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.
Only a minor update, but noteworthy because the app's so central to Nokia's new Symbian^3 handsets, but check Sw_update on your N8. You should see a 2.5MB update to 'Social' and it will install over the air. Do note that a phone restart will be needed as well, presumably to add a newer version of the Nokia Social widget to the homescreen system. Comments welcome if you notice any actual changes!
The Ovi Blog has just covered an application for Nokia touch handsets to make discovering music in the Ovi Music store a little easier. Music Explorer is essentially an alternative search interface for the store. The application is available in the Ovi Store, and allows you to easily browse featured tracks by genre. The application comes with a home screen widget (for suitably enabled handsets), which will provide recommendations and special offers. Read on for a mini review.
Nokia is running a competition to promote its new C7 and C6-01 handsets. (See our in-progress C7 review here and here). The object of the competition is to win as many votes as possible via the "Nokia C7 social challenge" Facebook application, by giving a special hyperlink. The five most popular contestants will not only win a C7 for themselves and twenty of their friends, but Nokia says it will throw them a big party as well! To enter, head over to Nokia's Facebook page and click on the "C7 Contest" tab. Read on for comment and the promotional video.
Those folks at GSM Arena have obviously had too much time on their hands as they've put together all the latest smartphones from the main manufacturers and have tackled another subject close to my heart: screen visibility and contrast in all light conditions. Representing the Symbian world in the round-up are the Nokia C6-01 and N8 and, it's fair to say, both acquit themselves pretty well, with CBD and anti-reflective AMOLED screens respectively.
Between 9am and 10am GMT tomorrow, November 30th, three designers from Nokia will be answering questions on Twitter about Nokia's design process, with special emphasis on Nokia's C6-01 and C7-00. Questions should have the #NokiaDesign hash-tag to be seen by the guys at Nokia. Searching for that tag (just click the previous link) will allow you to view the conversation. Read on for more details.
Kudos to the web programmers and the rest of the team at GSM Arena, who have produced the really rather cool 'Photo Compare Tool'. Essentially they've taken a large number of recent phones and smartphones and shot the same three test photos with each (ISO 12233, Grey and Colour). You can then choose which three phones you'd like to compare using the drop-down pick lists and click any of the offered crops to show the full photo in the main window. Oh heck, just go try it, you'll see what I mean. Curiously, the Symbian-powered camera champions, the Nokia N86, Samsung i8910 and Sony Ericsson Satio aren't represented, but there's still plenty of other Symbian (and Maemo) interest. Full list below.
Nokia’s Beta Labs latest release might be an old-school diagnostic tool, but the Nokia Connectivity Analyzer is a welcome addition to anyone either having issues with their Wifi or 3G connecting, looking to find out where the problems are on a slow connection, or just want to map the dead Wi-fi spots in their house. It’s a free download, but obviously with the caveats that go with a “beta” designation - and the 'techy' nature of the tool.
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...
You'll possibly have spotted some remarks of mine in the comments to yesterday's smartphone spectrum post, in which I referred to Nokia's EDoF cameras as 'cutting edge'. I've written several times (e.g. in my Nokia C7 review part) on how these work, but to emphasise the technology and tolerances involved, check out a post yesterday on Nokia Conversations, in which Damian Dinning waxes lyrical about both the challenges involved in making EDoF lenses and the possible benefits for the end user.
Nokia seem to be far more Mac-aware these days - the C6-01 and C7-00 - and even the still-in-womb E7-00 - are all now listed in Nokia's iSync plug-in system, for PIM sync to the Mac's iCal and Address Book. You can find these iSync plug-ins and more at Nokia's revamped Mac software page here. Particularly notable is a veritable flurry of FAQs and tutorials explaining how to do the more common operations with Nokia Multimedia Transfer, and how to connect up a Nokia smartphone to a Mac in the first place.
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.
It’s nice to see that Nokia’s strategy is slowly becoming clear to the mainstream media, as this article in the Wall Street Journal shows. While it does (eventually) get to the point, it starts as many articles do, from a false statement, magnified by Stephen Elop’s new role as CEO. Namely “his first decision was to go it alone and not adopt Android.” A statement that makes for a headline but has no basis in commercial reality.
Sports Tracker, the popular GPS and activity utility that was spun out of Nokia Beta Labs and which is now its own entity, has just had a big upgrade to v4.0, available over the air by simply running an older version on your Symbian-powered phone. The main change is the addition of social sharing functions, to friends or 'everyone' on Sports-Tracker.com and/or to your friends on Facebook, but there are other enhancements, including a new night mode. Some screenshots and more details below.
A hat tip to Jade for reporting here on the Nokia E7 manual being online now, courtesy of the always-helpful FCC. Of particular interest to me was the mention of standard 'ctrl' editing shortcuts when in text fields - I'm glad to see that these are now back in place, presumably in addition to the usual 'long press on shift' method beloved on the likes of the N97. The shortcuts are listed below. We expect to have the E7 in for review shortly, so stay tuned!
