The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is tightly integrated with a number of media-sharing sites, including Ovi Share, Flickr and Vox, and you can upload your photos and videos to these sites directly from the 5800's camera and gallery applications. In the latest (somewhat epic) tutorial in our beginners series, Tzer2 leaves no stone unturned in explaining how to get going and imparts a number of tips along the way.
In All About Symbian Insight 69 (AAS Podcast 127) Rafe, Ewan and Steve talk about Bobba, operating billing on the Ovi Store, v21 firmware for the Nokia 5800 and the new N-Gage game - Age of Empires III. Rafe then reports back in detail from the Nokia Developer Summit 2009. You can listen to AAS Insight 69 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Time for the next part in my video review of the Nokia E75 enterprise device. How well does the dual format device cope with going online through the Web browser, and what other internet features does it carry? How does it fare for N-Gage games? And what about left-handed owners? I take a look in part four of the series, below.
Federation. No not the evil kind from Blakes 7 or the Star Trek goodie two shoes, but the federation of communications. It's one of the reasons that the internet really started to work. Look at the different operating systems, servers and applications that can all happily talk to each other. Every home, office and school with a router is a small network, connected to a bigger network, and so on and so on all the way up the pipe. So why is IM such a problem? Read on for my thoughts.
So much for the quality stamp of being in the good 'ol BBC. Their latest Digital Planet podcast, going out worldwide, starts with an scaremongering piece which claims that the only reason why there hasn't been a mobile phone virus pandemic is that there aren't enough Symbian OS-powered phones out there yet. Completely ignoring the fact that the viruses mentioned are ALL for really old phones and OS versions, involve manual, deliberate installation and are aimed at really naive users. The Symbian Foundation's new PR dept would do well to fire a rocket into Gareth Mitchell, Jason Palmer and self-confessed expert Prof Barasbi, who, patently, haven't a clue what they're talking about. Pah.
David Wood, writing on the Symbian Foundation Blog, about reviewing the release plans, has highlighted some details of upcoming Symbian releases. Symbian^2, the equivalent of S60 5th Edition Feature Pack 1, will be functionally complete next week and in devices early next year. Symbian^3, for which the majority of the source code should be available, enhances communication architecture, multimedia and graphics functionality, and should reach devices in the second half of 2010.
Symbian ^4 will see the full integration and optimisation of Qt into the Symbian platform. Further proposals includes the 'Orbit' extension library for Qt (replacing AVKON) and a new 'Direct UI' interaction and navigation logic. Put crudely, this means we will see an evolution of the existing S60/AVKON UI to a new Qt-based 'Orbit' Symbian UI for devices coming out in 2011. Read on for more details.
Nokia's upcoming launch of the Ovi Store in the US will not, apparently, come with carrier billing – the ability to have any purchases added to your phone bill, as opposed to inputting credit card details into the system. To be fair, no other on-device store has this facility in America, so Nokia aren't being unduly penalised in not having this feature. But it does create another step in the process for the end user, and the seamless experience Nokia were planning on isn't quite in place in that territory. Read on for more.
The Nokia 5800 is criticised by some for being a single-touch device that can only register one finger press at a time. But is this actually true? Not quite. With a bit of clever interface design the existing 5800 hardware is already capable of registering two simultaneous screenpresses at once, and you can see how this works in the full story below (you can even try it for yourself, and there's a video of a 5800 game using it). The reason this is worth mentioning is that Nokia is already using a more limited version of this method in their just-released Maemo 5 SDK, which is the latest version of the platform they use on their internet tablets. If Nokia's already using it there, it seems very likely they could use it on their S60 devices too.
In previous articles, I've been more than happy to praise the S60 Music player. Unfortunately, it has just not kept up with the changing pace of technology. On the N95 and N95 8GB vintage devices, the music app was far better than the leading MP3 players of the time, notably the iPod Nano. But the iPhone music app has vaulted over the S60 app.... what could the Espoo Engineers learn from Cupertino Coders?
There's a nice piece by Chris Meadows here talking about the future for Mobipocket and its previously ubiquitous ebook reader software, now that Amazon have not only bought Mobipocket but are competing against it vigorously with its own Kindle hardware and software. In fact, it's looking increasingly as if Amazon bought Mobipocket simply to put paid to a competitor. Yet there's nothing else decent to fill the vacuum on S60 and Symbian. Read on for some thoughts and links.
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.
In an affectionate companion feature to my "Ten Things that Nokia Did RIGHT in making the 5800 XpressMusic" from last month, I now present "Ten Things that Nokia Did WRONG in making the 5800 XpressMusic". There we go, never ever say that I and All About Symbian aren't balanced!
Digital Chocolate's Cafe Hold Em Poker has arrived on the N-Gage platform, but how good is it? Ewan Spence passes judgement in the All About N-Gage review, and discovers lessons both for the game's developers and for the N-Gage platform as a whole.
Every week seems to bring new themes for our smartphones, many of which introduce us to ever wackier and more artistic sets of icons for the applications we're familiar with. In this rantfeature, I argue that there's efficiency and elegance in keeping icons close to the originals, keeping the workload for our poor beleaguered eyes and brain down....
You've heard from Rafe, Ewan and myself on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, the first S60 5th Edition smartphone. But, it now being April 2009, it's time for the fourth AAS team member to weigh in. Tzer2 reports back with terrifically detailed thoughts on this device after a solid three months of use, day in and day out. How did the 5800 stand up to such intense real world pressure? Surprisingly well, it seems that the only role the 5800 disappointed in was that of camera phone.
