Nokia are not confirming the numbers of Comes with Music users, but in the UK at least, analysts Music Ally has come up with a number for active users... 23,000 people. It should be noted that this only represents sales of a specially branded new Series 40 handset (plus the ageing N95 8GB) in the Carphone Warehouse, but with a huge marketing campaign those numbers (which are backed up by the music labels, so it must be in the ballpark) must be seen as a disappointment. Read on for my thoughts.
A couple of quick links to desk clock utilities that have cropped up in the last few days: DesignClock offers, time, a background, a calendar and message counts, and works on both S60 3rd Edition and 5th. While Desk Flicker Clock is exactly as it sounds, running on S60 5th Edition only.
Lee Williams, writing on the Symbian Foundation blog, shares a few photos on Symbian ^1 (effectively the current version of S60 5th Edition) running on an 'off the shelf Intel Atom based motherboard'. The Intel Atom is one of the processors regularly used in netbook computers. The concept highlights the flexibility and maturity of Symbian platform and demonstrates that there could be potential areas for it to be used beyond mobile phones. Read on for further thoughts.
Mobbler, a last.fm client for S60, has been updated to version 0.4.4. The new version supports the new Last.fm Web Services, which is an official API / integration route, and should improve stability. Other new features include improved album art support, the ability to disable scrobbling, a sleep timer (perfect for using music to send you to sleep), and the ability to view you Last.fm data.
The Phones Show 79 went live just now, with some extended news, thoughts on the T-Mobile G1 and a demo of Slingplayer Mobile on the N95 8GB. Comments welcome as usual.
Nokia Easy Meet is a mobile collaboration tool, which has been put together by NRC (Nokia Research Centre) as a research prototype, and made available to end-users via Nokia BetaLabs. Easy Meet allows you to easily share and view content around a given subject (meeting). For example, it could be used to share a PowerPoint slide slow during a voice conference call. The advantage of Easy Meet, compared to many other solutions, is that mobile users are able to fully participate in the viewing and sharing of content.
Google Maps for Symbian on S60 (3rd and 5th Edition) has received a major update to version 3.0.1.4 (from 3.0.0.x). There are UI changes, notably to the context 'pop-up' menu (when you press in the D-pad), this has been restyled to match the application's other dialog elements. There are also many under-the-hood changes to how Google Maps works on S60 phones, see below for the full published changelog [added April 13th].
Yesterday marked 'day one' of the Symbian Foundation. This announced the commencement of the beta testing of its new web site and that 81 companies have applied for membership (50 of which are first time endorsers). The new logo of the Symbian Foundation was also unveiled: Symbian, in stylised letters, underlain by a yellow heart. Read on for more.
As CJ puts it, "It’s been a long time coming". The brand new ShoZu release for S60 5th Edition/touch devices is now live (v4.01). ShoZu is the premier third party photo and video blogging client and works with just about any service. You can download ShoZu for S60 (all varieties) from m.shozu.com on your phone.
Nokia Handwriting Calculator has just been updated for S60 5th Edition, with support for scientific functions like sin, cos, tan, ln, etc., although the symbols can't be written directly and have to be dragged from a toolbar at present. There's also a new help system and support for the maths constants ‘e’ and pi - which you can write directly.
From the Symbian Foundation and Texas Instruments comes the news that the Zoom OMAP34x-II mobile development platform will be the first reference platform for the Symbian Foundation. This is a test device, capable of running various mobile operating systems, that can be used, to test code, by those wishing to contribute to the open source platform. It is also useful for developers wanting to explore and conduct tests on upcoming Symbian platform releases.
I'm not sure S60 really needed yet another photo browser, but Nokia Beta Labs has gone and released one anyway, at least in 'experimental' form. Nokia Photo Browser offers a fluid wall of photos (see screens and video below), with 'magnifying glass' feature and 'face detection' (swipe from face to face in a group shot). It's very limited though, in that there are no menus or ways of actually doing things with your photos. My guess is that some of the 3D tech in this release will make its way into future S60 5th Edition devices. Anyway, enjoy for now.
DreamSpring, the guys behind some of the leading UIQ titles, have turned their attention to S60 (including 5th Edition) and have contacted us to announce a beta program for DreamLife, their integrated Calendar and Contacts system. There's no mention of getting a free reg code at the end of the beta, but this is probably taken for granted if you provide useful feedback.
Long-time readers may remember we gave Lonely Cat Games' card game Mau Mau quite a positive review, and for those who don't know it's basically Uno played with normal cards. Well, it now appears that the game is available free of charge from LCG's website for all S60 editions and UIQ2 as well. Just download the file from the download page, then head on over to the free unlock code page and use your phone's IMEI. (UPDATE: Apparently there's the old annoying "expired certificate" problem with this file, but you should be able to get round this by altering your phone's date settings to March 2008 instead of March 2009. You can then alter the dates back to normal after installation.)
The San Francisco GDC conference is starting on monday and All About N-Gage's Ewan Spence will be reporting live from the event (there have been some interesting rumours regarding N-Gage news). To follow AAN's GDC coverage, you can visit our website of course, but we also have various other online presences such as our Twitter channel and our RSS news feed. And if we have any interesting vids to show you they should end up on our YouTube channel. Also see Ewan's personal Twitter feed.
