All things come to they that wait. In this case the Nokia E7, finally available to buy now in the Nokia UK web store at a substantial £499 inc VAT, though this comes down to £469 if you buy it with a pay-as-you-go SIM and is in fact completely free on a £35/month/2-year contract, so that does seem to be the way to go if you were planning on serious voice and data use anyway.
Nokia recently posted a clarification that Symbian was “Not open source, but open for business”. It is worth taking a moment to consider the collaborative environment Symbian now exists in. Prior to Nokia’s deal with Microsoft, we saw the closure of the Symbian Foundation and with it, the end of Symbian’s time under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). Developers were rightly concerned about just how ‘open’ Symbian would be. Read on for our analysis.
More than likely completing the PR 1.2 roll-out on Symbian^3 devices, the AAS C6-01 has received its v14.002 firmware update. Taking care of some smaller issues such as Mail for Exchange, and keeping the various Ovi applications up to date (including Ovi Maps and Ovi Store), this isn’t the big PR 2.0 update that’s been long promised, but is still a recommended download.
The Qt labs team has just announced the release candidate (RC) for its Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.1. This follows from its recent beta release. The final release, following this RC, will allow developers to take advantage of all the latest Qt features and submit Qt 4.7 based applications to the Ovi Store. However, it should be noted that Qt 4.7 will not support S60 3rd Edition, which sadly, but predictably, points to a deprecation of that version of Symbian. Read on for more details.
I was interested to see that the Nokia N8 made number three in ZDNet's "My top 5 smartphones", as listed by Matt Miller in his regular column. It's an American site, of course, so the number one pick is something we've never even seen in the UK, the HTC Thunderbolt, while numbers two and five aren't exactly widely available. But the N8 slots in quite happily at three, with the iPhone 4 at four.
Every month I tell myself that I'm not going to add the N8 photo awards as a link of interest and then every month one of the winning entries blows me away so much that I simply have to write about it. The '1st' pick this month is quite simply staggering - I've included a cut down version below so that you can nod your head and agree with me. This was captured on a phone? Here are the rest of the winners and other info.
Nokia Beta Labs has announced yet another experimental project, called Nokia Drop. This project sets out to push content from your desktop browser to your phone. Pushed content comes in the forum of URL's, files, images as files, or images as wallpapers. The desktop end requires a browser plugin; Firefox and Chrome are currently the only supported browsers. The phone application is available for S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3. Read on for more.
Nokia has officially 'graduated' Ovi Maps 3.6 (the version with Social check-ins, live traffic services and on-device country map loading) from Beta Labs and into the Ovi Store. This doesn't preclude further updates of course, but the application is stable and complete for now. If you want to check what version you have installed, tap on the "?" icon, then "About Maps" and then "Versions". The version of Ovi Maps now in the Ovi Store is v3.06 11wk10 b01.
“Rafe!” I asked, “can I look at the flying French Quadricopter for Friday?” A subdued nod over Skype was forthcoming, and I headed to the Ovi Store to grab the free Qt download for the AR.Drone. This is Parrot’s Wi-fi enabled, live webcam streaming, computer stabilised, helicopter-esque, flying peripheral – and it’s time for a brief video review. Did I forget to mention that the actual AR.Drone isn’t a free download...
Nokia has just posted that it has completed putting the Symbian source code online at symbian.nokia.com. This means that both company-supported and independent developers can now access the Symbian source code again, after the effective closure of the Symbian Foundation. This follow’s the interim measure of FTP access to Symbian Foundation hosted content being given out on request. Read on for more details.
From the team that brought us Nokia Bubbles comes Nokia Sleeping Screen, amping up the current OLED time and date display to include animations, better notification displays, night clock mode and even total screen blackness when the phone is covered (e.g. in a pocket). Video and details below, though you'll want to note that this currently doesn't work with the LED torch mode on the C6-01, C7-00 and E7-00, sadly. Still, it's in beta and I'm sure they'll fix that in time.
We do like to highlight bargains every now and then and, thanks to a tip off from reader Gary Moncrieff, it seems that most of the Smartphoneware titles in the Ovi Store have been reduced from their usual $10 (or so) tickets to just 1 pound (or local equivalent). If you've been eyeing up any of the following: Best Safe, Best Reminder, Best Crypto, Best TaskMan, Best SpamKiller, Best Jotter, Best Converter, Best Blacklist or Best Full Screen Message (among others), then grab them now rather than later. A few titles remain at higher prices, so do please check, etc.
Nokia is continuing to push the photo capture abilities of the Nokia N8. In the HD Horizons project, sponsored by Nokia, Jason Hawkes, who has specialised in taking aerial photographs for twenty years, has been capturing UK landscapes and landmarks from the air. We've got access to some of the early images, which offer a remarkable demonstration of the N8's capabilities.
Purnima Kochikar, Nokia Vice President with responsibility for Forum Nokia, has released an open letter to Nokia's developers, which looks to reinforce Nokia's recent messages about the continued importance of Symbian and Qt. The letter offers some details on upcoming updates that will aim to make the Symbian platform more competitive and notes that Symbian devices will continue to be sold long after Nokia's Windows Phone device shipments start.
The story so far. The N8 and other Symbian^3 phones came with Nokia Social networking 1.1, which was limited and slow. Version 1.2 was auto-detected and added limited social media sharing, but it was up to the 1.3 update to improve performance, insert status updates in Contacts, and extend sharing to full resolution uploads. Sadly, 1.3 was pulled after 3 days by Nokia for unspecified stability reasons, but the good news is that it's now available again, improved, fixed and facelifted, for all Symbian^3 phones over at Nokia Beta Labs and, presumably, available to a wider public on-device or in firmware at some point thereafter. Read on for new screenshots, comments and links.
