The Times' Testbed section today looks at five touchscreen based rivals to the iPhone (leaving unspoken the idea that the iPhone is the one phone that every other phone must be measured against) and fails to appoint a clear winner - each phone is good at a few tasks, and poor at others - but it certainly points out a loser... the W960i.
Although Hidden Expedition: Titanic didn't make Ewan's 'must buy' list, it certainly proves a well presented, well programmed interesting diversion, up to Astraware's high standards for S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3 games. Here's the full review.
In AAS Insight #28 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss some of the news from the past week including Trolltech, Mail for Exchange 2.5 and the Symbian Smartphone Show before moving on to the general waffle topics: firstly S60's increasing integration with the PC and web, secondly smartphone statistics and definition.
The Doctor Who brand may conjure up a vision of a game that's rather different to the one reviewed here. Top Trumps Doctor Who is a new commercial game for mobiles and we couldn't resist setting our resident time lord expert onto it in order to evaluate..... evaluate... evaluate...
DreamLife, the visual Personal Life Manager for UIQ 3 has just been upgraded to version 1.10, with many improvements. Among noteworthy changes are the increase in performance (it is very fast now!) and a much more finger-friendly interface. Screens and more info after the break.
Symbian's annual show, the Smartphone Show will take place later this year, October 21st to 22nd, at Earls Court in London. New this year is the Mobile DevFest a developer focused event from Symbian that runs in parallel to the main show. Symbian has issued a 'call for papers' for developers who are interested in speaking at the event. Fame and glory await.
Digia has announced it has developed a new browser for the UIQ 3 platform - Digia @Web. The browser is based on a port of the open-source webkit browser engine (as used in S60's Browser) and be controlled using finger touch. Features include page control with finger, four zoom levels, intelligent bookmarks, URL auto-completion, full screen browsing and screen rotation. A beta of the browser will be available later in June and will be available for all touch enabled UIQ 3 devices.
I know quite a few of you rely on my definitive pub-quiz-helper, Trivopaedia. It's now been brought up to 2008 levels, with up to date stats for v2.3 . It's available in Mobipocket reader and iSilo formats (i.e. compatible with any portable device or any platform), in addition to being fully online as well - and of course it's still free.
Although there are no real production units of the Sony Ericsson G900 up for looking at yet, it's been interesting to read the early reviews of the prototype around the web. Unwired View reckons the G900 should be great for people who need normal phone functions first and smartphone functions second, while Mobile Review says that the G900 presents one of the finest offerings in terms of the price/quality ratio.
The Indian industrial giant Videocon is apparently interested in buying Motorola's handset business. Videocon already have licences to build 3G phone networks in India, and see potential benefits from also owning a handset manufacturing unit. Motorola currenly owns half of UIQ Technology and manufactures UIQ3 handsets, so such a sale may have implications for the Symbian world. (via Mobile Burn)
Ferrari World Championship seems to have been a high profile game announcement that was followed by a very low profile release (e.g. it's not even in Nokia's Download! system) - but unnecessarily so, since it turns out to be great fun and one of the best Java games to yet appear. Cross-platform and running on just about any phone or smartphone, here's my full and illustrated Ferrari World Championship review. Highly recommended.
Opera has announced the availability of the Opera Widgets SDK. The SDK allows the development of cross device and cross platform applications using standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, DOM, Javascript). Opera Widgets can run, assuming the presence of the Opera browser (9.5), on a PC, mobile phones (e.g. UIQ 3.3 phones), game consoles (Wii) and TVs. Opera Widgets is the widget platform that will be used by future UIQ devices.
BigBen, a well-known utility for the previous generation of UIQ devices, is finally available for the latest UIQ3 phones, like the Sony Ericsson P1, the G900 and the Motorola Z10. It can be used as an automatic screen locker, it's configurable and personalisable. It can also display visible and audible reminders for unattended events, like calls or SMS. More info and a screenshot after the break.
Symbian today publish its first set of 2008 results, which showed shipments of 18.5 million devices in Q1, a year on year increase of 16.5%, a figure which suggests a flattening of device shipments. This takes total Symbian OS device shipments to 206 million. There was also a 92% growth in consultancy service revenue to £4.8 million driven demand for services from 'a broader and deeper range of customer mobile phone products in the pipeline'.
MobiMate recently added extra real-time flight information and facilities to their flagship traveller's app WorldMate Professional. Luckily our own Ewan knows a thing or two about travel utilities and so I threw the app in his direction. The result? We now have ourselves another (though fairly rare) All About Symbian 'MegaApp'. Here's the full review.