Just a note that if you're the owner of a UK-bought 'red' Nokia 5800 and have been champing at the bit for a bit of v20 firmware action, it's now online for you, bringing faster operation, Search, geotagging in Camera and more. See Nokia Software Update or check your on-device firmware updater with *#0000# etc.
It's definitely not a 'formal' release, but anyone with a penchant for fiddling with Python applications on S60 should note that there's now a build of Python for S60 that includes touch support. There's also an example 'Scribble' application, plus extra modules and easier installation. You can get PyS60 v1.9.3 here and here's hoping that a formal all-encompassing v2.0 release isn't far away. See the full change log here.
In a follow up to my popular series, from August 2008, investigating the practicalities of a S60 smartphone owner switching to an Apple Mac as the desktop counterpart, I report back after a couple of months of living the Mac life for real. What improvements have their been to the software available and does using a Mac and OS X now offer a more seamless smartphone experience than a PC and Windows?
Long-time readers may remember we gave Lonely Cat Games' card game Mau Mau quite a positive review, and for those who don't know it's basically Uno played with normal cards. Well, it now appears that the game is available free of charge from LCG's website for all S60 editions and UIQ2 as well. Just download the file from the download page, then head on over to the free unlock code page and use your phone's IMEI. (UPDATE: Apparently there's the old annoying "expired certificate" problem with this file, but you should be able to get round this by altering your phone's date settings to March 2008 instead of March 2009. You can then alter the dates back to normal after installation.)
In All About Symbian Insight 63 (AAS Podcast 120) Rafe gives some insight into iPlayer, Steve talks about YouTube's S60 client application and both talk about their views on Samsung's Omnia HD. You can listen to AAS Insight 63 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
In a group review Steve rounds up a number of cases and protection solutions for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. He gives scores for protection, style and usability and assesses how well each case does in each scoring category. He concludes by offering an overall opinion, but our prior experience suggests people have strong personal preferences so we would love to hear from you too.
Yes, Ewan's heading off for a three week tour of the USA, taking in social media and gaming events. To try and add a little Symbian spice to proceedings, we insisted he take the Nokia 5800 with him, to really try it out 'on the road'. This is the sixth of his regular video reports, embedded below, letting us know how he's getting on with S60 5th Edition and the 5800. In this part, Ewan answers some feedback questions and talks more about the PIM apps with regard to touch integration, before describing why Nokia Maps is a better bet than Google Maps for the overseas traveller. Oh, and watch out for the battlestar-sized stylus and the Black Helicopter....
The San Francisco GDC conference is starting on monday and All About N-Gage's Ewan Spence will be reporting live from the event (there have been some interesting rumours regarding N-Gage news). To follow AAN's GDC coverage, you can visit our website of course, but we also have various other online presences such as our Twitter channel and our RSS news feed. And if we have any interesting vids to show you they should end up on our YouTube channel. Also see Ewan's personal Twitter feed.
Reported widely today is a new over-the-air update to Nokia's GPS-uber-utility, Sports Tracker. v2.05 (up from v1.83) brings better touch support (map zoom icons, more reliable finger swipe screen transitions), plus N79-like support for the Polar heart rate monitor and (on compatible devices) the integration/backup of accelerometer-based step counting. You can get v2.05 by going into the application and using 'Check for updates'.
Released yesterday was my Show 78, with a six minute video version of my Samsung Omnia HD first impressions, published here at the start of the week. A huge thanks to Rafe for helping with the video and you can expect text and video in more detail from him on All About Symbian shortly. Show 78 also includes my March Top 5 Phones. If you want to comment on either, please see the YouTube thread.
As we mentioned last week, Canada's CBC has set up an online OPML podcast directory which can be used to browse all their audio and video podcasts on an S60 device's Podcasting application. One of the CBC's tech blogs has posted an article explaining how the directory was made, using the Macintosh-based NetNewsWire feed reader. However, you can use other readers on other platforms too, and we recently published a similar OPML directory how-to using Google Reader instead. For those of you who just want to browse the CBC podcast directory on your S60 phone, see our "how to add directories to S60 Podcasting" article which also covers the BBC and NPR directories too.
Just released in the Nokia 5800's Download-Widgets folder is the free WeatherBug, offering worldwide weather status, forecasts and radar animations, all (optionally) keyed to your GPS location. As the folder suggests, it's implemented as a (Web Runtime) widget, in similar fashion to AccuWeather, released last month in the same folder. How many more ways do we need to find out what the weather's going to be like tomorrow? Screenshots below.
Samsung Mobile Innovator has announced the availability of the Qt for S60 Garden technology preview device DLL installation files with Samsung certification. This enables the Qt for S60 demos , as well as applications created with Qt for S60, to run on Samsung S60 phones.
Yes, Ewan's heading off (Twitter feed here) for a three week tour of the USA, taking in social media and gaming events. To try and add a little Symbian spice to proceedings, we insisted he take the Nokia 5800 with him, to really try it out 'on the road'. This is the fifth of his regular video reports, embedded below, letting us know how he's getting on with S60 5th Edition and the 5800. Ewan talks about PIM apps (Contacts, Calendar, and so on), touching on Sync options and having a good rant about the paucity of Nokia's S60 To-do list functions.
Much has been made of the Apple iPhone and T-Mobile G1's capacitive touchscreens, with many proclaiming them superior to the humble 'resistive' touchscreens that have been used since the dawn of time (oh, ok, since about 1995). But is it as simple as the one technology being superior? What advantages does 'resistive' tech have and what else do you need to know?
