The Nokia E75 has been slowly but surely working its way into the hearts and minds of the All About Symbian team during 2009. Here's my real world, long term Nokia E75 review - what has been outstanding and what has been a problem? Of note is that the E75 was my only device for my recent holiday, i.e. it had to do absolutely everything - how did it cope under pressure?
Over on AAS's sister site Ovi Gaming, we've been continuing our review of Ovi Store games available for Symbian devices. Our latest batch of reviews includes five titles, an incredible three of which have won our Recommended award: slick arcade game Bubble Popper Deluxe, charming puzzler BlockGO, old favourite Tower Bloxx (aka City Bloxx), arcade conversion Ms. Pac-Man and Yahtzee-clone Yacht II. All of these reviews come with long gameplay videos and lots of screenshots. The games were reviewed on a Nokia 5800, but they should also be available for most other S60 5th and 3rd Edition devices too.
In All About Symbian Insight 82 (AAS Podcast 144), Rafe and Steve round up software news from Quickoffice, DataViz and Digia. Steve reprises his Mobidapter review and we discussing some of the forthcoming hardware content on AAS including the Samsung i8190, Nokia 5530, E52 and E55. You can listen to AAS Insight 82 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Over on Ovi Gaming, Ewan Spence has been putting Nokia's exclusive music game Dance Fabulous through its paces, and apparently it is rather good... The game was developed for Nokia by Digital Legends, the same people who did the excellent fighting game ONE, and features exclusive new music created by Dave Stewart (of the Eurythmics) and Cindy Gomez. You can also use your own music if you prefer.
It's August and it's the time of year when Ewan Spence disappears into the caverns of Edinburgh to report for his Fringe podcast - and we do like to load him up with something he hasn't seen before and ask him to road test it properly. This year it's the Nokia N97 and embedded below is the first of his reports. And yes, it includes an unboxing - of sorts! Comments welcome, as usual, along with any questions for the bearded one!
It was that time of the year again. When I got ready to head out into the wilds. Armed with nothing more than my trusty smartphone (in years past, a Nokia 9500, an E61i and an E90, this year it was the E75's turn), the aim was to keep in touch with the world even when camped miles from anywhere with my family. But what about power? How did I keep my smartphone supplied with juice? Not mention the barrage of 'Daddy, my xxxx's battery is flat' complaints, all of which needed to be handled quickly if a peaceful atmosphere was to be maintained!
Over on All About Symbian's sister-site Ovi Gaming we've been reviewing some big-name titles recently, and also added our usual gameplay videos and screenshots alongside the reviews. See below for the complete list of links...
Over on Ovi Gaming we've just done mini-reviews, screenshots and gameplay videos of six lower-price games (in descending order of quality): excellent accelerometer-based tilting maze game Labyrinth Touch, noughts and crosses on a larger grid with Tic Tac Toe Touch, chess-inspired puzzle game Knight's Puzzle, Mr Pringle avoiding a soaking in Log Jam, testing whether you've got dementia with Viitrio Memory Match, and a rather more boring noughts and crosses with Viitrio Tic Tac Toe.
Quickoffice today announced the official release of latest version of its Microsoft Ofiice compatible document viewing and editing software. With the release comes the news that all existing S60 on Symbian Nokia devices will receive a free upgrade to the latest version, Quickoffice 6. Users will receive an upgrade in line with the version that shipped with their device. This means that Eseries devices will receive an upgrade to the viewing and editing version, while other S60 Nokia devices will receive an upgrade to the viewing only version. Read on for more information.
In All About Symbian Insight 81 (AAS Podcast 143), we share the news that Ovi Files is now free to use and talk about its potential uses. We follow up with discussion of the latest Google software updates, the most notable being the addition of Layers to Google Maps. There's comment on Apple's recent result, Accenture acquisition of Nokia's Symbain Professional Service unit and answers to some listener questions. You can listen to AAS Insight 81 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
In an OviGaming.com editorial, Ewan discusses the dual existence of the (virtually identical) standalone and N-Gage versions of Sims 3 - will this be a problem, will this duality give Nokia and EA much useful information and does it highlight any flaws in the current muddled system?
After three days of delays (FX: looks meaningfully at YouTube's system manager and the programmers of S60 Podcasting), The Phones Show 86 is now online - and available via RSS from the usual addresses. Subjects covered: News, Qwerty phones, my N86 video zoom demo and my verdict on the Samsung i8910 HD. See here for the video, RSS links and more info.
Opera's press release today caught my eye not because of the “It's been used to look at ten billion web pages in a month” headline, but the top ten list of countries using Opera Mini. In order, these were Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, U.S., U.K., Poland and then Nigeria. Now I could pull out a list of top countries for the internet as a whole, but that's not going to be comparing like with like, but the thing is that many of them have the US, UK and mainland European countries high up on the list. Read on for my thoughts...
Nokia today announced that it is acquiring certain assets of cellity, a small privately owned mobile software company. cellity's current services, which are focused around managing and syncing contacts between different web services, will not be transferred to Nokia; rather Nokia will acquire the cellity team to strengthen its own 'competencies in the area of social networking'. Read on for more.
As I head out the door, I turn back, unlock the house, and sheepishly pick up my smartphone from the office desk. Probably a scene that we've all done once or twice, but have you ever wondered how much freedom the mobile phone actually takes away from you? In my musings below, I keep my tongue firmly in cheek and paranoia firmly in my brain. Read on...
