Quaintly described in the press release as "now available on flat pieces of dead trees", Tamoggemon Software, based in Germany, has written a book which "takes C++ programmers and transforms them into lean and mean Symbian coding machines". The book covers all Symbian versions from S60 3rd Edition onwards and covers Ovi Store and Symbian Signed - the only catch is that the book's only available in German so far - the writers are looking for an English language publisher. Photo and a link below.
Marko Ahtisaari, SVP of industrial design at Nokia, was one of the guest speakers at this year's LeWeb Conference. He covered topics from dominant designs of smartphone user interface and collective intelligence with mobile devices. He outlined why he sees that there's plenty of work to be done in the world of mobile user experience, particularly in having mobile devices actually demand less of our attention. In his view, iOS is "beautifully elegant and fantastically constrained", while Symbian and Android actually share the same design pattern but differ greatly in their business models. Read on for a in-depth account of the speech and Q&A session.
You may remember that we publicised the 'emergency' three finger super-hard reset key sequence for the Nokia N8 a while back? This is obviously not really meant for general users, at least not in the N8's case, since some of the underlying Qt enablers are thereafter missing from the device and functionality like the Ovi Store is also rendered inoperable. Hopefully, most of you will never need this emergency sequence in the first place (*#7370# should be enough should the worst ever happen), but if you do find yourself utterly stuck then note 'Leo the Lion's mini-tutorial on how to add the right Qt enablers back in.
SPB Online Games launched yesterday for S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3, a collection of 4 instant online, multi-player games (English and Russian Checkers, Hexagon and Reversi). If interrupted, the games can be continued from the spot where they left off. Players can also "share their game experience in the real-time chat service". Mini-review, screenshots and links below.
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.
Google has finally updated their YouTube mobile client to work fully with Symbian^3 handsets, taking the client to v2.4.10 - you can now sign in and use the usual Favourites and account features. As a bonus and perhaps a nod to the increased graphics capability of the new handsets (or indeed Symbian in general - it's not stuck in the Stone Age, you know...), Google seems to be serving up a higher quality video stream (where appropriate, in terms of the source footage) - so it's a big win all round. Screenshots and comments below.
Real Golf 2011 is a Gameloft title licensed by Nokia for some of its latest Symbian^3 graphics-accelerated handsets. It first appeared in Sw_update on the N8 in some parts of the world last week, but has now made it into the Ovi Suite update system as a whopping 180MB download for a wider range of N8 variants. Below is screenshot proof from me in the UK, including actual game screens and initial impressions. Comments and data points welcome from others, in terms of devices and regions!
After a little nagging from readers, I've done an update to my smartphone-choosing Grid, over on its new home at my own domain at stevelitchfield.com. New on the Symbian front are the N8 and C7, new as competition are the HTC Desire HD, Motorola Defy and Dell Streak. More devices going up over the next few weeks as I get more comments and feedback. Just plug in your own preferences and see what comes out as the suggested best smartphone for you.
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.
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.
When C7 owners check their Software Update application this week, they will (network branding permitting) find a set of Over-The-Air updates for their device. First of all, there is the update for the Social application, available for all Symbian^3 devices, that we have already reported on. Also there is a 3.3MB update for core applications to "improve stability", and a 3.0MB update adding the "Midnight" theme.
Orange Wednesdays is the first of a series of 'Signature Applications' produced by Orange UK, using Qt to build for Nokia devices, and there's a fascinating interview with Mark Sage and Rafel Uddin of Orange Labs UK, talking about the app's development, about the use of Qt, the differences Symbian^3 brings to the table and the way private APIs are being replaced by the use of official, public Qt APIs.
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.
