokia X6 32GB (Comes with Music) a few months back? (links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) It's fair to say that quite a bit of his criticism was based on early software issues and observations over the slow speed of the 32GB version's mass memory. Fast forward to May 2010 and we have a X6 16GB with more mature v20 firmware and a far faster mass memory. Can this cheaper edition succeed where the CwM version failed? And is the X6's hardware and software now ready for the prime time? Here's part one of Steve Litchfield's two part review of the Nokia X6-00. Part two will follow on Thursday.
In All About Symbian Insight 118 Ewan and Rafe share their thoughts on a visit to Nokia's design HQ in London, the release of Sports Tracker and memory performance on Ewan's X6. The second half of the podcast features an outside broadcast recorded at the recent #NokiaNav event in Richmond. Rafe and Steve are joined Julien Fourgeaud and discuss the event and related accessories and activities. You can listen to AAS Insight 118 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
OpenTable for Nokia, an application which lets you book a restaurant table from you phone, is now available to download from Ovi Store. OpenTable is a well established online restaurant booking service; it covers more than 13,000 restaurants in the US, UK, Canada and Mexico. The key advantage of the service is that it provides a complete 'end-to-end' offering allowing you to browse restaurants, making a booking and receive a confirmation. This saves significant time and effort over the traditional method of telephone booking.
With Steve borrowing an X6 for a few weeks (expect his thoughts on Nokia’s first capacitive screened smartphone next week) one thing we wanted to look at was the relatively slow speed of the music player on my X6. While we’re comparing over Skype and not side by side, there’s still a marked difference between Steve’s 16GB X6 and my 32GB X6. And we have a theory....
I was asked a very good question last week: "Why do you stay with Symbian when there's a world of wonder with iPhone and Android?" I have to admit to finding a number of positives in these other platforms, sometimes accompanied by positives in their hardware, but it's true that I do keep coming back to Symbian as the OS powering my smartphone-of-choice. Investigating my own leanings and trying to justify them, here are the top 10 reasons why I stay with Symbian.
Following on from our review of Gravity Surf on Ovi Gaming earlier this month, developers Synqua games have been in touch to thank us for the balanced review, and to let us know that one of the ideas we posted (controlling the game via the accelerometer) has been implemented. This is the perfect example of how to build up a business in the competitive online world of applications. Let me explain…
