UK DJ Zane Lowe's web site is currently featuring a mix competition, whereby you upload a mix of your own and the best mixes then all win a Sony Ericsson UIQ 3-powered W950i smartphone. Being over 40, of course, I have absolutely no idea what a 'mix' is... something to do with making cakes?
Via m-trends.org comes news that Nokia have created the Nokia Music Mixer as a promotion for its XpressMusic branding. The site allows you to remix your own ringtones via a web based user interface. The custom ringtone, in AAC format, can then be downloaded to your phone using a link sent via SMS to your phone as well shared with other users of the site.
Nokia has commissioned a survey by Nielsen Entertainment which interviewed 1800 users of mobile phone games from China, Germany, India, Spain, Thailand and the United States. The results are available in a press release and suggest that people will enjoy using Nokia's Next Generation gaming platform which is due for launch in the first half of 2007. Perhaps the most interesting is the average gaming session length: 28 minutes, which is far longer than is usually thought the case on phone games, and implies that the average phone gamer plays with as much dedication as they would on a portable console.
Long-suffering users of the Sony Ericsson P990i will be watching next week eagerly, being the one Lars promised us the big new firmware update, way back at the AAS pub meet. And it seems there's a bit of a buzz just starting, with a screenshot of new v10 firmware right here. We'll post here as soon as SEUS actually has it online.
Thanks to the E-series blog for updated versions of two very informative posts (and their comments) detailing the twodifferent ways to listen to Internet radio on your Wi-Fi-enabled S60 3rd Edition smartphone (so the N93, N80 etc are also 'in'). For a more chatty intro to the subject, see Krisse's intro here on AAS.
The huge photo-sharing site Flickr is now properly mobile again. http://m.flickr.com/ now works from any smartphone, letting you browse photo streams without incurring huge bandwidth penalties. Well worth bookmarking from your smartphone browser. (Via SymbianOne)
Lumisoft has announced that there's now a new Super Scale version of its GB road map product, for S60, S60 3rd Edition and Series 80 devices. As the name implies, this features higher resolution maps. There's a nominal upgrade path from S60 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition and apparently GPS support isn't far away/
Hacker extraordinaire "Another Guest", over on My-Symbian, has completed a port of the PC Classic 'Duke Nukem 3D' for all UIQ 3 devices, e.g. the Sony Ericsson M600i. Hardened gamers won't want to miss this one...
Symbian has released an official (video) webcast, in both RealPlayer and Windows Media format, with CEO Nigel Clifford talking about the significant '100 million smartphones' milestone. Here's the link.
HanDBase, the professional database system that's been such a major player in the Palm OS and Windows Mobile worlds over the last five years, has now been made available for S60 3rd Edition (2nd Edition has been supported for a while), albeit in beta form. If you're into databases on your smartphone, get involved with the beta - this is one app that I for one really want to see mature on Symbian OS.
Another link to the prolific Shaun McGill, but here he shows how to add extra fonts to Mobipocket Reader on S60 3rd Edition. Pretty cool, I wonder if there's a way to tinker with the main system fonts though? Comments welcome.
There's an interesting clip over on WOM World by Mike Hodgkinson, the 'director' of the totally N93-shot Rob Dickenson music video. Impressive stuff, from shooting underwater, shooting with various home made tripods and shooting aerial shots from helium baloons... all from a smartphone.
