Samsung Mobile Innovator has released the first iteration of the DevPak for the Samsung i8910 HD (formerly the Omnia HD). This plugs into the existing S60 5th Edition SDK to provide an emulator skin and control features, as well as additional APIs.
David Wood, writing on the Symbian Foundation Blog, about reviewing the release plans, has highlighted some details of upcoming Symbian releases. Symbian^2, the equivalent of S60 5th Edition Feature Pack 1, will be functionally complete next week and in devices early next year. Symbian^3, for which the majority of the source code should be available, enhances communication architecture, multimedia and graphics functionality, and should reach devices in the second half of 2010.
Symbian ^4 will see the full integration and optimisation of Qt into the Symbian platform. Further proposals includes the 'Orbit' extension library for Qt (replacing AVKON) and a new 'Direct UI' interaction and navigation logic. Put crudely, this means we will see an evolution of the existing S60/AVKON UI to a new Qt-based 'Orbit' Symbian UI for devices coming out in 2011. Read on for more details.
Released as free widgets for the Nokia 5800 and N97, PixelsBeatPaper has released interactive maps of the titled underground systems. Nothing fancy, just clear scrollable maps. If you dig a bit further into their site, you'll see utilities for bill splitting, body-mass-index calculating and a countdown timer, all again only for S60 5th Edition.
Nokia's upcoming launch of the Ovi Store in the US will not, apparently, come with carrier billing – the ability to have any purchases added to your phone bill, as opposed to inputting credit card details into the system. To be fair, no other on-device store has this facility in America, so Nokia aren't being unduly penalised in not having this feature. But it does create another step in the process for the end user, and the seamless experience Nokia were planning on isn't quite in place in that territory. Read on for more.
One of the biggest developers for UIQ, DreamSpring, has followed up its commitment to porting its software to S60 with the announcement of DreamConnect. Think of this as a contact manager on steroids, with with an 'innovative business card layout', plus 'hierarchical categories that let you organise your contacts to accurately reflect your real life relationships'. Sounds interesting - hopefully, given the UIQ heritage, there's a touch version coming for S60 5th Edition.
In previous articles, I've been more than happy to praise the S60 Music player. Unfortunately, it has just not kept up with the changing pace of technology. On the N95 and N95 8GB vintage devices, the music app was far better than the leading MP3 players of the time, notably the iPod Nano. But the iPhone music app has vaulted over the S60 app.... what could the Espoo Engineers learn from Cupertino Coders?
In All About Symbian Insight 68 (AAS Podcast 126) Rafe and Steve talk about the upcoming Ovi Store in relation to Widsets, N-Gage and uploading content, before sharing their recent device purchases. Steve explain why he prefers his device with an Xenon flash and Rafe talks about 3's and Orange's service strategy. You can listen to AAS Insight 68 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Every week seems to bring new themes for our smartphones, many of which introduce us to ever wackier and more artistic sets of icons for the applications we're familiar with. In this rantfeature, I argue that there's efficiency and elegance in keeping icons close to the originals, keeping the workload for our poor beleaguered eyes and brain down....
Nokia Messaging, Nokia's combined email service and client, main aim is to deliver an easy to set up and use consumer email solution for Nokia's devices. A preview release for S60 5th Edition (Nokia 5800) is now available via the Nokia Beta Labs site. The S60 5th Edition version is optimised for finger touch and includes, optionally, the 'push' element of the Nokia Messaging service.
Nokia has launched (via Beta Labs) a new web-based service and Web Runtime widget, entitled Green Explorer, aiming to help you live and travel in more eco-friendly fashion through tie-ins with green organisations and community involvement. See below for some screens, notes and links.
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.
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.
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.
Following on from today's review, word reaches us from Mojo's Studio that Twittix has been updated to v0.92. The interesting addition is the "introduce" feature which lets you point two of your Twitter friends to each other. The full change list is here
In All About Symbian Insight 66 (AAS Podcast 124) we talk about the N-Gage platform's newest addition - Worms World Party. Then there's discussion of Google Maps 3.0.1, BBC TV streams, device colours. We finish with a discussion of the joys of older devices. You can listen to AAS Insight 66 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.