A little bit of lateral thinking by the Nokia Beta Labs team sees Braille Reader coming to touchscreen S60 5th Edition phones, making the most of both touch and haptic feedback. I'm not qualified to comment on its usefulness, but see below for the launch video.
Courtesy of camcorder entrepreneur Ewan Macleod, we have our very own Rafe Blandford going over the Nokia N97 mini and X6 in detail in a (thankfully) quiet room at Nokia World 2009. And, in similar vein, though powered by Maemo 5, we have Rafe giving the Nokia N900 exactly the same detailed treatment. Enjoy.
Yes, no catches or tricks. Win a brand new Nokia N97 on behalf of All About Symbian and The Phones Show. The competition set-up video is also embedded below, I'll look forward to your video responses/entries! The competition will run for just over one week.
For completeness (and, yet again, to prove to ne'ersayers that I'm not in anybody's pocket), The Phones Show 90 is now out, with almost no Symbian content whatsoever (it's mainly about the HTC Hero). However, just to keep this news item on topic, Phones Show Chat 4 is also out, and this has large chunks of Nokia E71, Opera Mini 5 and musings on new qwerty phones.
A new release of the Java-hosted Opera Mini is always a big event. This is a beta launch, but still extremely interesting, with Opera Mini 5.0 adding smooth font aliasing, multiple browser windows, a password manager and much better support for touchscreen phones. On the downside, the application is larger, at 220kb (still small in the overall scheme of things, though), and custom form and editing fields mean that you can't now copy and paste text in and out of the application. I was going to produce a walkthrough of the new features, but there's absolutely no point because our good friend Stefan has already done this in good detail. You can get Opera Mini 5.0 by going to mini.opera.com/beta in Web on your phone.
It was an early Series 60 legend - the file manager utility that also cooked the tea and did the laundry. And today FExplorer has surfaced into the modern Symbian age, fully updated for all S60 3rd and 5th Edition phones, courtesy of SBSH. The bad news: it's now commercial software, as Ricky Cadden reports, along with a selection of screenshots. However, if you don't think you can rise to the purchase price, there's also a launch competition to win 5 license keys.
It's always good to see a reminder of this particular bit of lateral thinking, so I'm happy to link over to Phil Schwarzmann's feature on his favourite Apple iPhone/touch-optimised web sites that also work well on his Nokia N97 (or 5800 or Samsung i8910 HD or any other wide-screened S60 touch phone, of course). Don't get too excited over the Stitcher example, though, it's essentially just a selection of podcasts, we're still waiting for a really decent Internet Radio client for S60 5th Edition [Steve looks meaningfully in the direction of Nokia here....]
For completeness, Phones Show Chat 3 is now online, and thanks to Tim Salmon, we've now got show notes for the three shows so far. There's also now, as of this morning, an official iTunes feed for the podcast, for convenience, as well as the main RSS feed. Comments welcome, as usual. Note that this audio podcast is cross-platform, so it's not totally Symbian-safe(!) Coverage also includes Android, iPhone and lots of N900/Maemo references.
What happens when a west-coast geek smashes their iPhone? Well, they try the N97 for a month. Noted commentator Cali Lewis reports back to her GeekBriefTV online video audience on her month with the Nokia N97. Acknowledging her love of the iPhone and Apple's Mac OS, it sounds like the phone made a positive impression on her, but it felt over complicated, even though the better quality camera and flash appealed to her.
Top theme maker Tehk is branching out into the burgeoning market for 'premium' themes - with the complexity of modern Symbian devices, it's becoming harder and harder to create themes which contain icons and elements for every nook and cranny, and I don't think it's unreasonable for theme makers to charge a small amount for their time and effort. Tehk here introduces the first of a seven part design series, branded 'Evolution', with a variety of versions at various prices, from 1 Euro up to 6 Euros. Read on for a screenshot and some of Tehk's comments.
You can't help fail to notice the news around the net that the music service Spotify is now available on the iPhone. What you might not (yet) have picked up on is this subscription based mobile service will soon be on S60. Just to keep everyone happy and eager, the team (based in Stockholm and London) have debuted a video of the client.
[updated] Nokia Beta Labs has quietly issued an update to Ovi Maps 3.3 - 'subversion' 54 for S60 5th Edition (only) is now available on the main Ovi Maps page. There's still no opportunity to install to mass memory, and v3.3 is still English-only, but at least some more of the rough edges have been knocked off. 'GPS data lost' no longer sounds every few minutes(!), but at the expense of laggy screen updates - it seems the GPS interruptions are being averaged out behind the scenes. Ultimately, the N97's communications software subsystems simply need a big update. v20 firmware can't come soon enough for me.
Last week, in the developer section, I posted an interview with Christopher David, Head of Developer and Partner Engagement on Sony Ericsson’s plans to re-engage with Symbian developers for the Satio launch. It seems to have been quite timely, as additional information is starting to break cover.
For completeness, following on from the inclusion here of the official Nokia-produced summary of day 1 of their event last week, here (embedded below) is the summary of day 2, edited in similar 'party line' fashion, but interesting nonetheless.
As reported around the web over the weekend, Nokia Messaging for S60 5th Edition has now received full HTML support. As usual, you’ll need to go to email.nokia.com in Web on your phone (a 2MB download). Version 10.1.0.13 will automatically replace your previous installation and will also keep all email accounts and emails. You may remember the issues I've had with Nokia Messaging - at the very least take the usual backups, syncs and precautions before installation.