Rafe's been trying out Nokia's newest Music service offering, Comes with Music - for real, with a full retail package. There may be some caveats with the system (PC/MSIE-only, DRM-heavy), but overall he comes away very impressed. How is the PC client to use and what's the overall experience like for a new music-loving phone user? Can you retro-fit CwM to an existing handset? What can you do and what can't you do with the downloaded music? Find out in Rafe's definitive Comes with Music review.
Forum Nokia recently kicked off a series events to help educate developers about changes and editions in S60 5th Edition. For example, tomorrow, there are a pair of webinars: 9am London (11am Helsinki, 4pm Beijing) and 11am San Fransisco (2 pm New York) which focus on Touch UI development and APIs. With the first S60 5th Edition device announced and more on the way it makes sense to get informed now.
There's an interesting interview here today in which Richard Bloor talks to Antony Edwards, Vice President, Developer Product Marketing at Symbian, discussing how developers will be able to contribute to the Symbian Foundation, the challenge of software distribution and how the Symbian Foundation's developer program is shaping up.
In All About Symbian Podcast 96 (Insight #43) Steve, after an E90 firmware update, asks why he can have a better experience than Nokia Software Updater. We also talk about about recent content on All About Symbian before moving on to some thoughts and reflections on S60 5th Edition with some special attention for backwards compatibility.
Kudos to neois over on Forum Nokia for producing a layman's illustrated guide to S60 5th Edition, looking at it from the point of view of a S60 3rd Edition user. If a picture's worth 1000 words, then this is a veritable thesis.
In an extended edition of the All About Symbian Podcast (Insight #42) we reflect on the announcements out of last week's Nokia Remix Event in London. There's some a general discussion of the tone of the event, but the meat of the podcast focuses on Nokia's first S60 touch handset, the Nokia 5800 MusicXpress, before moving on to Nokia's new Comes with Music service.
It seems that Russian Mobile Review impressario Eldar was also at Thursday evening's launch of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (running S60 5th Edition, etc) and he's put together an amazingly detailed set of photos and well arranged thoughts on the device (in English, thankfully), based solely on his hour or so's hands-on. Kudos. It's certainly the best 5800 preview at the moment, though doubtless Rafe is beavering away, marshalling his own impressions...
Google has soft-launched Picasa Web Albums for S60, making available an optimised version of the service via their usual m.google.com starting page. There are some screenshots below. You can play slideshows, comment on other peoples' media and, of course, organise your photos into albums. Note that not all the functions seemed to work as I wrote this - maybe some switches have yet to be thrown!
All you can listen to, including Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell! Comes With Music is here and it's time to bring out the Cassandras and explain why it's such a bad idea. We don't have any Cassandra's to hand though, so Ewan will have to suffice.
Today sees the formal unveiling on S60 5th Edition. The new version of S60, built on Symbian OS 9.4, adds touch enablers to the platform, which means it is possible for licensees to create devices that use finger touch and/or stylus interaction. Other additions and improvements include the new sensor framework (adds easy integration of sensors, such as accelerometers into the platform) updated web technologies (WebKit version updated, Flash Lite 3 as standard) and enhanced multimedia functionality (support for widescreen displays, image and video editors as standard). Read on for more details.
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, a mid-range music-focussed phone, was launched today in London. It is Nokia's first touch enabled S60 phone. It runs S60 5th Edition on Symbian OS 9.4, has a 3.2" nHD (360 x 640) touch screen, WLAN and 3G connectivity, a 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera, integrated A-GPS and accelerometer and proximity sensors. To underline its music potential, the 5800 has a standard 3.5mm audio jack, stereo speakers, ships with a 8GB microSD card and will be one of the first phones to support Comes with Music (Q1 2009). It will be available worldwide in Q4 for 279 Euros (£215) before taxes and subsidies. Read on for much more.
In case you hadn't gathered, Nokia's big launch (device? new service? We're sworn to secrecy...) is tonight, at 5.00pm BST (4.00pm GMT), entitled 'Nokia Remix London' and, as usual, there's a virtual event page where you can follow all the happenings, releases and chat. If there's a video stream, look out for Rafe, who'll be there to capture video and images for All About Symbian.
