Anyone who is interested in testing the latest features of Pixelpipe Share Online should now direct their browser towards Nokia Beta Labs. Pixelpipe is the latest third party application to be invited into Nokia Beta Labs for users to get the latest bleeding edge features, and more importantly, provide useful feedback to the developers! To announce their invitation to Beta Labs, Pixepipe CEO Brett Butterfield has written a guest blog post, to introduce the social media sharing agent to the uninitiated.
Putting itself forward as the “real-time home screen” Hiplogic’s *Spark has left beta and the full version is officially launched today. With hooks into your own social networks on Facebook and Twitter, as well as news headlines from PA, Sky and CBS and a new daily deals module (powered by this month’s web darling, Groupon), *Spark certainly makes a strong case for itself. See below for plenty more, including comments, screens, links and an in-depth, exclusive video interview with Hiplogic's CEO, Mark Anderson.
Over on A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch is taking a closer look at one of the current key elements of the modern smartphone, the web browser. Pulling numbers from the Stat-Counter Service, he not only points out that the leading browser is Opera, but that Nokia’s web-kit effort is sitting nicely on 17% of the global market, compared to Opera and Safari on 22% and Blackberry on 19%. Android, by comparison, is on 11%. What does that mean for website designers?
Nokia Messaging 10.2 and Mail for Exchange have just been pushed out for Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic, 5530 and X6-00. These updates are over-the-air (OTA), and should be available via the Software Update application. Nokia Messaging provides push email to these handsets via Nokia's own push mail service from popular services like Ovi Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. Alongside the Nokia Messaging update, Mail for Exchange has been added to these handsets providing push email and PIM push synchronisation with corporate networks, and third party services like Nuevasync. Read on for screenshots and a brief comment.
Skype have just announced a new version of Skype for Symbian, with a revamped user interface and support for Symbian^3 devices. This new version (1.50 build 15) supports the SILK codec for higher quality calls. As part of the user interface update, Skype say they have improved support for larger screens, and made it easier to add contacts and photos, and make status updates. We have also noted the UI has new instant message notification pop-ups. Read on for screenshots and our initial test results.
Friend of All About Symbian, Asri Al Baker from i-symbian.com, has done it again. As mentioned in this week's Insight Podcast, he has just published two more WRT widgets for launching advanced mobile website versions of Google services. This time he has created launchers for GTalk, Google's instant messaging service, and Google Calendar. These come after Asri's other widgets for GMail and Google Reader (which we reported on here and here). The websites utilised by these launchers are the default views found on iOS and Android browsers, but are available to any mobile browser, if you know the right URL's. Read on for screenshots and more.
The next version of Pixelpipe's social media sharing agent, Send and Share, has reached its final version, and is awaiting approval on the Ovi Store. For a number of months, the Pixelpipe team have been working hard on developing the Send and Share client, regularly sending test versions out to their beta testing mailing list. In a message to testers from CEO Brett Butterfield, this pre-release pattern will be changing and less frequent updates will be sent to testers.
Nokia Diagnostics is a little suite of on-device tests to help exercise core functionality of your Symbian smartphone and report back. It's a nice idea, driven by Nokia Beta Labs, and has had a big update (to v1.74) today, but only for S60 5th Edition phones (e.g. N97, 5800) - it seems that the S60 3rd Edition version is no longer to be updated. And Symbian^3 phones are also out of luck - so far - a version is promised for these 'soon'.
Recently added to the Ovi Store is a client for TheTrainLine.com - and I was going to review it but Jay Montano has beaten me to it, with a complete walkthrough. Highlights include a built-in portrait QWERTY keyboard, the re-use of saved pages and data, the speed and the full feature set. The application takes you right through to purchasing tickets and is free to download. A couple of screens and links below.
You may remember that Opera Software recently ported their acclaimed proxy-based web browser to (native) Symbian? Beta 1 of Opera Mini 5.1 was great apart from some weirdness when it came to incorporating text input from the phone's own text input system (e.g. virtual keyboard). Now we have Beta 2, with this fixed and doubtless a multitude of other minor bugs quoshed.
There's a new beta of Ovi Maps 3.6 out over at Nokia Beta Labs, including 'map loading' of areas direct to your phone's mass memory or memory card (over Wi-fi). There are also some interface tweaks, listed below, including more Symbian^3-like long-tap functionality and popup tips and hints for new users.
Following on from last month’s beta 2 release, Opera has announced the final release of Opera Mobile 10.1, a native web browser for Symbian. Since the beta release, there’s been a further update to the javascript speed increase – now up to nine times faster than Opera 10.0. Along with the server side compression, geo-location plug-in, and their rendering engine, the Opera browser continues to be one of the leading Symbian applications. More, and links, below...
Version 32.0.007 of the Nokia 5530's firmware was released today, the update is available via over-the-air download. There is nothing noticeable in terms of user experience updates. According to other sources, there is a small number of language specific bugs that have been addressed. In our own examination, Web has received a minor update too. Click through for further details.
An at-a-glance readout of the amount of free RAM in your Symbian smartphone has always been a bit of a 'faff' to get, usually involving a dedicated full-screen utility. Free Memory Bars, released today in the Ovi Store, solves the problem by putting a Symbian homescreen widget panel to good use, showing RAM, C: disk and E: disk status, in terms of proportion free and figures in Megabytes.
You'll remember Skyfire, the proxy-based (i.e. like Opera Mini) browser that also managed to somehow transcode flash video as well? Released originally for Windows Mobile and Symbian, it is now being officially phased out, with the proxy servers stopping working at the end of 2010. In something of a tunraround, Skyfire's new 'vision' is based around a local browser on iOS and Android, with a cloud 'booster engine' for handling video and social networking. See below for a surprisingly personal and heartfelt quote from the developers.
