Ewan interviews Chia-Lin Simmons from Audible about their plans for spoken word audio content in the Symbian world. Here's the interview. Summary: all very polished, but as with ROK TV, you might want to wait for unlimited GPRS tariffs before subscribing.
Steve is tickled by the latest trends in the mobile device industry towards qwerty keyboards. He just knew the rest of the world would come round in the end... Read on...
The quarterly figures from Symbian, Ltd have ben released today and show a steady growth in pretty much every area. 8.54 million Symbian handsets shipped in Q3 of 2005, 60 different Symbian powered devices, 4500 applications available and 11 licencees developing handsets. But the headline number everyone should start paying attention to is the installed user base, now standing at 48 million Symbian OS users. Which is probably a number the Microsoft Windows team would love to be closer to than an order of magnitude.
As noted by SymbianOne it looks like the Series 60 brand may bet getting a face lift. Series60.com is showing off this new brand, with a new logo, and references to S60. There is a new bolder colour scheme (very bold compared to the old blue highlights). The Series60.com website can now also be reached via S60.com.
According to the latest (Q3) figures from Canalys, Nokia shipped over seven million Series 60 and Series 80 smartphones in the recently finished quarter, with over half the worldwide PDA/Smartphone market. Sales of standalone PDAs declined markedly again and Sony Ericsson's nowhere to be seen, though that should change when the P990 starts to become available.
Mobile Innovation, a leading technology consultant and integrator for the Symbian OS, has been acquired by Macromedia. Mobile Innovation have been directly or indirectly involved with many of the Series 60, Series 90 and UIQ smartphones currently on the market.
UIQ has announced the availability of the first public software development kit (SDK) for UIQ 3. This announcement conincides with Sony Ericsson's announcement of the P990 (which will be the first UIQ 3 phone to the market). A public download will be available on October 26th, but the first 500 people to sign up for UIQ's new development program, at UIQ booth at the Smartpone Show, will obtain a preview copy.
In a 'belt and braces' move, Nokia has signed a licensing deal with Symantec to preload the latter's anti-virus software onto (unspecified) future smartphones. Read more...
There's a huge number of exhibitors at The Smartphone Show (opening a week today), so rather than list them all, we've picked out a few highlights for you to think about visiting - including the All About Symbian team who'll be in The Media Zone.
According to the latest Canalys report EMEA smartphone sales have increased by 170% in the last year and now accounts for 7.5% of all mobiles sales. Series 60 dominates with just under 80% of the market share with Series 80 taking another 13%. UIQ has 4% with Palm, Blackberry and Microsoft taking 5% between them.
F-Secure are reporting, via their weblog, that they have discovered a new Trojan targeting Series 60 phones. The Tojan deletes key system files (which will prevent some phone restarting) and write a random password to the MMC (so you can not access data on the MMC). The Trojan pretends to be a pirated copy application (InstantSIS). As F-Secure state: 'Cardblock.A is not a threat to people who don't use pirate copied software'.
One of the more popular applications on both the online stores and bundled with the device is Quickoffice. Craig Senick has been with the product for many years, and All About Symbian sat down with him to find out more about the Office Suite.
