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....
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.
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.
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.
Astraware is selling Astraware Boardgames and Astraware Solitaire at the reduced price of $5 each until the end of this month. The games are available for Symbian S60 3rd Edition and UIQ3, and can be purchased at the reduced price from astraware.com: click here for their S60v3 section, and click here for their UIQ3 section. (Astraware's parent company Handmark is also having a sale until the 29th of March, with a "buy one, get one free" offer using the discount code "DEMAND".)
Richard Bloor, a new addition to the AAS editorial team, recently talked to Thibaut Rouffineau, from the Symbian Foundation, on a range of topics including the challenges and opportunities in setting-up to support developers, how developers might contribute to the platform and the role of academia in the software industry.
In All About Symbian Insight 62 (AAS Podcast 118) we briefly discuss the recently released S60 5.0 SDK (and consider broader uses), follow up on kinetic scrolling on the N97, get Ewan's view point on Monopoly for the N-Gage. In the last part of the podcast Steve and Ewan relate their experience of video recording on the N85 versus the N95. You can listen to AAS Insight 62 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Opera, the Norwegian browser and web technology company, today introduced Fingertouch, a technology which aims to make it easier to interact with a web page on touchscreen devices. On such devices, especially those with smaller screens, when selectable page elements (e.g. links or form elements) are grouped close together on a web page, it can be difficult to accurately select the right element. Opera's Fingertouch looks to solve this problem by providing visual feedback and 'zooming in' on the clustered elements. Read on for more and demo video.
Slightly different format for the podcast this week as Rafe is in Barcelona. Steve and Ewan pick up the reins to talk about the announcements and products on show at the Mobile World Congress in the AAS Podcast #113. In Monday's recap, they set the scene, talk about the annoncements from Sony Ericsson, and discuss Nokia's Monday morning press conference.
Sony Ericsson has laid out a proposition for their customers at MWC. Entertainment Unlimited is their name for “the true fusion of communication and entertainment” that the partners have been working on since 2001. It's a statement that makes clear their corporate direction of smartphones, and as such is a good marker to remind journalists what Sony Ericsson want to do. Coupled with their concept smartphone Idou announced yesterday, this is a line in the sand drawn by the Swedish company, answering the obvious question of “what now after UIQ?”
CellPhoneSoft have announced, in a reversal of their previous statement, that they will be ceasing to support and develop their UIQ portfolio with immediate effect. They had pledged resources through to the end of 2009, but with rising levels of piracy and a drop in income from registrations they've pulled the plug.
In All About Symbian Insight 59 (AAS Podcast 112) we talk about the recent release of Google Maps 3.0 and its inclusion of the Latitude location service. We follow up with a general discussion of 'people location services' and discuss their implementation, utility and surrounding privacy issues. In the last third of the podcast we preview the forthcoming Mobile World Congress event.
Google today launched the beta of its new Google Sync service for mobile phones. The service, which is free, allows you to synchronise data between your phone and Google's web services. This, for example, allows you to synchronise the contacts on your phone with the contacts data used by Google's GMail. All recent S60 and UIQ phones are supported through the use of SyncML. However currently only the synching of contacts is supported. Read on for more details.
In the first AAS Insight (54) of the year we look back on 2008 and share our hardware highlights, rant about our lowlights, make a few daring predictions and waffle on our favourite pieces of software from 2008. You can listen to AAS Insight 54 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Following a board meeting on 29th December the board of UIQ Technology resolved to file for bankruptcy. This follows on from the news, in early November, that staff had been put on notice and a temporary transition period was being funded by Sony Ericsson. With that period over, with no alternative investor available and given the current economic climate the board had no choice but to shutter the company.