In All About Symbian Insight 68 (AAS Podcast 126) Rafe and Steve talk about the upcoming Ovi Store in relation to Widsets, N-Gage and uploading content, before sharing their recent device purchases. Steve explain why he prefers his device with an Xenon flash and Rafe talks about 3's and Orange's service strategy. You can listen to AAS Insight 68 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Boy oh boy, Python for S60 is coming along nicely. Just in time for the likes of the Ovi Store, too. New in v1.9.4, out today are a single signed runtime, an improved application packager, easier runtime deployment, new APIs and a full-screen mode for the likes of the Nokia 5800.
Apologies to those who already know this, but it was news to me and perhaps to other people too: if you run an internet radio station you can add it to Nokia's online directory of stations for free by visiting this link. The directory is used by Nokia's Internet Radio application currently available on Symbian S60 3rd Edition phones and Maemo internet tablets, and allows people to browse and listen to listed stations on their devices through wi-fi or the phone network. The directory accepts both internet-only stations and internet streams of conventional broadcast radio stations.
It seems that Nokia will shortly be releasing the first device specific S60 SDK (focussed on the N97) and there has been a lot of talk about Symbian on MIDs, how will this affect developers? Read on for my analysis.
Lee Williams, writing on the Symbian Foundation blog, shares a few photos on Symbian ^1 (effectively the current version of S60 5th Edition) running on an 'off the shelf Intel Atom based motherboard'. The Intel Atom is one of the processors regularly used in netbook computers. The concept highlights the flexibility and maturity of Symbian platform and demonstrates that there could be potential areas for it to be used beyond mobile phones. Read on for further thoughts.
In this developer feature we preview Nokia's upcoming Developer Summit 2009, which being held in Monaco at the end of this month. It is the first event that brings all aspects of development for Nokia devices together and Srikanth Raju, head of marketing for Forum Nokia, offers some insight.
To coincide with the first shipments of the Nokia E75, Forum Nokia released the Nokia E75 plug-in for Carbide.ui and the Eseries SDK plug-in for the S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 SDK. There was also some apparently gloomy news about developer intentions to port location enabled applications to Symbian.
This week an interesting announcement slipped into the Forum Nokia Wiki about a change in Java strategy on S60. Also a couple of new members joined the Symbian Foundation, and, if you don’t have enough information already, a Publish on Ovi webinar is coming up later in the week.
Curiously dated as a 1 April release, the Nokia Energy Profiler has been updated to fix issues with it freezing on S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 devices. With the release also came an update to the NEP External API, enabling developers to tap into NEP data or add new data capture to the application.
Nokia's application store, Ovi Store, is now accepting content from developers, and will launch in May. In our latest developer feature, Richard Bloor speaks to Eric John, Director of Media Product Marketing for Nokia Services, to discuss the developer proposition offered by Ovi store. There's questions on operator billing, supported content types, platform support and more.
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.
There's now a build of the latest Python for S60 (PyS60) which installs without errors on S60 5th Edition devices like the Nokia 5800. v1.9.3 introduced quite a few enhancements, chief among which was support for touchscreens. Though this build will be of interest mainly to developers, I suspect several professional applications for the 5800 written in Python won't be far behind now. (via Croozeus)
From the Symbian Foundation and Texas Instruments comes the news that the Zoom OMAP34x-II mobile development platform will be the first reference platform for the Symbian Foundation. This is a test device, capable of running various mobile operating systems, that can be used, to test code, by those wishing to contribute to the open source platform. It is also useful for developers wanting to explore and conduct tests on upcoming Symbian platform releases.
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.
In a regular new feature, here's a round up of the rest of last week’s mobile development news. This week FleaC, Rhomobile, and froglogic are in the news and there's a reminder of the Betavine Widget 2009 competition.