According to the Finnish business newspaper Kauppalehti, Nokia's Chief Financial Officer said Nokia is considering manufacturing Linux-based mobile phones. The article quotes Rick Simonson, Nokia's Chief Financial Officer, as saying "we are definitely moving in the direction (of Linux-based phones)" at a seminar in Boston run by JP Morgan Chase. There was no further detail though, and apparently Simonson refused to be drawn on which kind of Linux would be used. Nokia already makes the Linux-based N800 and N810 internet tablets, which use Nokia's own version of Linux called Maemo, but current tablets have no telephony ability.
A beta version of eReader.com's eBook software is now available for S60 3rd Edition. eReader is a long standing eBook store which provides some of the current best sellers in eBook form, protected via its own form of DRM. They provides a version of their reader for multiple platforms. However a few years ago they seemed to lose interest in support Symbian OS handsets, but under the new ownership of Fictionwise this seems to be changing.
Opera has announced the availability of the Opera Widgets SDK. The SDK allows the development of cross device and cross platform applications using standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, DOM, Javascript). Opera Widgets can run, assuming the presence of the Opera browser (9.5), on a PC, mobile phones (e.g. UIQ 3.3 phones), game consoles (Wii) and TVs. Opera Widgets is the widget platform that will be used by future UIQ devices.
Symbian today publish its first set of 2008 results, which showed shipments of 18.5 million devices in Q1, a year on year increase of 16.5%, a figure which suggests a flattening of device shipments. This takes total Symbian OS device shipments to 206 million. There was also a 92% growth in consultancy service revenue to £4.8 million driven demand for services from 'a broader and deeper range of customer mobile phone products in the pipeline'.
I reported last week that GooSync was testing Contacts sync with GMail Contacts - it just came out of beta and now anyone with a GooSync Premium account can do the same contact sync. Do note some of the caveats from my original article though.
How good were the good old days? Over on the ‘Obstacles can Kill’ blog, Eric has put away his N95 8GB and switched to his old N-Gage QD for 24 hours to see just how well it would compare to today’s feature packed phones. The result is mixed; while the gaming experience was still unsurpassed, the improvements in the S60 interface render the QD’s v1 interface lacking massive number of tricks and tweaks he has come to rely on.
Anathema, over on the Vodafone Betavine site, has a bare bones Last.FM client for S60 devices. Rather than let Last.FM know which tracks you have played on your phone (so that Last.FM can use these to build up a profile of what you like), blastfm allows you to stream music from Last.FM, including a stream of music that Last.FM thinks you will like. I’ve been waiting for the ability to do this on my phone for some time.
Nokia has released another new 'v200' software update for the E90 Communicator, available now for unlocked devices on Nokia Software Update. The new version is v210.34.75 and this installed fine on my E90 using NSU [under Windows Vista in XP SP2 compatibility mode, but still...] More below...
Nimbuzz, the all-in-one communication software which we mentioned a few weeks ago, has now formally launched. In addition to its own network, Nimbuzz supports instant messaging and voice calls for Skype, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM and Jabber. Recent additions include support for true VoIP when making voice calls on S60 devices. The functionality is used when you use NimBuzz to make a voice call to one of your IM contacts. Read on for screens and more.
Just a short note that we've heard that Nokia Software Update will be down for 24 hours, as from 19:00 GMT tomorrow (Saturday). Presumably it's something to do with fixing Windows Vista compatibility, let's hope for a problem free solution on Monday!
With the concept of over-the-air syncing hotter than ever (e.g. GooSync), thanks to the guys at SMS Text News for the scoop that Vodafone just bought Zyb, another of the top SyncML hosts on the 'net. Keeping your PIM data in the 'cloud' is obviously something Vodafone now gets and for which it has got plans. Good news for everybody.
Around a year ago, I first reviewed the Nokia E90 Communicator. I was quite positive though others in the industry (famously) weren't. Amazingly, it's still picking up first time reviewers today in 2008, with Ricky Cadden getting his first hands-on this week, in his regular video podcast (MP4 link). He's generally blown away but misses support for USA 3G frequencies and misses some of the 'Nseries-only' extras from his N95.
