If you thought that Symbian Signed was too many hoops to jump through to get your game onto a UK handset, just wait till the British Board of Film Classification gets involved (BBC News and other online sources). Released later today, the Byron report will recommend that any video game will be forced to carry cinema style classification (currently only games depicting sex or gross violence are certified).
Ofcom has cleared the use of certain mobile phone based services in flying aircraft, reports the BBC. This isn't the end of the story, as other regulatory bodies (such as the UK's Civil Aviation Authority) will also need to give clearance. In my view, we can expect to see picocell enabled aircraft offer a roaming service (which will allow the Airlines to generate revenue from in-flight calls), and as per existing flight regulations, the service will be switched off below 10,000 feet.
Launched in October 2007, Mippin has managed to not only get over the initial ‘what is this service?’ that every Web 2.0 property has to deal with, but has continued to gain users and presence in its first six months. I caught up with VP of Product Management Prashant Agarwal at the recent SXSW Interactive festival, where he demoed two of Mippin’s latest features to me – Mippin Video and Mippin Today.
In Insight #18 (AAS Podcast 67) Rafe, Ewan and Steve talk about this week's news (N-Gage First Access closing and Comes with Music). Rafe and Steve discuss their first impressions of the Samsung SGH-i450 and Samsung SGH-i550 (S60 phones) and afterwards Ewan talks about how he recorded and broadcast video on his trip to the USA.
Yep, it's that time of the week. Your generic mobile reading is over at Situational Marketing - Carnival of the Mobilists 116.
The UK High Court has over-ruled a decision by the UK Intellectual Property Office in regards to their application for a patent for their method of indexing library functions (reports IT Pro). The UK-IPO had turned down this application, although the European Patent Office had granted it (the UK office does not recognise patents which are 'nothing more than a computer program,' where Europe does), hence their appeal to the High Court. While the case is concluded, the UK-IPO office has indicated that it will appeal the judgement.
New mobile site GoMo News is going to be making a historical splash at the upcoming CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas - they'll be based in a classic Airstream Bus at the Hard Rock Cafe; with tech demos, and live interviews on site and streamed over the internet. More at www.gomonews.com, and of course we'll be taking a good look at CTIA here on All About Symbian as well!
And now on AAS, some facts, numbers and percentages from over the Easter Weekend. One in three mobiles will be smart in five years times, it is one in ten today (ABI Research); Nokia continues to rule the mobile web browser as their webcore based browser takes 0.25% of the total global browser market, the much trumpeted iPhone manages 0.06%) (Statcounter); and staying with the Finns, Nokia's growth in the US market for 2008 will have the lions share, 70%, made up of replacement sales, a slight increase on last year (Reuters).
Dubbed the 'poor man's N95', how does the budget Samsung i450 stack up? Pretty well for the price, actually. Rafe'll have an in-depth textual review here soon, but in the meantime I've done a video review in Smartphones Show 55, out today. There's also iPhone AppStore/Download! chat from AAS regular Matt Radford and a video version of my push GMail walkthrough.
Thanks to Ricky Cadden for pointing us towards the brand new beta of OwnSkin's Professional Theme Creator. It's a 100% online theme creation application for S60 smartphones, i.e. no messing around with Java tools or having to install an SDK. Be patient while it's loading up, it'll take a minute or so to load into your desktop browser but the end result's well worth it. Finished themes can be shared directly or simply downloaded as SIS files for your device.
Will the incredibly popular Y-Browser file manager ever get to the big 1.0? Somehow I doubt it, but in the meantime note that Y-Browser's now up to v0.88, released yesterday, with tweaked design, bug fixes (especially to help SP2 compatibility), menu shortcut accelerators, wildcard file selection, file association settings added, plus a proper plug-in manager. It's all a (fabulous and) free download over at DrJukka.
Officially, the recent N-Gage beta testing phase (aka "First Access") was only open to N81 owners. However, some people managed to find unofficial ways for other phones to take part as well. In recognition of this, the beta test feedback survey has been opened up to non-N81 owners as well, which means they'll also get a free copy of Mile High Pinball when it's released.
EMI has confirmed it's in talks with Nokia to offer its portfolio of songs as part of the upcoming "Comes with Music" program, scheduled to become available later this year with selected devices. The world's largest music label, Universal, signed up for the program last December. (via IntoMobile)
Yup, I'm still maintaining my 'No Nags' lists of freeware over at 3-Lib - I've been tweaking my freeware list for all UIQ 3 smartphones (e.g. Sony Ericsson M600, P1i) - can you help to add to it? Anything I've missed out?
Google is seeing a massive increase in mobile internet devices using their services (reports Reuters). And while the obvious answer is 'people are using the web on their phones!' I don't think that's the case. More like Google has signed enough deals for search plug-ins and 'go on, set Google as the browsers default homepage' that they are grabbing a bigger share of existing traffic.
