Our very own Rafe Blandford joined Tim Salmon and I (about 25 minutes into the 80 minute show) yesterday to record Phones Show Chat 72, worth a listen if you'd like to hear Rafe talking about not just Symbian, but all platforms and all phone tech. There's plenty of Symbian content in Phones Show 130 too, released this morning - skip over the Dell Streak review and you'll get a peek at my 'gear', plus a short spot about the 'gone but not forgotten' Nokia 7710 - remember that?
Nokia Reader, a simple RSS reader, was released today on Nokia Beta Labs as an experimental prototype. The application features push notifications (making use of Nokia's new notification service API), a content directory and homescreen widget integration. It provides a clean and efficient way to consume and be notified of updates to your favourite feeds while on the move. The application is available for most S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 phones.
Mobile Roadie is coming to Nokia, announced their CEO Michael Schneider at the recent MIDEM conference (reports Mobile Entertainment). If you’ve not come across their apps on iOS, Android and Blackberry, then you won’t have seen one of the music industry’s quiet successes. Providing a turn-key environment for groups, bands and performers to create their own applications, Mobile Roadie has helped 1,500 applications reach smartphones around the world. Now the biggest platform, target-wise, beckons them.
Nokia have released a set of fourteen support videos, embedded below, to show users how to get the most out of their Nokia C6-01. Ranging from basic things like how to use the buttons and touchscreen, to more sophisticated topics like planning a road trip and editing photos. This is a great resource for anyone new to Symbian^3. While the video titles are aimed at the C6-01, these instructions apply to any Symbian^3 handset. Click through to view our indexed list of videos. Thanks to Clinton Jeff at ZOMGITSCJ for spotting these.
What happens when you hand Aardman Animations, the Oscar winning company behind Wallace and Gromit (and other childhood delights like Morph and Creature Comforts), a Nokia N8? The HD Camera is attractive for a lot of reasons, and I think the Bristol based team have found another one with a fantastic piece of art. Called Nokia 'Dot' this is far away from "making a phone call" but still a wonderful achievement.
There's an interesting article over on The Wall Street Journal trying to explain why Angry Birds has been such an amazing hit in the gaming world. Their thesis looks at the idea that we humans are hard wired to enjoy solving parabolas, the trajectories made by something propelled against the influence of gravity. Video games have long exploited our bias for ballistics; for example, look back at the hit series of PC games, "Worms". Read on for quotes and comments.
Nokia's DAB radio headset, for Symbian^3 phones (Nokia N8, C7, C6-01 and E7), is now available in the UK for £45. The headset, which uses Symbian^3's USB OTG technology and therefore plugs into the microUSB/Micro-AB port, allows you to listen to and control, via companion software, DAB radio. The UK is one of the leading DAB markets with more than 250 different stations spread over the country. Sales of DAB radio units now outnumber those of FM radio units, thanks, in part, to government subsidies. Around 25% of radio listening in the UK is via DAB.
Andrew Orlowski continues to look back on the history of Symbian over at The Register, this time through an interview with Charles Davies, former CTO at Symbian and Director of Psion for more than two years. With hindsight, it’s possible to spot the correct decisions made by Symbian, and also where the problems arose, which he looks at here. The same is true of every company, and while the Symbian Foundation experiment is winding down, the OS itself is still very much alive on modern handsets.
Nokia's Ovi Store got a few upgrades today, notably a fuzzy search system incorporating 'Did you mean?' functionality for coping with spelling errors - all too easy to do when typing in application names and getting pluralisation or punctuation wrong. Nokia has also added Arabic and Hindi support to the Store for Series 40 users, a significant boost to potential application sales and distribution in the Middle East and India, with Arabic also rolling out to Symbian users as well very shortly.
Nokia are proud of the Ovi Store, it’s gaining traction, there are more downloads every day, and I don’t begrudge them the right to shout about any success whenever they want. So the list of “Top Ovi Store Games” on the Conversations Blog is exactly what I’d expect. And hopefully Nokia are fully aware that we're going to look at this post and ask the question “nice list, but how about some context?”
Nokia has just announced that interested parties can now make requests (by email) for FTP logins for its hosted Symbian Foundation content. This information includes: source code of the current Symbian platform, documentation, and PDK's. This has been announced via the new Symbian blog (hosted by Nokia) at symbian.nokia.com. The blog post also reports that Nokia is working to make more available via the Symbian website. It also encourages Symbian developers to look at its sister site Forum Nokia for information about current development frameworks, C++ and Qt.
There's a superb article published today over on Mobile R'n'R by Rita el-Khoury, listing the ten things you should do first with a new Symbian smartphone to ensure you get the very best experience, from replacing the browser and social clients to automating and customising the look and feel. This is one to bookmark and recommend to friends who are eying up the likes of the Nokia N8 and C7, methinks....
I haven't linked to the Phones Show Chat podcast for a long time, but show 70, released a few minutes ago, ended up being something of a Symbian special. We'd invited James Burland on, of Nokia Creative fame but latterly a big iPhone fan, to try and 'up' the iPhone content, but it turns out he's a recent Nokia N8 convert, so there's an especially strong Symbian flavour to the show, which runs to 1 hour 10 mins. Also in the show are musings on Nokia breaking America (or not) and discussion over ever-increasing screen sizes.
An interesting question from Jeff Pulver on his blog – should our phones have a “dumb” mode that allows nothing but phone calls to come through? The goal of course is to reduce needless accidents as people text, browse and generally use their phone to communicate and distract them from driving (see also AOL’s The Last Text campaign).
A recent post of the Nokia Beta Labs blog indicates that Nokia will be discontinuing its augmented reality test-bed application - Nokia Point and Find. However it goes onto say that the underlying augmented reality (and visual search) technology will be incorporated into "the future of key experiences like Maps and Search". The technology may also become available to third party developers, presumably through a service API or similar provision.
