Nokia's 'Tube' already has great battery life. But Tzer2 wants to go to the max and has penned an excellent 'how to' on maximising the battery life on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic... and on just about any other comparable phone, for that matter. Some great (if sometimes extreme) suggestions here.
In All About Symbian Insight 58 (AAS Podcast 111) we talk about the recent release of Quickoffice version 6, Rafe reports back from Betavine's birthday bash, and Steve talks about T9Nav. The team then moves on to discuss Samsung S60 application compatibility, followed by a few thoughts on the capacitive versus resistive touch debate.
Nokia's Podcasting application for S60 phones has some default podcast directories included, but these aren't very comprehensive and only include a tiny number of BBC feeds. However, if you add the BBC's online podcast directory to the app you can browse all current podcasts and subscribe to any of them with a single click. Adding the directory is very VERY easy to do, almost the same as adding a bookmark in a browser. See below for more details on how to do it (this should work on all current Nokia S60 phones including the 5800 and N95) ...
Bought a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic? Before you do anything, read All About Symbian's guide to your first steps with the phone. Tzer2 has written the article with ordinary people in mind and tried to keep jargon to a minimum, but hopefully even advanced phone users should find something useful in it.
Nokia today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire bit-side GmbH. Bit-side is a small (39 employees) software and service development company that is privately owned. Nokia say the acquisition will help speed up its mobile development for Nokia Maps. Bit-side is known for its imaging (Panoman) and entertainment applications (Marble Revolution). It is also the development house behind a number of well received mobile applications including Plazes for the iPhone and Pixelpipe for Android.
Kudos to W Seto from Forum Nokia for rolling up his sleeves and knocking up a WRT (Web RunTime) widget for our phones that links into Google's excellent Translate service. Although the latter is quite useable on S60 Web, this widget adds copy and paste support, as well as source language auto-detection.
In All About Symbian Insight 57 (AAS Podcast 110) Rafe reports back from the UK launch of the Nokia 5800 launch at Nokia's flagship store on Regents Street, London. The team discuss Q4 finanical results from Nokia and other consumer electronics company before Ewan updates us on two recently announced N-Gage games and Steve highlights Jomtris.
Did you see Nokia's recent press release on the shipping of one million 5800 handsets? Does anything strike you as unusual about this? Me too. Why are Nokia deciding to shout about this now, when other devices rarely get the look at me treatment? Could it be that the Finns are starting to do some psychosocial marketing? Read on while I explain.
A lot of people want to watch video on their phone but find some video converters to be a bit confusing and overcomplicated, or they don't work properly. If you're looking for a "converter for dummies" that works with S60 devices you might want to try Nokia's rather overlooked Internet Tablet Video Converter. It's available for both Windows and Mac, it's totally free, and should work with all current S60 devices despite its Linux tablet heritage. It seems to work especially well with the Nokia 5800 as it has the same 16:9 screen shape as the tablets, and a somewhat similar resolution too.
During a conference call discussing of Q4 results Nokia's CEO, Olli Pekka Kallasvuo mentioned that in the last 30 days of the quarter Nokia had shipped slightly more than half a million Nokia 5800 handsets. During this period the 5800 was only available in limited markets. Today it is the turn of the UK, the device also known as 'Tube' will be available from the Regent Street Nokia flagship store from 8am. See my Twitter stream for live blogging and my Flickr stream for live photos of the queues and experience. Read on for more including our PDF download.
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (CEO) and Rick Simonson (CFO), discussed Nokia's smartphone strategy during today's Q4 earnings call. Nokia intend to further expand S60 on Symbian OS to new categories and market segments as well as continuing to push it on to lower cost devices. As a result they are expanding the S60 investment when compared to Series 40. Furthermore they believe the combination of Nokia's five services (Ovi) with a larger portfolio of such devices will see a change in the definition of smartphone. Read on for more details.
Nokia today released its Q4 2008 results. Nokia net sales of EUR 12.7 billion, down 19% year on year and up 3% sequentially (down 18% and up 1% at constant currency). Nokia sold 15.1 million converged (S60) devices, down from 15.5 million in Q3 and 18.8 million in Q4 2007, of these 8 million were Nseries and 3 million were Eseries. Nokia's industry outlook for 2009 estimates mobile device volumes to decrease by 10%. The results are set against the background of the global economic slow down.
There's an interesting interview here by Richard Bloor, chatting to Jezar Wakefield. Yep, that 'jezar', tech-guru from the days of Psion and EPOC/32 (Symbian OS's beginnings). They talk about Jezar's current role in the field of audio in Symbian OS, about options for developers, about how a modern smartphone might have to manager up to 4 or 5 separate audio streams or events at the same time, and about OpenMAX, designed to make things even easier for developers.
Phil Lattimore, over at (usually, but not always) respected tech news harbinger The Register has put together a very fair and objective look at Nokia's first S60 5th Edition phone, the 5800 XpressMusic, coming to much the same conclusions as we did. Great minds, etc?
Nokia today announced that it has signed pan-European licensing agreements for its Comes with Music download service. This includes agreements with Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, CELAS/EMI Publishing and a number of national collecting societies (France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Finland and Norway). The announcement underlines Nokia's commitment to its music services and will enable Nokia to extend the reach of its unlimited download music service.
