Not directly Symbian-related, but Nokia have just brought out a Macintosh version of their Internet Tablet Video Converter. Are they getting a bit more used to supporting "alternative" operating systems, and when will we see their first desktop Linux app?
Master theme maker PiZero has made all his 'premium' themes available at half price until the end of May. Paying for themes may sound a bit odd when most other themes are free, but having tried some of these, I can testify that they're very high quality, being fast, RAM-efficient and 100% SVG-based, so they'll work on anything. Err.... advert over!
Congrats to Russ Beattie and Mike Rowehl, the guys behind Mowser. It may well have looked dead and buried a few weeks ago, but the service has been bought by the dotMobi consortium. Reporting on Dev.Mobi, James Pearce charts out the use of their new toy, namely to drive Opt-In mobilisation of websites, integrating the Mowser Directory, and of course using the (re)formatting technology.
Juniper Research reckon that the advertising spend to promote mobile services will be in excess of $1 billion dollars for 2008 (reports IT Pro), which leads me to think that the total income from the mobile services must be at least $8-$10 billion. Those are some impressive numbers. The usual culprits are blamed for the increase, including better handsets and more bandwidth.
Well, you certainly can't accuse the Nokia Maps team of rushing things.... Still, the latest (and possibly last) beta of Maps 2.0 is available today for anyone with a S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 device (e.g. the N95), although there's no changelog that I can see. Comments welcome.
Thanks to bery95 for spotting this surprisingly attractive/fun iPhone theme for S60 3rd Edition. I know, I know, I usually hate this sort of thing, but this one has iPhone icons in surprising depth and works well on many levels under S60 (240 by 320 pixel screens, at least).
Papyrus, everybody's favourite S60 Calendar replacement, has been given a big update after a silence of 8 months. v1.4.01 contains a huge list of changes, so go read. The new version is a free update to registered users, naturally. (via Ricky) Here's our review of Papyrus, although with all the changes it's starting to look a bit outdated!
In a move that surprises noone, Nokia's free Location Tagger has just gotten its last ever update. But fret not, because future versions will simply be built into device firmware, which is as it should be, with geotagging working beautifully on the N82, for example. See the Beta Labs report for the news and changelog.
OK, so the N96 itself is a late prototype and some bits aren't working yet, but Cellulare Magazine (in Italy) have completed a ten minute video preview, thankfully in English, showing just about everything you need to know about this upcoming S60 flagship. Embedded below and well worth a watch!
MoCoNews is running an interview with Serena Glover from Nokia, where she talks on the main points of Ovi, including the rather high level 'what is it?' to the more important 'how are you going to make money?'
Psiloc Connect looks to be, as Symbian In Motion says, 'the app we've all been waiting for'. Creating its own unique access point, this then (behind the scenes) tries all your valid Wi-Fi access points and then (optionally) presses on down towards 3G/GPRS/EDGE etc. For much more on Psiloc Connect, you might as well start with SIM's write up.
Text entry using only a d-pad? I wouldn't have thought this was possible, but Ricky has been playing with Kannuu and insists it works well. Game changer or novelty - comments welcome!
The official N-Gage site's installation instructions seem to concentrate on installing the N-Gage application using a PC. However, there is a much quicker and simpler alternative which lets you install the N-Gage app directly onto your phone through its web browser. Click on the headline of this news item for more details...