AAS Podcast 138: Interview with Lee Williams, Symbian Foundation

In All About Symbian Podcast 138, Rafe talks to Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation. The interview covers a wide range of topics, including the Symbian Foundation's planned application arena, the universal web runtime, the forthcoming Symbian Exchange and Exposition, Qt and the Symbian Foundation, the challenges of openness and open governance, and more.

Orkut Mobile App Launched by Google

Google's incredibly popular social network, Orkut, is now available through a java based smartphone client, which is optimised for S60 phones. Orkut has a presence with as much, if not more, impact than Facebook or MySpace in both Brazil and India and providing greater access to the network.

Get DreamLife S60 upgrade for free

DreamSpring, the developer of DreamLife, is running a "Buy One Get Another One Free" promotion to offer users who purchase a copy of DreamLife for UIQ a free upgrade to DreamLife for S60 when it's released. The offer is finishing at the end of May 2009. You can find more details at the official web site. 

10 minutes with the Ozone web browser

Over the weekend the news arrived that a beta of Ozone, a WebKit based web browser, had been released for S60 3rd Edition. Ozone, previously available for UIQ 3, claims better standard compliance and faster performance that the built in S60 browser. In the full news story we take a closer look at some of Ozone's features and include some illustrative screenshots from both S60 3rd Edition and S60 5th Edition.

Ozone web maxes out on standards compliance and speed

Ozone is now available for S60, at the same beta 0.9 version that appeared for UIQ 3 last year. Ozone is a web browser that "not only delivers advanced features such as client-side database support, application cache, zooming and multiple windows, but also provides the best web-standards compliant experience that's available". The beta download is at www.o3mobi.com. Comments welcome if you've tried Ozone.

More on Symbian release plans - Qt-based Orbit UI supersedes S60 AVKON in Symbian^4

David Wood, writing on the Symbian Foundation Blog, about reviewing the release plans, has highlighted some details of upcoming Symbian releases. Symbian^2, the equivalent of S60 5th Edition Feature Pack 1, will be functionally complete next week and in devices early next year. Symbian^3, for which the majority of the source code should be available, enhances communication architecture, multimedia and graphics functionality, and should reach devices in the second half of 2010. 

Symbian ^4 will see the full integration and optimisation of Qt into the Symbian platform. Further proposals includes the 'Orbit' extension library for Qt (replacing AVKON) and a new 'Direct UI' interaction and navigation logic. Put crudely, this means we will see an evolution of the existing S60/AVKON UI to a new Qt-based 'Orbit' Symbian UI for devices coming out in 2011. Read on for more details.

Art and Confusion

Every week seems to bring new themes for our smartphones, many of which introduce us to ever wackier and more artistic sets of icons for the applications we're familiar with. In this rantfeature, I argue that there's efficiency and elegance in keeping icons close to the originals, keeping the workload for our poor beleaguered eyes and brain down....  

Symbian Foundation: day one and a new logo

Yesterday marked 'day one' of the Symbian Foundation. This announced the commencement of the beta testing of its new web site and that 81 companies have applied for membership (50 of which are first time endorsers). The new logo of the Symbian Foundation was also unveiled: Symbian, in stylised letters, underlain by a yellow heart. Read on for more.

Whatley Wednesday - Should Gravity come down?

In this comment piece, 'Should Gravity come down?', James Whatley shares his thoughts on mobile application prices. Have on-device stores, such as iPhone's App Store and Android's Marketplace, changed consumer's perception of the pricing of mobile applications? What constitutes reasonable value? Read our first Whatley Wednesday, then share your thoughts in the comments thread.

Twice from Herocraft

The latest time waster from developer powerhouse Herocraft is an amazing logic game and a memory training tool in one. Read on for an extract from the press release and a video.