Nokia is going to be one of the main sponsors of GDC Mobile, the phone game part of the Game Developers Conference. GDC and GDC Mobile take place in San Francisco from the 5th to the 7th of March 2007. Nokia's Next Generation gaming platform is due to launch across a range of S60 3rd Edition smartphones some time in the first half of 2007, so a March sponsorship of a major gaming event would seem to be well-timed.
Symbian today announced, in their Q3 figures, that more than 100 million Symbian OS phones have shipped. There are over 100 different Symbian OS phones in the market from 10 different licensees and a further 49 are currently in development. In Q3 13 million Symbian phones were shipped, brining the total thus far to 37 million in 2006. Read on for more.
Sun has open sourced various parts of Java under a GPL 2 license. Included within this is a build-able version of Sun's Java ME implementation. Also open sourced is the Java ME testing and compatibility framework. Sun are hoping to speed up the development and evolution of the Java platform and say that open sourcing the language will help drive down development costs and reduce fragmentation.
Ganesh Sivaraman, from Nokia's S60 3rd Edition Web browser team, is the guest of the Voice of S60, with a 16 minute audio interview, mainly talking about the browser and what you can expect in the coming year or so. Why not listen in?
Sony Ericsson is to purchase UIQ Technology from Symbian. UIQ Technology is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of Symbian. UIQ Technology will continue to operate under its current management as a seperate business subsidiary of Sony Ericsson. This reverses the purchase on the Ericsson Mobile Application lab by Symbian in 1999. More on this throughout the day. For now, the full press release follows.
In his video guide to the Symbian Smartphone Show 2006 Steve offers a few video highlights, recorded using his Nokia N93, including a quick look at the new S60 phones, the LG JoY and Samsung i520, and video interviews with CoPilot, F-Secure, Sling Media, among others.
An apparently genuine Nokia document contains some interesting details about their Next Gen gaming platform, which is due to launch across a range of Nokia smartphones in the first half of 2007. In the document is a list of publishers which it claims are working on content for the platform, and which surprisingly includes Sony. The document also gives some details about the distribution channels and development kits. (To find out more, click here...)
Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show Nokia officially announed the availability of its new theme creation tool Carbide.ui. The tool allows for the easy creation of themes and other customisation elements for Nokia smartphones. The tool can be downloaded from the Forum Nokia website.
Symbian and Cingular haved announced that they have teamed up to help support developers. Cingular Deluxe developers will receive complimentary Symbian Affiliate status and Cingular have become a Symbian Platinum Partner. Cingular have also added a new Symbian Zone to their devCentral developer portal.
Announced exclusivly at the All About Symbian Pub Meet this evening is Chris Davies' minimalist but useful Web 2.0 utility, Why The Frak Won't My Sis File Install? Although Rafe would like to point out that if you work for Symbian it might be NSFW...
Just in time for the Smartphone Show Symbian has announced Symbian blogs. The blog's tag line is 'Symbian insights into smartphone products, industry news, and our culture' which describes what the blog aims to cover. Symbian Bloggers include Nigel Clifford (CEO), Thomas Chambers (CFO), David Wood (EVP), Haruhiko Hisa (President, Symbian Japan) and more.
