Nokia today announced the winner of its S60 3rd Edition Challenge competition. The grand prize winners were QuickOffice, Foeca, InfoTalk and Augmentra. The global developer compeition was designed to encourage innovative development on the S60 platform.
Symbian's developer website, Symbian Developer Network, has been relaunched to coincide with next week's Symbian Smartphone Show. The revamped site now includes web based discussion forums, a wiki, reorganised content and a clearer navigation system.
UIQ has announced the launch of the UIQ Developer Advisory Board which is aimed at helping various companies that target UIQ developers coordinate their activities. The advisory board will meet on a regular basis to discuss the best way that the industry can use its resources to help support developers. The board will actively seek feedback and input from developers over which issues should be addressed.
It's autumn, it's time for the Symbian Smartphone Show, which means it must be time to wheel Symbian Signed back out in the open! Developer Sampo Suvisaari has been writing about why Symbian Signed means less choice for end users and proposes a simple and brilliant change to the system.
Orange are holding their annual European Partner Camp in 10 days time. With speakers from Orange, Symbian, UIQ and S60 the event offers broad coverage of the Symbian World. There is also a developer centre and plenty of on-hand advisors to help you make the most of your time. We've got one free pass (worth €595) to give away - read on for more details.
Nokia have announced an updated version of Python for S60. New in version 1.3.11 are keycapture and topwindow modules, support for SVG images (3rd Edition only) and support for both S60 2nd Edition and S60 3rd Edition in one release.
Today at 4pm BST (but also archived for later playback) Symbian are running a developer webcast focusing on the Accredited Symbian Developer (ASD) program /exam. ASD is an accredited exam program designed to test the skill / knowledge base of developers. After the exam has been taken a report is provided that allows you to quantify and individual or group's underrstanding of Symbian fundamentals.
Orange and Nokia today announced that they would be working together to customise S60 for Orange signature devices. S60 is one of Orange's preferred software platforms. The Orange signature device program includes those devices which express or enhance the Orange brand and lifestyle with an emphasis on high end devices.
Just in case you missed them, I've been quite impressed by Alessandro Pace's introduction and getting started with development articles on the subject of Flash Lite, a new way of producing content for some (but currently not all) Symbian OS smartphones.
Sony Ericsson has joined the Eclipse community as an Add-in Provider member. Eclipse is an open source platform designed for building IDE's for various platforms and languages. Read on for more information and a UIQ 3 developer round up.
Ruby for Symbian is a version of the Ruby object orientated scripting language for Symbian phones. It currently runs on S60 2nd Edition phone and is available only in a preview release version (intended to demonstrate different milestones in the project). Ruby for Symbian was funded by the Google Summer of Code program.
News from Somusar that their application-generator can now produce self-signed programs for S60 3rd Edition. It's an almost code-free way to get text, sounds and graphics into a working smartphone application. Press release follows.
Python for S60 , the opensource port of the Python scripting language for S60 phones, now has an official Wiki. The Wiki features a list of Python applications, instructions for installing Python for S60, Python for S60 documentation and links to resources of interest and note.
Simon Judge is reporting on his blog that some operators (Vodafone Japan) are locking down S60 3rd Edition handsets so that only Symbian Signed applications can be installed. This means that self-signed applications can not be installed.
Symbian OS 9.3 has been announced, whose highlights include shorter start up times, better performance, native support for Wi-Fi, PushToTalk and USB 2.0 (previously these were added in by licensees) and FOTA (Firmware Over The Air) upgrades. Symbian OS 9.3 is likely to be used in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1. The first OS 9.3 phones will be announced shortly. The full press release follows.
