Nokia's Download! system, integrated into every S60 device, has finally had one of my long-standing bugbears fixed. Never mind that the whole thing is now seemingly administered by Jamster (explaining all the '1 of 3' 'costs' listed throughout some of the app pages), the core 'Applications' section now has freeware marked as '0' (i.e. costs nothing), while trialware and demos now appear, less misleadingly (they used to say '0' too), as 'Try for free'. There's also the new 'Payment in application', in readiness for Ovi. See below.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the discussion on my recent “Why I Don't Use the PIM on S60” bring in a bundle of comments both on the site and in the emails. Lots of you brought up similar points, so I thought it would be a good idea to bring those into an article about why a PIM on a mobile device is a really good idea. [And Mr. Editor (Steve) couldn't resist sticking in his thoughts as well... bah]
Lee Williams, writing on the Symbian Foundation blog, shares a few photos on Symbian ^1 (effectively the current version of S60 5th Edition) running on an 'off the shelf Intel Atom based motherboard'. The Intel Atom is one of the processors regularly used in netbook computers. The concept highlights the flexibility and maturity of Symbian platform and demonstrates that there could be potential areas for it to be used beyond mobile phones. Read on for further thoughts.
Mobbler, a last.fm client for S60, has been updated to version 0.4.4. The new version supports the new Last.fm Web Services, which is an official API / integration route, and should improve stability. Other new features include improved album art support, the ability to disable scrobbling, a sleep timer (perfect for using music to send you to sleep), and the ability to view you Last.fm data.
Nokia today released its Q1 2009 results. Nokia had net sales of EUR 9.3 billion, down 27% year on year and down 27% sequentially (down 24% and up 25% at constant currency). Nokia sold 13.7 million converged (S60) devices, down from 14.6 million in Q1 2008 and 15.1 million in Q4 2008, of these 5 million were Nseries and 3 million were Eseries. An individual device highlight was the 5800 which sold 2.6 million units. Nokia's industry outlook sees similar device volumes and market share for Q2, but expect overall conditions to improve in the second half of the year
The Phones Show 79 went live just now, with some extended news, thoughts on the T-Mobile G1 and a demo of Slingplayer Mobile on the N95 8GB. Comments welcome as usual.
In this developer feature we preview Nokia's upcoming Developer Summit 2009, which being held in Monaco at the end of this month. It is the first event that brings all aspects of development for Nokia devices together and Srikanth Raju, head of marketing for Forum Nokia, offers some insight.
Nokia Easy Meet is a mobile collaboration tool, which has been put together by NRC (Nokia Research Centre) as a research prototype, and made available to end-users via Nokia BetaLabs. Easy Meet allows you to easily share and view content around a given subject (meeting). For example, it could be used to share a PowerPoint slide slow during a voice conference call. The advantage of Easy Meet, compared to many other solutions, is that mobile users are able to fully participate in the viewing and sharing of content.
Following on from today's review, word reaches us from Mojo's Studio that Twittix has been updated to v0.92. The interesting addition is the "introduce" feature which lets you point two of your Twitter friends to each other. The full change list is here
In All About Symbian Insight 66 (AAS Podcast 124) we talk about the N-Gage platform's newest addition - Worms World Party. Then there's discussion of Google Maps 3.0.1, BBC TV streams, device colours. We finish with a discussion of the joys of older devices. You can listen to AAS Insight 66 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Google Maps for Symbian on S60 (3rd and 5th Edition) has received a major update to version 3.0.1.4 (from 3.0.0.x). There are UI changes, notably to the context 'pop-up' menu (when you press in the D-pad), this has been restyled to match the application's other dialog elements. There are also many under-the-hood changes to how Google Maps works on S60 phones, see below for the full published changelog [added April 13th].
A question that has cropped up a few times since I took the Nokia 5800 to the recent Getting Things Done Conference in America is how I organise my time using GTD principles on my smartphone. And the honest answer is that I don't use a smartphone at all. I still use paper. Why? Let me explain... [Editor's note: Ewan's latest stylus for the Nokia 5800 appears to be.... an Allen key! Strewth - what next?]
