In All About Symbian Podcast 98 (Insight #45) we are back from last weeks Symbian Smartphone Show at Earl's Court. There some discussion on the feel and size of the show, Symbian Foundation related announcements, and the start of our run through of some of the devices and demos we saw.
Just making sure that you catch up with Ricky Cadden as he presents his real world thoughts on Nokia's Share Online, pointing out that it's far too laborious when you've got more than a handful of photos to share with the world. Quite agree. Also agree with him that the PC/web-side of things is now really slick.
AAS regular 'jbpseudo' has been writing here on his experiences with Taptu, specifically their new beta-status standby screen widget. I have to confess to having forgotten all about Taptu, so this article is a timely reminder of a valid competitor on the mobile side of things for the mighty Google.
Mobile content portal Mippin has unveiled the 'social' part of their service. They're already able to re-purpose thousands of sites for a mobile display (mainly by using their RSS feeds rather than the full blown regular pages), but now your userlogin gives you a personal profile that can be used by others to discover news that they should like, based on the respective profiles.
This compendium of card solitaires hit N-Gage in the last week and our very own Tzer2 has been playing through the games, declaring DChoc Cafe Solitaire to be 'a nice slice of classic entertainment', though with reservations over the non-standard online social elements.
Ewan decides to 'build a phone' at this year's Smartphone Show, switches his phone into video recording mode and heads for the various stands needed to get its software together... Plus an aerial view of the show, courtesy of a roving airship!
It was interesting at the show to see that Samsung had tippexed out the i8510 name in a lot of their press releases and replaced it with INNOV8 after all - maybe common sense is prevailing, and INNOV8 is certainly a lot easier to remember. The devices on the Samsung stand had much newer firmware (HH9) than the current review hardware (HH7), but we're still waiting on an issue-free release before delivering our AAS verdict - the INNOV8 has too much potential to simply prematurely write it off as 'buggy'. In related news, The Register has just put up their own INNOV8 review, although from the lack of criticism I'm assuming that they only really gave it a cursory trial. Rafe and I are putting a lot more time into it.
In the second of my video items from The Smartphone Show 2008, I chat to Symbian about their latest FreePlay demo (Wi-Fi to GSM handover) and to VirtualLogix about the possibility of running Linux and Symbian together in the same device...
GMail's Java-based client seemed to have been stuck at v1 for decades - it's just had the big 2.0 upgrade. It's still Java and larger (at 500K), but it's faster and, it's claimed, more reliable, especially when working for short periods offline. There's also now support for multiple GMail accounts and sending email in the background. To download version 2.0, go to m.google.com/mail in your phone browser.
Nokia do seem to be getting better at communications with the outside world, as evidenced by the very switched on and honest status update just posted by the 'Nokia Email' service team. If you use this service then take a look.
Yup. There's one show photo that we simply couldn't decide on a caption for. So it's down to you. We have Ewan, Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford and Rafe chewing the cud in the press area. But what on earth's going on? You decide! Best one line caption in the comments wins some mystery star goodies..... [Winner chosen... see below]
If you've been following the semi-official S60 blogs over on S60.com then note that the old blog feeds have just been discontinued and the blogs archived. There are now just two main feeds/blogs to follow in your feed reader: S60 Living and Developing on S60. A simpler system and less confusing all round!
In the first of our video features from this week's Smartphone Show 2008, I chat in AAS video podcast 31 to Michael Shean from Skyhook and Loughlin Spollen from Tagggit about their Wi-Fi-based location technology and the first S60 native app to use it.
My Phones Show 67 just went live, with a hands-on preview and thoughts on the S60 5th Edition-powered Nokia 5800 XpressMusic ('Tube'), plus a cross-platform feature analysing 'Which phone should you buy?'. Note also the RSS feeds for the standard and hi-res versions of the show, for your feedreader, browser or iTunes. And yes, Rafe's official AAS preview of the 5800 is coming soon, don't worry....
Symbian has released Ruby for Symbian OS to the Open Source software developer community. Ruby is "a powerful dynamic language that reaches the heights of the pure Object Oriented Programming paradigm" and is popular in many developer communities.
