Following on Symbian's announcement last week, Nokia have also published
plans to establish a research lab in Lausanne and Zurich, in
association with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. This center
will start by looking at pervasive communications, using all the human
senses, user context and interaction with internet services... which
sounds like a mix of Ovi's approach to bringing on board platforms such
as Facebook and MySpae, but also extending the S60 sensor platform
we're expecting to see later in the year.
A second video link for this morning, this time to 'Gadget Show WEB TV', who reviewed Fring, the free VoIP and chat utility over the weekend. Great to see the coverage but the ultimate negative verdict was undoubtedly flavoured by the data speeds and coverage in the single demo area. What about Wi-Fi? What about 3.5G? Comments welcome - how well does Fring work for you?
OK, so they're a trifle basic, but it's a start. Google Mobile Help is the name of a new (official) YouTube channel, with videos helping newcomers to use Google Maps for Mobile and YouTube for mobile. There are four videos to watch at the moment (not counting an old GMail test one), mainly demoed on S60 and UIQ 3 hardware. Worth adding to your YouTube subscriptions list?
N-Gage fans will want to check out NeXtVideo's YouTube channel, as there are videos of almost every upcoming N-Gage title, including Brothers in Arms, Dogz, Midnight Pinball, Worms World Party, FIFA 08, and many more. Well worth watching and all we need now, Nokia, are the actual games to buy. I'm champing at the bit for Pro Series Golf, personally! (via S-W-L)
Oh yes, from this, Smartphones Show 56 onwards, there's both a traditional QVGA version to play and a hi-res VGA version as well. And they each have their own RSS feeds, so you can decide which one to pug into your feed reader or aggregator. Show 56 has News, a show FAQ, a photo tutorial and a brief video review of the Nokia N81 8GB. See below for all the links.
That's User Data Preservation to you and I. This nugget is from a normally reliable industry insider, mik3, over at My-Symbian. We already know that new firmware v20 is coming for the Nokia N95 8GB, bringing screen auto-rotation, but mik3 makes a point of mentioning UDP. I'm guessing that v20 will bring the UDP code, ready so that UDP happens properly for the next firmware update after that. If you see what I mean...
...BUT not for the platform you were expecting. Showing that there's (a tiny bit of) life left in the old S60 2nd Edition platform, here's news of what appears to be a camera-controlled, wireless multiplayer version of Bejewelled - that runs on the likes of the Nokia 6630 and N70. At least there are plans to port it to something more modern.
With Rafe at CTIA, Ewan at Over The Air and others all on holiday, it's time for a little Friday catchup, with some links you may have missed. All-Format Writer is a freeware Java application that can create documents in the various
competing ‘next-generation’ electronic document formats (ODT, DOCX, UOF and PDF) (via The Symbian Blog). Antony Pranata has a great tip for cleanly uninstalling PC Suite under Windows Vista. Al at the Nokia Blog has a great post about creating photos with High Dynamic Range (evening out extremes of light and dark). Finally, the insane(ly great) N82-toting Stavros has addressed the world. Again. Listen and learn!
Nokia have announced the immediate availability of the Nokia Music Store in Ireland (Nokia Press Release) As with the UK store, you're going to need to have Internet Explorer to make full use of the service. To entice you in Nokia are offering a number of vouchers, some 24,000 of them giving up to 10 Euros of music. And everyone gets a free Tom Baxter track.
C-Net's Tom Krazit sat down with Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford a couple of days ago and the resulting interview is now online here, talking about elegant computing, USA market share, Google's Android and the iPhone, among other topics. Recommended reading!
JoikuSpot, the phenomenal little utility that turns your smartphone into a Wi-Fi hotspot for your laptop and other hardware, just got significantly better, with the release of a new beta (1.2) that supports WEP encryption. Previously, your little Wi-Fi hotspot had to be open to allcomers, with predictable results. (via The Symbian Blog)
Having had a bit of a re-jig of some of the attributes in my all-singing, all-dancing interactive smartphone-choosing Grid, I proudly present it to the masses on AAS for approval. And yes, by plugging in different profiles, I've managed to get it to pick everything from Apple iPhone to Nokia E61i. See what it now picks as your best option. Did it pick your current smartphone? Your next intended phone?
A few weeks back, GooSync (online backup host and sync agent into Google) announced support for Tasks, but it couldn't cope with the way S60 3rd Edition bundled to-dos into Calendar. That changed a few minutes ago as a revised Tasks module just went live, handling full S60 to-do synchronisation into GooSync, including categories, descriptions, etc. Seems to work well, though note that it's not available for freebie GooSync users - you need to have plumped for the £20/year Premium service.
To coincide with their UIQ 3.3 announcement, UIQ Technology have released five pretty new themes for UIQ smartphones: UIQ Wave, UIQ Snow, UIQ Lounge, UIQ Black Build and UIQ Chili. Very cool. Isn't it about time we had some new official S60 themes?
