If you've ever looked at an aspect of the Symbian or smartphone world and asked 'Why?', then you know exactly how I sometimes feel. This being Friday, here are some of my puzzlers for weekend pontification....
Proporta do seem to snap up some of the best accessory ideas. They've just launched a 'Keychain GPS', weighing only 30g, with SiRF III chipset and USB (and 12V) charging. They claim it'll work from within a pocket, briefcase or handbag, meaning that provided you remember to keep it charged, you can pretend your Bluetooth-equipped smartphone has its own, private, invisible GPS.
Symbian has finalised its agenda and show layout for its annual Smartphone Show in London, on 16-17th October at the ExCeL centre. Listed below are some of the last minute speaker sign ups and some thumbnails, plus links. The show is free to attend, as is the AAS pub meet on the evening of the 15th, details to be announced, but the prize list is pretty impressive....(!) Oh, and keep the evening of the 16th free as well - watch this space.
It's here folks. The much anticipated CorePlayer Mobile for Symbian is just released a few minutes ago for S60, S60 3rd Edition, UIQ and UIQ 3. It supports the latest Audio and Video formats such as MP3, AAC, MKA, WMA, WAV, OGG and also H.264 (AVC), MKV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 part 2 (ASP), DivX, XviD, etc. Full press release after the break!
According to this post in the CoreCodec Forums the highly anticipated CorePlayer Mobile for Symbian OS will be launched next Wednesday. CorePlayer is a multimedia player that supports a large number of formats including WMA, OGG, FLAC, DivX and XviD. The player will be available for S60 2nd Edition, S60 3rd Edition, UIQ 2 and UIQ 3 devices. Read on.
According to The Register, phone giant Motorola has now slipped into third place behind Nokia and Samsung, after a loss-making Q2 2007. El Reg thinks Moto should make more high end handsets, so would that mean more Z8-style Symbian UIQ3 models?
It's..... AAS video podcast 17, in which I muse on the gulf between opposite ends of the smartphone spectrum, despair over trolling fanboys and look ahead to hardware coming up in the second half of 2007. If you want to get all our podcasts, here's the RSS feed.
Here's something useful for your summer travels and completely free. CoolGorilla have created a freeware talking phrasebook, available in half a dozen languages. It runs under Java, so should work with the majority of S60 and UIQ smartphones. Just pick the model in their list that's closest to what you have. It worked fine on my E90 8-) (Via MobHappy)
Using GMail in a web browser has always been a bit clumsy. Ewan's taken a shine to Google's dedicated Java-based GMail client on his Nokia N95. OK, so Java's slow to load and clumsy, but Google's mini app is well designed and has some lovely touches.
The beta of Opera Mini 4 is now available from the Opera website. The new version renders a full page overview from which you can then zoom in to read the page (very reminiscent of S60's browser overview / minimap mode). Other new features include the introduction of a mouse and power scrolling making it easier to move around pages and a quick access context menu. Read on for more and screenshots.
Projekt, the only genuine 'outliner' for Symbian OS, recently hit S60 3rd Edition. Now that it's available for both current Symbian-based platforms, Asri al-Baker reviews the UIQ 3 version of Projekt and shows how it can be used for everything from project management to shopping lists... And in the second part of a UIQ 3 double bill, Asri explains his top 10 wishlist for UIQ 3 - any developers fancy a challenge?
emoze, the popular and free push email and Calendar service for S60 and UIQ smartphones, has been given a major update to v1.4, with much increased efficiency top of the list of improvements, meaning a smaller hit on battery life. Here's the press release and here's the download page.