Carnival 111
For your weekly dose of generic mobile writing, you'll find it over at Vision Mobile. Worth checking out over a cup of tea or coffee....
Recent News - Links of Interest - Page 115
6110 Navigators fall foul of reg key screwup
It seems that some firmwares for the Nokia 6110 Navigator have a major issue with the core navigation function and that Nokia are recalling some handsets (those that are branded) and fixing others with firmware updates. See the comments below for more info, it's a licensing screwup... (via IntoMobile)
It's Like We're Waiting For A New Games Console
MoCo News is carrying a number of reports from the Games Developer Confernece in San Francisco, including this keynote from Gameloft's CEO Michael Guillemot. With news that there was no Christmas spike in mobile game sales, he compared the current market to that of the end of life of a console - which should promise an upturn in 2008 as new hardware, techniques and greater public visibility will help drive awareness and (hopefully) sales.
N-Gage News Flood!
If you haven't already, do check out All About N-Gage today as we have a huge wave of news about Nokia's S60 gaming platform. Perhaps most interesting of all is a leaked video of the upcoming Creebies game, a first party title exclusive to N-Gage which seems to be a bizarre mixture of (fluff)Friends, the Sims and Animal Crossing. Also appearing is a "Making Of" video for the N-Gage-exclusive 3D fighting game ONE.
Thoughts From The BBC on a Mobile MWC
While the usual web suspects had their tricks ready for covering last week's MWC, the BBC's Technology team of Darren Walters (back at base) and Rory Cellan-Jones (on site reporter) were happily posting away on their BBC blog using an N95 and the latest mobile software tools (such as Shozu) Darren and Rory's thoughts are here and here respectively. And while you read that, I think I need to get a big "Isn't that demarcation?" sticker for the Camera Crew.
Why S60's Touch demo DIDN'T suck...
To be filed under 'editorials that I was about to write but someone else beat me to it', Ricky Cadden (moonlighting over at SMS Text News) has issued a few pithy retorts to criticism that the S60 Touch demo at MWC was lame. I completely agree with your points, Ricky, I'd much rather see S60 have touch added as an extra than see a whole new iPhone-wannabe interface.
1000 Pirate Downloads Is Only Losing One Legal Purchase
Gamasutra has a fascinating editorial by Russell Carroll, from Reflexive Games, talking about the amount of piracy in casual games and what measures have proven effective. The scary number is that piracy runs at up to 92% for their titles, and rather than one pirate copy equals one lost sales, Reflexive found that they had to stop one thousand pirate downloads to gain one extra sale.
It All Sounds LIke Noise To Me (Here Comes Dolby)
Stefan points out the announcement of Dolby Mobile at Mobile World Congress, an audio process to create "rich vibrant surround sound" on a mobile device. It sounds remarkably like a repackaging of Dolby technology that was displayed at CES 2006, but it's nice to see the audio names reaching out to mobile (and putting out a 'we're here in the mobile space' press release into the bargain).
Designing for the E90...
Glad to see the Nokia E90 is not totally forgotten. There's now an official guide (warning: PDF link) to tweaking an S60 application's UI to work effectively on the 800 pixel wide screen of the Communicator. Shows it's not as simple as setting screen width to a bigger number, anyway!
N78 and N96 hands-on - best so far
While Rafe's still emboiled in the hustle and bustle of MWC, many others have managed to get out their thoughts on Nokia's two top end Nseries smartphones. The best of these is Vaibhav Sharma's, well photographed and plenty of insights for both the N78 and the N96.
Ovi Share demoed
Before you get too discouraged by Ewan's 'sharing' analysis(!), here's a nice (Flash) demonstration of what can be achieved by Ovi's Share (/Twango) - working on the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words, the slideshow is equivalent to a small book...
S60 Touch UI coming along nicely?
Below the break, there's an interesting video demo of some of the features in the upcoming S60 Touch UI, showing standby screen shortcuts, list scrolling and explaining touch interaction in Web. Good to see so much emphasis is being placed on consistency with existing the S60 3rd Edition platform, too...
Carnival Of the Mobilists - Weekly News Links
The week leading up to Mobile World Congress saw a number of good stories and topics discussed on mobile websites, and as usual the roving Carnival of Mobilists has linked through to a number of them. Hosted this week by Mobile Messaging 2.0, issue #110 previews MWC; asks how open does 'Open' have to be; deploying J2ME apps in America; and a number of others
Nokia Maps 2.0 beta formally available
[updated post] Yep, v2.0 is now out, at http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/maps/ - thanks, guys, we got to a working URL in the end(!) It's strictly a beta release but should work well on any FP1 phone (e.g. N95, N82, E90, E51, etc.) Some of the new features (e.g. traffic) may not work yet, either.
Bookmarking the Nseries virtual event
If you want to follow Nokia's Nseries launches (two devices are expected), bookmark their dedicated Tangler page, with video and news throughout tomorrow (Mon). Note also that there are probably going to be Nokia Eseries launches, plus possible devices from Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Motorola - we'll bring you the news as it happens.
