Ah, so it's not just me then. Respected über-blogger Jay Montano (far from an N97 fanboy, he's a Maemo 5 user these days) has compiled an interesting and highly illustrated list of ten reasons why Ovi Maps 3.3 utterly rocks on the N97. A good read over your afternoon coffee. (Note that the software itself works on a range of phones, mind you. Do buzz me if you spot Ovi Maps v3.3 (free nav) becoming available for more than the initial eight or so devices.)
Moubail is a handy place for third party S60 5th Edition widgets, being the home of DeviceInfo, which I've used for the last year. IMDb is the latest project, providing touchscreen, Web-like lookup of information in the Internet Movie Database. Read on for some screens, links and comments.
As expected by many, Nokia chose to concentrate on their services for their second event this morning at Mobile World Congress (the first was the Moblin/Maemo merger), announcing a barrage of stats, covering the Symbian-relevant Ovi Maps and Ovi Store, plus numbers for Life Tools, all summarised below. Nokia also announced a live pilot of their Nokia Money, designed to allow mobile payments throughout developing countries.
The Symbian Foundation has today unveiled Symbian^3, with details quoted below. And, courtesy of the video-friendly chaps at Nokia Conversations (YouTube channel), we now have an impressive video 'design preview' of Symbian^3 in action. Remember, this is the OS and user interface that will be included in Symbian-powered smartphones in the second half of 2010. Highlights from the video, embedded at high resolution below, are multiple homescreens, 3D 'Coverflow' for music albums, 'single tap' direct manipulation UI everywhere, multitouch (pinching, splaying, to zoom) and live visual multitasking (Web OS/Maemo 5-style). It's quite a visual feast, so look below and enjoy.
Python for S60 has been in a state of flux for oh so long, with multiple forks and levels, but it seems we can put all that behind us now with the formal release of the big shiny v2.0 - the dev kit was released today. You may have noted that we reported on PyS60 being made available via Sw update on some 3rd Edition FP2 devices (and above) a month ago. This new kit represents all the other bits developers (and users) might need to write in Python. The announcement, quoted below, also mentions that the source code is being donated to the Symbian Foundation.
Forgive the plug, but I haven't mentioned Phones Show Chat for a few weeks - audio podcasts 24 and 25 are now online for your listening pleasure - around an hour each of myself and Tim Salmon of this parish wittering about Symbian, Maemo and Android smartphones, answering Q&A, and so on. Here's the RSS feed for you to plug into Podcasting, to subscribe, if you haven't done so already 8-)
Over on their “stories from around the neighbourhood” blog, the Nokia team have spent two days in Colchester, where a trial of the Point and Find information service is going on. By using a mix of GPS on the handset, scannable barcodes and a central database, the theory is you’ll know what’s going on around you and interact with the environment. So how does it work in practice?
Following the announcement earlier this evening of Google Buzz, the extension of Google and Gmail into social networking, Google Maps (for Mobile) 4.0 has been released, advertised with the feature: "Post and view real-time messages & photos at places around the world". For Symbian at the moment, Buzz is just implemented as another Layer in Google Maps' existing system, though there will be a compatible web site soon as well. For the Gmail integration to work, you'll have to click the link on the Google Buzz web site and then reload your Gmail page. Otherwise, just use Buzz direct from the new Google Maps, just 'Add Buzz', tap the speech bubble and you're off. Screenshots, video and more below. Comments welcome if you've got it working as well.
Canalys stats are another important data point for the smartphone industry, they usually bring out something of interest. Here, in their 2009 summary, (mirroring Tomi's numbers and our analysis), they give Symbian-powered smartphones 47% world marketshare for the year, with RIM in second place on 20%. With their press release focussing on touchscreen numbers, Canalys points out that 55% of all smartphones sold in Q4, 2009 had touchscreens, with Nokia being the leading touchscreen smartphone manufacturer.
Following on from Strategy Analytics and Tomi's stats for smartphone sales in the whole of 2009, summarised here by me last week, we now have confirmation, courtesy of the USA-based IDC, of the very latest Q4 2009 smartphone world unit sales: again, Nokia lead the market with 38% for its S60-based smartphones, while RIM's Blackberrys are in second place with 20%. Q1 2010 results will be even more interesting, expect these in the first week of April.
What do you get when you decide to shoot a UK music video using only phones? Specifically, Nokia's N95 8GB, N86 and 5800? Well, rubbish, in the case of the third one just mentioned, but the N95 and N86 in the hands of a couple of hundred fans, shooting around the band (Noisettes), should provide something interesting, the full story is told in the brief documentary embedded below. (Even riskier, the video is being edited (all 140 hours of footage) by the fans themselves, online at shotbyfans.com, if you want to take a look there as well.)
Nokia Beta Labs has debuted an 'experimental' application, Nokia Diagnostics, aimed at helping S60 5th Edition users diagnose, troubleshoot, and configure their devices "with ease on their own". See below for the launch video and details.
Several improvements have been made to the Ovi Store application for Nokia phones today. The first is that content area pages now include sort tabs for 'Top Free', 'Best Sellers' and 'New' - a new version of the client - v1.5 (611) - is obviously involved, but it should prompt you to download the update. More later when we've all woken up in the UK and tried the new client out!
