I'd been bending the ears of Nokia's Eseries team for ages about signing up with WOM World to handle buzz about their products and to manage triallist programs. And now it's happened, although my nagging was probably only a small part of the process(!) Here's the new, generic WOM/Nokia home page for you to keep track of via RSS. There will probably be an official statement along soon, too, hopefully with the announcement and trial-availability of at least one new Eseries smartphone.
Without wishing to harp on about the Nokia N93 too much(!), it was interesting to see the N93 get equal 'billing' with the N81 and N95 8GB in the title screen of Nokia's Mobile Games Innovation Challenge. Graphic proof below the break. I wonder if this actually means something? After all, we know that N-Gage support for the N93 is on the way...
To promote N-Gage, Nokia has put up a new interactive gaming site - Get out and Play. The loading screen itself is Breakout, there's a film based on Snake and you can then play Breakout with real people as blocks/paddle/ball. Hmmm.... Comments welcome. (Tzer2 adds: The film is made entirely in stop-motion without any special effects, using 1000 extras to make up the snake at its largest. Everything in the film existed in real life, there's no CGI at all.)
Craig Loxton's Tech Blog is worth keeping an eye on, partly because he's in the middle of a transition from the Nokia E90 to the E51, and partly because he's just discovered an unofficial way to get Blackberry Connect working on the E51 - and it's a lot, lot faster.
Samsung has shown off a new S60 3rd Edition smartphone at the Tele-Vision fair in Nieuwegein. The L870 is a quad-band
slider with GPRS and UMTS support, FM radio, 3 megapixel camera and USB 2.0. The L870 is, notably, only 13.5mm thick, thin for a slider smartphone. Picture below.
With the black Nokia N82 arriving in shops and with the titanium version gaining more and more fans, you'll be hearing quite a bit more about this smartphone in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, Vaibhav Sharma is a pretty well-respected member of the Symbian community - in these two good articles he looks at the N82's build quality and feel and its overall usability and performance.
You know how you've always told your other half that your smartphone is better than her/his pen and paper? Well, with PiZero' latest - Paper, your smartphone can even ape the paper/highlighter look. While I'm here, if anyone's been eyeing up the latest Macs with a tinge of tech-lust, check out this Leopard theme for S60. And Giambi (don't tell me - yet another Italian theme genius?)'s WARM series of SVG themes for S60 are stunning too.
Smartphones may have evolved since the first Nokia Communicator, but
what made that phone such a success was the telnet client - system
admins could fix their IT infrastructure from anywhere. Smartphones
evolve, but managing your IT from the handset is still a worthy goal,
as Simon Bisson finds out over at IT Pro.
...Although not by me (sob). I've got my own thoughts and opinions, which will have to wait until the black N82 arrives at AAS towers. Until then, kudos to Daniel from Sweden, who has unboxed (seemingly) the very first black N82 out in real world shops. Some photos below, plus a link.
You may recall some months ago that the instant social messaging service Jaiku was bought and absorbed into the bosom of Google... and promptly went into hibernation. Well with spring on the way, boss Jyri Engestrom has blogged that Jaiku will rise again under the new Google App Engine. It's still being developed, but watch this space.
In the interests of public knowledge, I can't resist linking to this news story, reporting that (confirming customers' suspicions when using 3.5G-capable Nokia smartphones) the UK network O2 have been artificially limiting 3G and HSDPA connections to a meagre 128kbps, slower than EDGE. Any correlation between this observation and the fact that O2 are the same exclusive promoter of the EDGE-only Apple iPhone in the UK is entirely a figment of your imagination, surely?
Mobile Content Portal Mippin continues to launch new features for its
user base, and today sees the highly inventive 'Free Games' section of
the site launched. With a couple of hundred games (supplied by
Greystripe) to be rotated on a regular basis, Mippin is giving users
another sticky reason to use the site.
Got an idea for a game? Then one idea to getting it published could be Nokia's Mobile Games Initiative Challenge. Announced today, it offers a 70,000 Euro prize fund, and a pre-production contract with Nokia publishing. More details on the dedicated web site.
