It's.... AAS Insight 19 (aka AAS audio podcast 68), mainly concentrating on the news of UIQ 3.3 and what it will mean, but also chatting about the split of Motorola, the v21 update for the Nokia N95 Classic and the usual software spots. Here's the Insight 19 listening link, here's the RSS feed for you to subscribe for the future.
No, not that sort of pleasure. We're talking geek pleasure. I respond (hopefully with a voice of reason) to the S60 3rd Edition hackers over at Symbian Freak and to the hyped headlines that have started to appear around the world. And if you've no idea what I'm talking about, just move on, you're not missing much.
This Samsung SGH-i550 image gallery is a teaser ahead of our full review (now published above). The i550 is Samsung's top of the range S60 phone. It has a candy bar form factor and features a large 2.6 inch screen, a 3.0 megapixel AF camera, WiFi and HSDPA connectivity and an integrated GPS.
EA Mobile has released an official version of Tetris for the new N-Gage platform. Is it up to scratch in these 21st century days? Head on over to All About N-Gage's Tetris review to find out.
In Insight #18 (AAS Podcast 67) Rafe, Ewan and Steve talk about this week's news (N-Gage First Access closing and Comes with Music). Rafe and Steve discuss their first impressions of the Samsung SGH-i450 and Samsung SGH-i550 (S60 phones) and afterwards Ewan talks about how he recorded and broadcast video on his trip to the USA.
Never mind the debates about which is best: clamshells, candybars, sliders, and so on. There's a wider debate going on - how large should a smart mobile device be? I argue that once you get beyond a certain size, you lose the 'take it everywhere' usefulness, you sacrifice robustness and you fail to achieve mass market sales.
In Insight #17 (AAS Podcast 66) Rafe, Steve and Stefan talk around Apple's recently announced SDK and Application Store and what Nokia and Sony Ericsson do in this area. We also talk about our favourite form factors where we recognise that device robustness is the most important factor.
Hearing that my long-suffering wife, Fiona, was off for a day jaunt to 'somewhere she'd never been before', I wondered if she'd like to get help from some smartphone technology and try out one of the new features of Nokia Maps 2.0 - namely the explicit pedestrian navigation mode. She agreed and handed over her Nokia E51 for me to preload it with the latest beta and the UK maps. I also stuck a pocket GPS in her jacket and guessed it would see enough of the satellites from there. Here's her Maps 2.0 report.
Do you use GMail or a service like it on the web? Does your email server have an IMAP option? If so, why not set up Messaging on your S60, UIQ or Series 80 smartphone for IMAP access and get pseudo-push email, simply and for free? I investigate what's involved. And how does GMail via IMAP/Messaging compare with GMail via the dedicated Java application?
The SXSW interactive festival (happening right now in the USA) is a busy conference, but Ewan caught a taxi ride with James Pearce, Vice President of Technology for the dotmobi consortium, and asked him about the controversial top level domain for mobile devices, here in AAS podcast 65. Are you convinced about his arguments for .mobi? Comments welcome.
I've been taking a look back and forward at four of the competitors to the Nokia E90. What's it up against in the market for qwerty-keyboarded clamshells? And how does it compare, spec for spec, blow for blow? It's certainly an interesting form factor and one which is apparently increasing in popularity.
Only Rafe and I this time round, here's AAS podcast 64, a.k.a. Insight 16, in which we talk about the new Nokia S60 devices for Vodafone and T-Mobile, the recent announcement of Silverlight Mobile for S60 and the issues surrounding the changes at Symbian Signed - how can the current debacle be resolved?
You may remember the original Space Impact from phones such as the 3310, but now it's back as a full commercial game called Kappa Base. All About N-Gage puts it through its paces in the latest Next Gen N-Gage game review. Is alien zapping as fun now as it was in the 80s and 90s? Click on the link to find out.
You'll remember that we've looked at Epocware's Handy Weather before, giving both the original S60 3rd Edition version and that for UIQ 3 well deserved AAS MegaApp awards. And now they've gone and improved it again, adding weather maps and streamlining the interface. Still a MegaApp? You bet, it's still one of the stars in the Symbian OS firmament - here's my review of Handy Weather version 5.01.
Mitsubishi is to close its loss making mobile handset business with employees being reassigned to other areas of the company. Mistubishi currently makes phones for Japan's NTT DoCoMo FOMA network; the handsets use the MOAP-S (MOAP on Symbian) software platform. Handset shipments to NTT DoCoMo will halt by September. And so we bid goodbye to another Symbian licensee. Read on for more details.
