In our latest AAS podcast, Insight 105, Steve and Ewan discuss the news and announcements from Barcelona, including the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro, Symbian^3, Skype for 5th Edition, Nokia's Maemo/Moblin deal, Windows Phone 7 Series Pocket Pro Mobile (or something like that) and anything else which we thought of interest and relevance.
Exclusive: Skype for Symbian, long in beta for S60 3rd Edition and missing-in-action for the Nokia N97 marque, has now been overhauled, face-lifted and released for both, and is out of beta. You can get it by going to skype.com/m in Web on your (N95 onwards) S60 phone and downloading when prompted. Read on for lots of screenshots from my Nokia N97, comment and links.
In this video, recorded at Sony Ericsson's Mobile World Congress press event, we get a brief hands-on with the Sony Ericsson Vivaz looking at some of the key feature and design highlights. There's also a bonus video which shows of the 'rotation-sensitive' wallpaper on the Vivaz's homescreen.
The Symbian Foundation today officially unveiled Symbian^3 at Mobile World Congress. In this video, Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Foundation, gives us an introduction to Symbian^3 and highlights some of the platform's key features, including new user experience enhancements and architectural evolution.
As expected by many, Nokia chose to concentrate on their services for their second event this morning at Mobile World Congress (the first was the Moblin/Maemo merger), announcing a barrage of stats, covering the Symbian-relevant Ovi Maps and Ovi Store, plus numbers for Life Tools, all summarised below. Nokia also announced a live pilot of their Nokia Money, designed to allow mobile payments throughout developing countries.
The Symbian Foundation has today unveiled Symbian^3, with details quoted below. And, courtesy of the video-friendly chaps at Nokia Conversations (YouTube channel), we now have an impressive video 'design preview' of Symbian^3 in action. Remember, this is the OS and user interface that will be included in Symbian-powered smartphones in the second half of 2010. Highlights from the video, embedded at high resolution below, are multiple homescreens, 3D 'Coverflow' for music albums, 'single tap' direct manipulation UI everywhere, multitouch (pinching, splaying, to zoom) and live visual multitasking (Web OS/Maemo 5-style). It's quite a visual feast, so look below and enjoy.
Popular Symbian Twitter client Gravity, hot on the heals of the addition of geo-location, has now added support for Foursquare to check in from the client. Driven, like many of the changes in Gravity, by user requests, you simply add your Foursquare account from the main screen then click through and update your location via GPS. It’s currently available to download for 5th Edition devices in the alpha builds of Gravity. Read on for screens etc.
At a pre-MWC press event, Sony Ericsson has announced the Vivaz Pro, essentially a slightly chunkier Vivaz with sliding qwerty keyboard. Other specs remain the same, with 3.2" resistive touchscreen and it runs vanilla S60 5th Edition with Sony Ericsson panelled homescreen and Media browser/player (same as Satio). Sony Ericsson are emphasising, amidst the simultaneous launch of other smartphones on two other OS platforms, that they're aiming their user experience to be 'OS agnostic', a similar strategy to Samsung's. You'll find specs, photos and promo below. Rafe's at the event and we're hoping to get more details and photos in due course.
Wild Ducks is a Symbian Foundation project that aims to demonstrate how the recently open sourced Symbian platform can run on open hardware. The project uses the popular Beagle Board as the main board which, together with a modem and few other components, gives you everything you need to make a phone. This allows anyone to build their own Symbian based phones with off the shelf hardware. Over two videos we talk to Arunabh Ankur to get the details on the project and take a look at the project's hardware running Symbian^2. Read on for more.
Tower Defense games are popular on Flash web sites, but can Digital Chocolate, in the Nokia Ovi Store, use their Java programming wizardry to bring a tiny battle to your smartphone screen? Ewan dons his peaked cap to find out, in our Ovi Gaming Dictator Defense review.
Python for S60 has been in a state of flux for oh so long, with multiple forks and levels, but it seems we can put all that behind us now with the formal release of the big shiny v2.0 - the dev kit was released today. You may have noted that we reported on PyS60 being made available via Sw update on some 3rd Edition FP2 devices (and above) a month ago. This new kit represents all the other bits developers (and users) might need to write in Python. The announcement, quoted below, also mentions that the source code is being donated to the Symbian Foundation.
A slightly cheeky Friday link of interest, but I noticed that the most excellent Sky Force Reloaded (reviewed by Ewan here) is now only a quid (£1) in the Nokia Ovi Store, which has to be the gaming bargain of the century. Oh, apart from four even bigger bargains, in that they're all still free in the Ovi Store: Raging Thunder (reviewed here), ToonWarz, Wave Blazer and Armageddon Squadron.
Symbian is now open source, which will no doubt attract new developers with new ideas. Any manufacturer can freely use and change Symbian in their devices. It's an exciting future - or is it? David Gilson discusses the potential downside of Symbian being open source.
Nokia has begun the process of rolling out a series of updates for its Nokia Messaging for Email service. The first update available is for the S60 5th Edition Nokia Messaging client. It is available in the SW Update application and is labelled 'Nokia Messaging 10.2'. Further updates, including an updated client for S60 3rd Edition devices and server side updates will be made available over the next few weeks. Read on for further details.
Following on from my review (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4) of the Nokia X6 32GB Comes with Music, I have received the new v12 firmware with open arms and report back here on the transformation it makes to my intensive use of this music-focussed smartphone. There are still issues that need attention, but at least I can trust the X6 - for the first time.
