With the MWC and now GDC events under our belt, Ewan Spence draws from all the clues that Nokia has been dropping and comes up with a connected, converged epiphany into the future of gaming. The unification of smartphone functions, social networking and gaming is just around the corner, perhaps. Personally, I can't see any real showstoppers.
Nokia is calling on mobile developers with new ideas to take part in its Mobile Games Innovation Challenge, and at least one winning game will be published by Nokia on its new N-Gage platform (which is based on S60 3rd Edition). Entries will be accepted from the 3rd of April 2008, so if you're interested it might be worth starting work now. Established developers and publishers can already apply to publish commercially on the platform, or find out more on the N-Gage developer site.
Popcap Games (or the online gaming equivalent of crack cocaine) have inked an agreement with Nokia to bring a number of their titles to mobile, and to use the SNAP mobile platform to provide multi-player support for the Java based titles. In rough terms, SNAP is similar to the N-Gage Arena, but primarily for J2ME applications, and it can also be run by a network provider as their own gaming portal (eg YourNetwork Gaming Portal, SNAP powered), which should make the networks as happy as the gamers.
Ewan continues to ponder on the ramifications of Mobile World Congress. How will the next year or so pan out and who will be the winners and losers? More importantly, in which direction is the smartphone industry heading?
Ahead of our device previews here are a number of image galleries, with the usual commentary, of the 8 Symbian OS powered devices which were announced last week at Mobile World Congress 2008. The Nokia N96 (high end Nseries), Nokia N78 (entry level Nseries), Nokia 6210 (navigation focused), Nokia 6220 (mid tier all rounder), Sony Ericsson G700 and G900 (the first mid tier UIQ 3 phones), Samsung G810 (camera focused high end slider) and LG KT610 (mid tier QWERTY clamshell).
In All About Symbian Insight #13 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss their first impressions of Mobile World Congress 2008. Rafe gives his impressions from the show floor while Steve and Ewan pick out their highlights from the various announcements and cover a variety of news from last week.
Up to 20% of mobile users are listening to music on their mobile. That's the findings of the latest M:Metrics report (via SMS Text News). This sits very nicely with the numbers Nokia have reported for sage of their Music Store - 20% of eligible users have registered with the store. Nokia also report that 25% of that number (ie 5% of the total) use the on-device client; a significant improvement on the 1.1% that M:Metrics report downloading direct to the device.
Playyou, the social gaming network that lets you build your own games (Hmmm, why does that sound familiar) has a nice Q&A on their blog with Kars Alfrink, who does consulting work with them. Partly it's to highlight his upcoming talk at the Games Developer Conference on Casual Social Gaming, but also about Playyoo's Games Creator software.
Service after service, app after app, solutions keep appearing to offer media streaming (from our own hard disks or from hosted servers) over the air. But what happens when the masses start doing this and the bandwidth runs out? Is putting all our music online really the best solution? When it comes to media that's truly mobile, you can't beat the old school approach, I reckon....
Mobile World Congress 2008 certainly hasn't been a washout - there have been announcements right, left and centre that are definitely of interest. But there haven't been any slam dunk launches that have got the whole show floor talking, argues Ewan. For those, you'll have to wait until MWC 2009...
Symbian chose to wait until MWC before releasing their own Q4 results for 2007 and the full press release is quoted below. There's also a video webcast to stream if you want to see Symbian's CEO and CFO go through the numbers in person. Standout highlights include the fact that Symbian OS now powers around 7% of all phones being sold worldwide (up from 5%), with just over 22 million Symbian OS-powered smartphones shipped in Q4/2007.
And here's the mobile advertising announcement, Nokia Media Network, a 'premiere mobile advertising network' (their phrase), was announced at MWC. This appears to be the re-branding of the Enpocket advertising company the Finnish company purchased on October 2007, allowing companies to place advertising on Operator and Mobile Publisher pages.
What kind of crazy tech industry do we have where companies make work for themselves at the same time as making customers unhappy? And you can bet that the mobile industry is the worst offender of all. Read on for a few experiences, thoughts and links.
Fed up with announcements about "leveraging the Web 2.0 growth cycle to grow market share in the YouTube generation"? Ewan's a little sceptical about some of the press releases that get issued at this time of the industry year, and I don't blame him. What are we looking for from the hardware and software companies and what are we dreading seeing?
Ah yes, I always leap upon new official figures from Canalys - kind of like tuning into radio chart shows to find out which song is 'number 1'. 118 million smartphones were sold across the world in 2007, but who were the winners and losers? Read on to find out.
