Over on Symbian.com, David Wood's latest 'Insight' editorial is on the way the huge success of Symbian OS smartphones will inevitably spark a renaissance in home-produced applications. Back to the way things were in Psion's hey-day?
Ewan takes a good look at the free beta of ShoZu, a utility to aid uploading of your photos to a photo blogging service, and concludes that it's technically impressive but that it doesn't yet have all based covered in terms of functionality.
Okay so Engadget and Gizmodo are carrying P970 pics (allegedly) and following the links up the chain, it looks like a cut down keypad design, no Wi-Fi or 3G option, and possibly a downgraded camera. The rumours are saying Q1 2006, so the good money is on an announcement at the upcoming 3GSM.
piAccess Link adds AT command support to Symbian phones for SMS and phone book retrieval. This allows you to access text messages and contacts over Bluetooth from a PC with standard AT command software (such as piAcess Mail). Features include support for both incoming and outgoing Bluetooth serical connections, reading and deletion of all SMS (sent or received), reading of contacts and access to additional phone information such as the IMEI.
3-Lib has added extra weightings, future-proofing and software catalogue attributes to the big, free, Grid. Which is your perfect smartphone? Let the Grid decide!
[Huge personal plug alert] Programme 1 in a new 'TV' series looking specifically at smartphones has aired. The show covers all software platforms and is currently free to download online. Read on for details...
There's a veritable flood of Internet-borne 'services' that you access on your smartphone coming out of America (and specifically the CES show) but what they're announcing makes no sense whatsoever in most of the rest of the world. Read on...
MetrO is a freeware tube routefinder that works for many cities around the world, on all Symbian-based smartphones. Steve's been putting it through its paces on his Nokia 7710 to let us know what it's like.
Just spotted this, released over Christmas. Emil Tchekov has produced OPeLo, a freeware Windows OPL editor, with color syntax highlighting, pop-up command lists and more. Your code can be translated by using the official OPLTRAN tool. Nice idea!
Providing a massive feature set (including filtering, multi-list views, contact merging, and both public and private notes), DreamConnect looks to be great add-on utility for UIQ users. Lots of UI work in how the thumb wheel can be used to do more than just scroll is one point that caught my eye.
Digital Restrictions Management in UIQ 3 is going to be provided by Discretix, UIQ have announced. Procviding support for the industry standard OMA DRM, Microsoft Windows Media v10 and CPRM, it promises "flexibility in meeting the evolving needs of mobile operators." Our emphasis. Full press release follows.
Steve Litchfield's discovered that Opera Mini's now alive and working and has been playing with it for a couple of days. Here's his review. Summary: it may change the way you browse on your smartphone - it will certainly chop your GPRS bill down to size...
Ewan goes in search of an Internet Relay Chat client that will work on all his Symbian smartphones and finds it in the free JmIRC. Here's the full review.
3-Lib's grid of mobile/smartphone solutions is now fully interactive! You can apply your own weightings for any smartphone functions and the grid will recalculate scores as needed.
