Over on the Ovi Daily App Blog Ewan has been reviewing Herocraft's Robo. Robo is an action puzzler that sees you use logic the guide a robot around a landscape of boulders, mirrors and lasers; as Ewan notes this is a variation on the classic Sokobahn game. Robo is available for the N8, C7, C6-01 and E7; it can be downloaded for £1.50 from Ovi Store.
Just a couple of weekend links of interest. The Ovi Store publishing team has announced that application update notifications are coming this week in an update of its Ovi Store client, v2.8, initially for Symbian^3 phones only. Quote below, we'll cover this more when v2.8 actually appears. In other news, the folks at phoneArena have pitted the Nokia N8's camera against those in the LG Optimus 2X, the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S II. Suffice it to say that the N8's unit acquits itself very well, but kudos to the feature compiler for the work that's gone into this detailed comparison.
Kevin Fury, over on his blog, has some interesting thoughts on what Microsoft are up to in the mobile space. Building blocks such as the Windows Phone OS, Nokia's hardware and manufacturing expertise, the voice and IM handling of Skype, what does it add up to? The supposition (also echoed in part by Dave Winer) is that the major technology firms are gearing up for a confrontation with the mobile carrier networks.
Following on from the IDC figures earlier this month, we now have Gartner's analysis and considered opinions, focussing on mobile operating systems and ecosystems, summarised and quoted below. Symbian-powered shipments were indeed now behind Android, but still retained 27% of the entire new smartphone market.
As promised, Angry Birds Rio has received a third episode to provide more fun fowl physics and extra game-play for those who've purchased the movie-tie in expansion game. Beach Volley takes place on the Copacabana Beach, and as well as the Marmosets replacing the Green Pigs, you've got new birds to throw, in the shape of Blu and Jewel.
Nimbuzz may not now have any Skype integration, but it's relentless in adding every other IM feature under the sun. Version 3 arrived last November, bringing a truck load of improvements, and we now have v3.01 bringing another "9 awesome reasons" to upgrade, including better call quality, custom wallpapers and an avatar gallery.
Microsoft today announced plans to acquire Skype, the Internet communications company, for US $8.5 billion. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of both companies and, pending regulatory approval, is expected to be completed later this year. The acquisition sets the scene for closer integration between Skype and Microsoft products, including Windows Phone. Given Microsoft and Nokia's recent tie up, it seems likely that future Nokia products may ship with Skype integration out of the box.
You've got to envy Mike Macias. Like many of us he has a Nokia N8 - but he also works in Long Beach, California, with some fabulous good weather and also the opportunity to photograph things on a huge scale. Boats, cranes.... and sunrises. Here he documents trying to capture the latter especially, though look back in his Flickr stream if you get a moment and you'll see plenty of other fine N8 camera phone photography. The downside of Mike's job? He often has to work some rather odd hours!
IDC has released its set of smartphone shipment figures for Q1 2011. They show that just under 100 million smartphones were sold last quarter. Nokia led the way with 24.2 million smartphones, followed by Apple (18.7m), RIM (13.9m), Samsung (10.8m) and HTC (8.9m). All manufacturers had increased shipments year on year, but by widely varying amounts. Nokia was the weakest (+12%), with RIM (+31%), Apple (+114%), HTC (+229%) and Samsung (+350%) all showing stronger growth.
Our very own Ewan Spence has been moonlighting over at the Ovi Daily App blog, here producing a review of Grim Joggers, the latest glossy take on the 'running' genre of game, here for Symbian^3 phones. He pronounces it "well programmed", "reactive" and "great fun". Expect another ODA guest review from Ewan later this month.
Nokia's Chairman, Jorma Ollila, is to step down next year, reports Reuters. At Nokia's Annual General Meeting, held yesterday, Ollila, confirming what he said last September, announced that he would stand down in 2012 and that the search for his sucessor has already started. Ollia was CEO of Nokia from 1992-2006 and became the Chairman in 1999. He recently oversaw the appointment of Stephen Elop as the new CEO of Nokia, replacing Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.
Following on from last week here is the second episode of the 361 Degrees podcast. This is a podcast all about mobile technology, created by Ben Smith of Wireless Worker and co-hosted by Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review and Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian. The second episode covers the recent Connected Creativity event, which explored some of the themes around the future of television and media consumption.
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer appeared on stage at RIM's BlackBerry World to announce a partnership between the two companies to bring Bing services to Blackberry devices. Bing Search will be deeply integrated into the platform and Bing Maps will become the default mapping service. In part, this will make BlackBerry device a de facto part of the Microsoft-Nokia location services ecosystem.
Coming from S60 5th Edition's touchscreen keyboard, which had no intellgence whatsoever, the capacitive/predictive/correcting keyboard in Symbian^3 seems like a revelation, even if there's no multitouch yet and even if some of the defaults are wrong out of the box. But it's interesting to note that there's a still a way to go, as evidenced by this terrifically interesting piece on the team behind the intelligent virtual keyboard in Windows Phone 7. Can some of the lessons learned here help the team tasked with improving the Symbian virtual keyboard?
As a big fan of the long running Desert Island Discs radio programme, I was interested to see that its entire archive is now up for grabs in smartphone-friendly form on the Web, with over 500 of the shows fully downloadable in MP3 form. Thousands of guests, tens of thousands of music picks and a huge amount of auto-biographical chat, all in MP3 form. Screens and links below. Download and enjoy.
