Ewan snuggles up in his favourite chair by the Christmas tree, with a selection of novels on his S60 5th Edition smartphone, courtesy of the brand new eReader application (and ecosystem). Apart from the use of a restrictive ebook format, there's very little to complain about, it seems, and Ewan has no problem recommending that you give the free eReader a try.
As part of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in two weeks time, 20 mobile apps have been selected to compete in the Mobile App Showdown. Perennial Symbian favourite Gravity (here's the AAS Review of the Twitter client) is currently running fifth in the public vote, which continues until Friday 8th January.
No, not a blatant Phones Show plug (though Phones Show Chat 18 is out), but a serious attempt to provoke thought and discussion. Ahead of a video feature on smartphone recommendations, I've opened up my thought processes to you below, in some detail, breaking down the market into a whopping seven stereotypes(!) Maybe you'd like to chip in with comments, recommendations and disqualifications of your own?
While still waiting to complete my own Satio review part 3, I was interested to read Michell Bak of the S-E (Sony Ericsson) Blog, who has produced an impressively long and graphical all-in-one Satio review. This is also interesting because it seems to be Michell's first S60 phone as well, giving a view of vanilla S60 5th Edition from a newcomer's standpoint.
Screen-capturing S60 5th Edition phones has been a little awkward in 2009 because the only tool available, Best Screen Snap, was really written for an older version of the OS and didn't like taking screens in a different aspect ratio to that in which it was started up. Luckily, it seems that SmartphoneWare have released Best Screen Snap v2.0 and this (besides also being free) also works flawlessly in terms of screen orientation. That's one less thing to worry about over Christmas!
It's all very well listening to advice on ways to cut down the power used by your smartphone, but have you ever seen the power savings quantified? Can you put numbers to the various techniques and settings? You can now, with my handy guide. Although testing was on a Nokia N96, the findings should apply to any Symbian-powered smartphone.
In a remarkable turn of events, Nokia's Ovi Store (e.g. see the client on your phone) has beaten another official outlet to the punch, with new versions of the free S60 YouTube client available - v2.2.21 for S60 3rd Edition phones and v2.2.29 for S60 5th Edition phones. No major feature changes, I'm afraid, and the menu is somewhat screwy on the latter version, but hey, it's free and it's new, right? Photo proof below.
Samsung has officially announced a big new firmware update for its i8910 HD, bringing faster web browsing, faster multimedia access and, most desired of all, full Symbian^2/N97-style kinetic scrolling in all dialogs and screens. See below for the press release text. The bad news? You'll have to wait until next month to get it, via PC Studio update.
In All About Symbian Insight 99 (AAS Podcast 163), we discuss recent news including Nokia's presence at MWC, Ewan's Le Web trip and recent Apple legal activity. Then there's discussion of the Nokia Booklet 3G and the future direction of such mobile devices and software platforms. Finally there some special Christmas related content making for a longer-then-usual podcast. You can listen to AAS Insight 99 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
As an experiment, I lent my Nokia N97 mini to All About iPhone's Matt Radford, to see what he thought of the device and its interface, coming from a staunch iPhone background. Embedded below is my ten minute catch-up interview with him, for your interest. A fuller textual report from Matt is in the works over Christmas, pudding and festivities permitting!
Guest author Julian Grail takes on a review of the alliterative Magic Message Manager, claiming to filter your emails and SMS in powerful ways. Unfortunately, it suffers at the end of the day from not being integrated tightly enough into Symbian OS/S60. Comments welcomed if you've had a chance to try Magic Message Manager yet.
Track and Protect, now available in beta, is a personal remote security tool for Symbian phones. It brings easy-to-use remote management and security features, such as remote locking and wiping, to a consumer audience and also includes a location tracking module. We've taken a closer look at the beta version in this in-depth review and conclude that Track and Protect should 'significantly improve the chance of having your phone returned to you', if it is lost or stolen. Read on for more.
A couple of Phones Show-related links for you: show 98 is now live, with my video review of the Nokia E72 and a walkthrough of Nimbuzz with Twitter on the Nokia N97. And if you're anywhere near Berkshire in the UK on the 6th of January 2010, there's an informal Phones Show pub meet - anyone welcome, though my offer of 'free beer' might need a caveat if too many people want to attend... 8-)
Our very own Asri al-Baker has taken the time to sit down with Malcolm Lithgow, the guy behind Dreamspring, a software house which has been in the Psion and Symbian worlds for almost as long as I have(!) - Asri questions him on the challenges and rewards of developing for Symbian and asks him to summarise a modern developer's other options (Maemo, iPhone, Android, etc.) Here's the fairly lengthy, but interesting, interview.
One would assume that with the Nokia N95, N96 and N97 having sequential product numbers, there would be a common aim for their use in the minds of Nokia's design team, along with a clear technical evolution. To be fair, you can see the former, in their focus on multimedia in conjunction with a decent camera. However, the latter isn't that easy to demonstrate, as I found when comparing the three Nokia flagships (from 2007, 2008 and 2009) head to head - it seems there are plenty of attributes for which the N95 wins and still more for which the N96 wins....
