Well worth bookmarking for late evening reading over a beer or two is Andrew Orlowski's epic two part essay on the history of Symbian from creation in 1998 up to near the present day. Interviewing a number of past employees, admittedly, there's a strong aftertaste of 'these are all the bits that went wrong' and there's little in the way of acknowledgement of success stories, but Orlowski's text is readable and well researched. Here's part one: Dark Star, covering Symbian's creation and here's part two: The battle for Symbian's soul.
Between 9am and 10am GMT tomorrow, November 30th, three designers from Nokia will be answering questions on Twitter about Nokia's design process, with special emphasis on Nokia's C6-01 and C7-00. Questions should have the #NokiaDesign hash-tag to be seen by the guys at Nokia. Searching for that tag (just click the previous link) will allow you to view the conversation. Read on for more details.
Kudos to the web programmers and the rest of the team at GSM Arena, who have produced the really rather cool 'Photo Compare Tool'. Essentially they've taken a large number of recent phones and smartphones and shot the same three test photos with each (ISO 12233, Grey and Colour). You can then choose which three phones you'd like to compare using the drop-down pick lists and click any of the offered crops to show the full photo in the main window. Oh heck, just go try it, you'll see what I mean. Curiously, the Symbian-powered camera champions, the Nokia N86, Samsung i8910 and Sony Ericsson Satio aren't represented, but there's still plenty of other Symbian (and Maemo) interest. Full list below.
Nokia’s Beta Labs latest release might be an old-school diagnostic tool, but the Nokia Connectivity Analyzer is a welcome addition to anyone either having issues with their Wifi or 3G connecting, looking to find out where the problems are on a slow connection, or just want to map the dead Wi-fi spots in their house. It’s a free download, but obviously with the caveats that go with a “beta” designation - and the 'techy' nature of the tool.
Earlier this year Nokia, in conjunction with Tim Kring, created and ran a transmedia project, a gaming / story telling event across multiple participation forms. Conspiracy for Good involved play in the real world, over the Internet and on mobile phones. This YouTube video, embedded below, offers a summary of the Conspiracy for Good project. It shows not only the scale of the project, but also gives a good summary of the various games, events and activities involved.
AAS fans might like to note that our very own Rafe Blandford and David Gilson have been the guests on The Phones Show Chat podcast over the last two weeks, Rafe in chat 64 and David in chat 63, providing analysis with their own particular slant, notably with much mention of MeeGo, still prominent in the news following the conference last week, but also with masses of Symbian chat as well. Worth a listen to one of them over your lunch-hour? Also, see below for an important URL change for 3-Lib and The Phones Show - my old web server is disappearing up Sky's tailpipe at the end of 2010!
Take one super-knowledgable smartphone fan, steeped in Symbian especially. Put him in Japan and then throw every cutting edge tech demo and every flagship newcomer from NTT DoCoMo at him - and let him take as many photos as he wanted. The result is a great illustrated read from Clinton Jeff, looking at both Symbian-powered and proprietary phones and smartphones, plus a number of new technologies - as usual, some of these will be standard in the rest of the world in a few years time.
There are two online happenings I'd like to draw your attention to today. Firstly, the guys at AutoTrader - who released their Symbian application a week or so ago - are holding a one hour 'Twitter Takeover' at 12pm GMT on their AutoTrader UK account, so if you're looking for improvements to their app or have questions about mobile support then get involved by asking questions. Secondly, the folks at SPB (who make Mobile Shell and SPB TV, among others) are holding their annual web survey on your smartphone preferences and habits - here's the start page for All About Symbian readers - with some prizes for respondents, detailed below.
Nokia seem to be far more Mac-aware these days - the C6-01 and C7-00 - and even the still-in-womb E7-00 - are all now listed in Nokia's iSync plug-in system, for PIM sync to the Mac's iCal and Address Book. You can find these iSync plug-ins and more at Nokia's revamped Mac software page here. Particularly notable is a veritable flurry of FAQs and tutorials explaining how to do the more common operations with Nokia Multimedia Transfer, and how to connect up a Nokia smartphone to a Mac in the first place.
It’s nice to see that Nokia’s strategy is slowly becoming clear to the mainstream media, as this article in the Wall Street Journal shows. While it does (eventually) get to the point, it starts as many articles do, from a false statement, magnified by Stephen Elop’s new role as CEO. Namely “his first decision was to go it alone and not adopt Android.” A statement that makes for a headline but has no basis in commercial reality.
You'll remember Skyfire, the proxy-based (i.e. like Opera Mini) browser that also managed to somehow transcode flash video as well? Released originally for Windows Mobile and Symbian, it is now being officially phased out, with the proxy servers stopping working at the end of 2010. In something of a tunraround, Skyfire's new 'vision' is based around a local browser on iOS and Android, with a cloud 'booster engine' for handling video and social networking. See below for a surprisingly personal and heartfelt quote from the developers.
A hat tip to Jade for reporting here on the Nokia E7 manual being online now, courtesy of the always-helpful FCC. Of particular interest to me was the mention of standard 'ctrl' editing shortcuts when in text fields - I'm glad to see that these are now back in place, presumably in addition to the usual 'long press on shift' method beloved on the likes of the N97. The shortcuts are listed below. We expect to have the E7 in for review shortly, so stay tuned!
You'll know David from his articles for All About Symbian and All About MeeGo over the last 12 months, but if you're interested in knowing more about him as a person then you could do far worse than check out this mini-interview with him over on the Ovi Blog. Did you, for example, know that he has a Masters in Quantum Theory? Must remember to chat to him about string theory and multiverses sometime....
Forget check-in fatigue, the problem with many location based services and networks is this, once you've checked in, there’s nothing for you to do (an argument by many, but let's take Jon Evans recent rant on TechCrunch as one). Putting aside the collecting of badges and bragging rights, the standalone location-based networks are losing market share now the early adopters have got bored. But there is an answer, and some companies are pushing towards it.
