There's a nice article by Aatif Sumar over on ZOMGit'sCJ looking in detail at Nokia Mobile Money, announced two years ago but now seemingly arrived, at least in India, as a Java application compatible with S60 3rd Edition smartphones (and presumably S40 and other devices too, right up to the latest Symbian handsets).
Vlingo, the voice recognition system that has been bundled in limited form with most Nokia smartphones over the last few years, has finally gone completely free, with Vlingo Premium now available for all through the Ovi Store. The utility lets you call contacts, dictate messages, emails, notes and Facebook updates - and more.
We've published our fair share of 'how to' articles here on AAS over the years, wo we can recognise a decent article when we see it. In this case it's the Mobile Tech Bishop's "Guide to Getting the most out of your Symbian Device", quoted below. In this feature he covers, expertly, device maintenance, PIM syncing, media transfer, data security, and much more. And it's all Anna-aware and up to date, with hyperlinks everywhere necessary. Nice job!
Gartner has released a summary of its worldwide analysis for the mobile industry for Q2 2011 and it, as expected, shows that the in-demand Android smartphones have leapfrogged Symbian in the rankings. I've quoted the main tables below, but in summary, Symbian OS's marketshare worldwide is now 22%, with 23.8 million smartphones being sold.
Another in my series of developer interviews has just been published at Nokia Conversations. This time I was chatting to Sebastian Brannstrom, creator of Podcatcher but also (for the purposes of this interview) looking at his new hit app, CoverUp, which retrieves album art for your music files on Symbian smartphones. In the chat, he talked about the app, the challenges he faced and the tools he used, especially Qt.
Nokia has announced that it plans to close web-based access to Ovi Calendar at the end of August. The sync service will continue to be available, but will now only operate as a backup for data. This means it will no longer be possible to view or edit calendar information through the Ovi.com website. Nokia says this was a business decision and that it "will help us to concentrate on our core service offerings". In reality, the decision is likely driven by the low numbers of active users of the web-based portion of the service.
Months after you thought the Samsung i8910 modding scene had finally died, out comes arch-modder 'faenil', curator of 'faenil's pit', with a major new firmware release, 'n2o5', bringing an all-singing, all-dancing graphical interface to a wealth of i8910 system settings (browser user agents, camera tweaks, kinetic UI tweaks, and much more), compatibility certificates, Qt runtimes, and more. See below for warnings and links.
The Qt Labs Developer Blog has just announced an update to the Qt SDK. In a case of good timing, the Qt team have released Qt Creator 2.2.1, which is mainly a bug fix release, at the same time as integrating support for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Support for MeeGo Harmattan comes on the day that the N9 was announced at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore. Read on for more details.
Back in March last year, I had a look at the Qt based Wordpress client for Symbian. Back then I said it needed to "fill in some obvious gaps and improve the stability" and I've recently gone back to see how the client has progressed in the last year. The good news is that this is still the best mobile client for Wordpress out there, but the improvements have made it even more useful.
What a great idea - step through the alphabet and pick the best Symbian application starting with that letter. And, impressively, every letter has a great suggestion here in 'The Essential A-Z of Nokia Apps', from Angry Birds to Zuma. Well worth a quick scan - maybe you can come up with better suggestion here and there?
Foursquare fans on Symbian looking for an alternative to the official client might like to look at NeliSquare from Tommi Laukkanen. This Qt based application, originally developed for the N900, has now been compiled for Symbian. While still in alpha, it's slick, easy to use, and runs a little faster.
Nimbuzz may not now have any Skype integration, but it's relentless in adding every other IM feature under the sun. Version 3 arrived last November, bringing a truck load of improvements, and we now have v3.01 bringing another "9 awesome reasons" to upgrade, including better call quality, custom wallpapers and an avatar gallery.
IDC has released its set of smartphone shipment figures for Q1 2011. They show that just under 100 million smartphones were sold last quarter. Nokia led the way with 24.2 million smartphones, followed by Apple (18.7m), RIM (13.9m), Samsung (10.8m) and HTC (8.9m). All manufacturers had increased shipments year on year, but by widely varying amounts. Nokia was the weakest (+12%), with RIM (+31%), Apple (+114%), HTC (+229%) and Samsung (+350%) all showing stronger growth.
As a big fan of the long running Desert Island Discs radio programme, I was interested to see that its entire archive is now up for grabs in smartphone-friendly form on the Web, with over 500 of the shows fully downloadable in MP3 form. Thousands of guests, tens of thousands of music picks and a huge amount of auto-biographical chat, all in MP3 form. Screens and links below. Download and enjoy.
You may remember, almost three months ago, that I featured news of an innovative URL-to-application wizard: AppMe, claiming to create an installable Symbian application (for use on a homescreen shortcuts bar or simply in the main app menu) from any Internet page. It worked, too, though the wizard itself was desktop browser-based and a little rough around the edges. Well, AppMe is back, it's slicker, it's more rounded, it has its own mini 'app store' and it's now mobile too. More below.