File this one under 'Cool, but very early days', Nokia Beta Labs has released 'PC Phone', a Firefox extension for your PC that gives you access to your S60 smartphone and its calling, messaging and contacts functions. Comments welcome on what this might eventually turn into!
Nokia recently released a press release about a report it had comissioned, 'A Glimpse of the Next Episode' which talked about the future of entertainment. The main trend identified was the coming of 'Circular Entertainment' (content created, edited and shared within a peer community rather than traditional media sources). Nokia have now released a number of videos featuring discussion around some of the key areas of the report. Read on for more and to view the videos.
Nokia Research Centre has made available, as a technology demonstrator, Activity Monitor for the Nokia N95 and N95 8GB. It uses the accelerometer built into the phone to count the number of steps you take in a given period of time. It then uses the collected data to display various statistics including energy consumed, steps taken and distance travelled. Activity monitor is therefore best thought of as an intelligent 'super' pedometer.
Now that Adobe's Flash Lite 3 has been 'released', ways of accessing YouTube on a smartphone are starting to leak out. Following a really convoluted method, there's been the commercial demo of Mobitubia (mini-site and 9 minute brand new video with appallingly funny English!), and now RotateMe wizard Samir brings us FLVPlayer - although it's currently hard wired to a few test videos and needs further development. Throw in an updated version of Web and it can't be long until the Holy Grail becomes possible, surely?
Milestones passing and arriving on the Smartphones Show. It passed the half a million viewings mark a few weeks ago, and is approaching its own half century, with Show 49 going live today, in the last show of 2007. This programme has a look at some smartphone bargains, an overview of the HTC Touch and Touch Dual, plus a review of all the add-on keyboard utilities, a demo of using a S60 smartphone as a wireless modem for your laptop and a brief look ahead to N-Gage.
Yes, yes, it's just another 'news headlines and content' reader, but Nokia do seem to have some high profile content partners for this free venture, so worth giving Channels a try. Of note is that Channels auto-rotates the screen if relevant, i.e. it's accelerometer-aware on the likes of the N95 and N82 - as the blog entry notes , 'this is a sign of things to come'.
The Italians may have a few things that aren't exactly perfect in their economy, but boy do they have style. Following on from my rave write up of PiZero, here's your theme for today, 'Everything Burns' , from P@sco.
The hands-down best S60 theme ever created, PiZero's 'Gold' has had a big upgrade, to v2.0 ! How can you have an upgrade, with bug fixes and version numbers, all for a simple theme? Because this is no ordinary theme and, like most of PiZero's other creations, it's implemented in meticulous detail. Oh, and if you like Gold 2.0, drop him a few PayPal dollars - I did.
I know quite a few N95 and E90 owners have been waiting for this (I gave in and bought a 6GB microSDHC last week!), but it seems that the official SanDisk 8GB microSDHC cards are now available in the UK . The price is £55 inc VAT.
With a huge number of partners, licencees and developers around the world, Symbian announced a partnership with the PGP Encryption Platform to protect the contents of Symbian laptops, desktops and email exchanges around the world; specifically the IP of Symbian and their partners. After all, one lost laptop with details on a prototype device getting into the wild would not be a nice scenario for anyone involved. I 'm just wondering if there's a mobile client for Symbian staff's smartphones, and if that will ever be available to the public?
Shhh.... don't tell Rafe I told you this ( 8-) as you know, we do like you to buy software through our Handango-run store, so that we get commission to keep AAS going), but... Handango have one of their 'Free App Friday' offers on today only, giving away the S60 Calendar replacement Papyrus - completely free ! Thought you'd want to know, anyway...
After the bally-hoo over a leaked early trailer, Nokia has now published an interview with the developers of the upcoming N-Gage Star Wars game, along with the proper trailer and the official screenshots. Read more over at All About N-Gage.
A while back, Proporta kindly sent over the 'Freedom Mini GPS' for review, a tiny 30g GPS that could happily sit in the tiniest pocket or on a key ring - and I just hadn't got round to writing about it yet. Time moves on and there's now a 20g "Freedom Keychain GPS SiRF Receiver" that's even smaller. If you want to get your hands on either of these accessories, read on...
Describing itself as the world's "first social bookmarking system completely designed and optimized for mobile phone users", PhoneFavs is new and free. In addition to the social bookmark element, there's a mobile link directory and a new "mobilizing" engine which automatically adapts standard web pages for improved viewing on smaller screen devices and, helpfully, has an 'images on/off' toggle. See below for screenshots, links and the press release.
