Nokia have announced a partnership with Sony BMG, allowing their catalogue
of titles to be available with the Comes with Music program, due to be
available in the second half of 2008. Along with Universal, Nokia now have two of the 'big four' music labels in the program. EMI and Warner are still absent, although Nokia makes a point of stressing that they are still 'in discussion' with many other international labels.
These N-Gage promotions seem to be appearing thick and fast! This one is very simple and easy to enter though: just play any Gameloft N-Gage game (Asphalt 3, Brain Challenge, Block Breaker Deluxe) on your N-Gage phone (currently N81, N82, N95 and variants) and upload at least one score to the Arena before the 18th of May 2008. Everyone who does this is automatically entered into a draw for a range of prizes.
Nokia just announced that their Music Store is now available in Australia. Cool. But there's a big music-related announcement in London tomorrow (Tuesday) - so there's much more to come. I'm betting on the release of a new PC music client, as demoed at Go:Play. Any takers for that bet?
Over the weekend, Google released a cute plug-in for Firefox users called "Google Send To Phone."
Highlighting any text in your web browser, and then click the phone
icon on the toolbar to send the text to your phone as an SMS. One
caveat, it's for US based phones only.
Nokia are giving away FIFA08 for N-Gage-compatible phones absolutely free to a limited number of people in Europe (we don't know the exact figure but it's in the thousands at least). It's on a first-come-first-served basis, so the quicker you act the more likely you are to get the game free. The most reliable way of getting the game free is to install the FIFA08 demo directly on your phone in the N-Gage application, then go to the special N-Gage Play site (play.n-gage.com) on your computer's browser to get the activation link sent to your N-Gage phone as a text message. When the message arrives, just click on its link to activate the game. UPDATE:If you couldn't get it activated on the mobile site, try again through the PC site!(via Symbian Web Blog)
The official N-Gage blog has announced that third party publisher Gameloft will be answering your questions at a future event. You can submit the questions by posting in the reply section of this N-Gage blog post. Questions can cover anything, including their current games and future plans for supporting N-Gage, or you can ask about other mobile platforms as well.
OK, so the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 isn't Symbian OS-based, but it's a form factor that's got a lot of people interesed from all corners of the smartphone world. And, as it's Friday, here's a little off-topic link to WMexperts' initial review of the X1 prototype. Plenty of good information here, plus some good comments and extra Q&A at the end too. (via IntoMobile)
One for the paranoid this Friday, as the O'Reilly Radar reports that the A5 Hardware Project will be releasing a web service to crack the GSM A5/1 Encryption Protocol. Pick up a radio receiver (around $700) and the potential is there to crack and listen to a call while it is in progress.
With Mowser's impending demise, a lot of discussion has been centred this week on the future of the mobile web. Ewan reckons that it's stronger than ever and has produced a rundown of his Top 10 mobile web sites as evidence. What's especially interesting is that some of these m.versions are more useful than either the full desktop-designed site or the service's own downloadable client. Comments welcome: what other m.sites have you found that are also worthy of a mention?
In Smartphones Show 57, I challenge Stavros at Position Art (unsuccessfully - but then he is a genius), I cover Google's native S60 Search utility and there's an in-depth video review of the Samsung i550 business smartphone. Here's the main Smartphones Show 57 page, the high res YouTube version, and the QVGA (low res) and VGA (high res) RSS feeds.
Nokia has released official figures for Q1, 2008, revealing growth in 'Devices and Services' of 50%, year on year, net sales up 35%, overall phone market share of 39%, smartphones sales up 24% to 14.6 million in the quarter, with 10 million Nseries handsets and 2 million Eseries. Geographically, unsurprisingly, market share was down in North America, static(ish) in Europe and growing in emerging markets (e.g. China). Here's the full Nokia statement, tables and their own analysis.
Never mind small local trials of DVB-H mobile TV, never mind twiddling with cell towers, the Americans just love doing things bigger than the rest of us. Yesterday they launched a huge satellite dedicated to covering the whole of the USA with DVB-SH signals, reports PhoneMag. This is a satellite-friendly (higher frequency), extended version of DVB-H, the new Euro and (arguably) worldwide mobile TV standard. See also DVB-SH at Wikipedia. So look for DVB-SH compatibility in the next generation of smartphones.
Now, why can't we have a huge European satellite to serve the same purpose?
British based Mippin are happy bunnies today, with Red Herring
labelling them as one of 100 Top Tech Start-ups in Europe. Nice to see
their service get the recognition it deserves after six months of
public availability.
As I found out recently when doing my review of Samsung's i550, a lot of the success of S60 and the Nseries in particular is down to the existence of all Nokia's add-on utilities and applications. Many of which came through Nokia Beta Labs - which, Tommi informs us, is 1 today - so Happy Birthday!
Many readers will be familiar with Mowser, the content adaptation engine that made making mobile-friendly URLs from traditional web sites fairly easy. It seems that Mowser's main developer has admitted commercial defeat, saying that there will be no more development of Mowser and that it 'could disappear at any time'. Great shame.