You've got to love a labour of love - and that's what Vuk Vulovic (a.k.a. highdiver) has produced here for the Nokia N8. Starting with the idea for a page of helpful tips on getting the most from his N8, the post blossomed into the current 67 tips, most of which are also illustrated. Worth bookmarking and worth placing a bet that he gets up to 100 before Christmas?
I have just read an interesting post by blogger @Smartfonefan, in which he goes into great detail deliberating about whether he should buy the Nokia N8 or upcoming E7. It's a rather empaphetic read, and anyone who is reading All About Symbian will instantly understand that difficult and pleasurable period we all go through when we try to find out every last detail (which hopefully AAS provides!) about our candidate devices, to make that final decision.
Nokia Beta Labs have released their Wellness Diary application, which they announced in September. Available for all touch-screen enabled Symbian phones, the application runs in the background monitoring the user's activity. For example, it uses the accelerometer as a pedometer to measure your physical activity, and a schedule can even be set for the application to periodically ask you how many snacks you've eaten! Users can set personal targets and share their progress with social networks. To find out more, read on.
There’s no doubt that Facebook is one of the key drivers of content on a mobile platform, and what Mark Zuckerberg has planned for his users will affect the mobile market. So Rob Jackson’s analysis of the announcement at the start of the month on the “Facebook Mobile Platform” makes for interesting background reading.
Limited Q3, 2010 worldwide smartphone platform sales figures are now available, published by Gartner here. Year on year, Symbian-powered smartphone sales are up over 50%, but it's still a sharply rising market and Android's explosion into second place means that Symbian now has a very serious competitor, in addition to being 'down' to 36.6% world marketshare. With Android on the march, iPhone marketshare was also down year on year, ditto RIM and Windows Mobile. See below for some comments and the stats.
After the fiasco where Skype started blocking all IM access to third party Symbian/mobile clients like Nimbuzz and Fring, it seems that ICQ has started doing the same, blocking Nimbuzz, as reported here on the latter's blog. With many IM services already highly proprietary, it seems that the Instant Messaging is imploding before our eyes. Or maybe we'll all end up on Google Talk and Jabber? Comments welcome if you're a heavy IM user!
Yesterday's news that Nokia would be taking over governance of the Symbian project was great for anyone wanting to publish a dramatic headline. However, to call this a failure for Symbian would, at best, be a cursory observation of what this really means for the platform. To many observers, the writing was on the wall for quite some time, and for others, it was the only logical conclusion to the Symbian Foundation experiment. Over the past year, I wrote two articles about the wider adoption of Symbian: "The risk of opening Symbian" and "Does Symbian have a service layer gap?". Now that the governance of Symbian has reverted back to Nokia, it's a good time to review both of these articles to help give readers some context to what the changeover means for Symbian.
A hugely entertaining read by Tim Ocock (formerly of Symbian) over on Tech Crunch Europe this morning. Ocock’s well placed to comment on “The Successful Failures” of Symbian, as he straddled engineering and management during his time at the company. Starting at the birth of Symbian, right through to his current advice to Nokia and the Symbian Foundation (ditch S40, support your developers with useful API’s and tools, and spend time educating the market and the Analysts), this is one to read over lunch."
Just when you thought that HX-V8-32 firmware was the last 'hurrah' of the Samsung i8910 HD, along comes HyperX and his team to push the venerable smartphone to one final chapter. HX-V11-5 includes full Qt integration and extensive customisation options, some of which are listed below. There are still ways in which the i8910 remains the top dog in the Symbian world (besting the N8 with stereo speakers, larger display, etc.) so this new release is particularly interesting.
Now getting seriously mature is Symbian Podcatcher, an open source replacement for Nokia Podcasting and of serious use to all the owners of Symbian-powered smartphones without any automatic way of gathering in audio and video podcasts. Today sees the release of v1.0.8 for Symbian^3 devices, screenshotted below. Versions for vanilla S60 5th Edition and 3rd Edition phones are a little behind, but hopefully the developer can back port as many of the bug fixes as are practical. Next stop for Symbian Podcatcher? The Nokia Ovi Store, hopefully! In the meantime, get it here.
Xenon-cameraphone fan though I am, it has to be said that at my advanced(!) age and with family responsibilities, I don't get to party til 3am anymore (though see here from 7.45pm tomorrow!), so don't really get a chance to see what the likes of the Nokia N8 can really do in near pitch darkness with real people (as opposed to pot plants and fans!). Luckily, Jay Montano shares my love of Xenon and has put up a feast of N8 Xenon-lit party shots from Halloween, last night. What's even more impressive than the lighting and 'freezing' in time is the power management - seems like the N8 took over 300 photos with Xenon flash without breaking sweat...
The cliche is that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I have to hand it to Horace Dediu at Asymco. His graph of "sales vs profit per handset" not only shows how profitable some of the major manufacturers are, but also how Apple and Nokia are working completely different strategies in sales.
Sometimes you need to get to your music player fast on your touchscreen Symbian phone. You could use the multi-task bar or homescreen widget, but Fone Arena have had a look at Music Bar, which will 'temporarily ‘re-program’ one of the physical buttons on smartphones like the N8 to pop up the basic music controls on screen. It’s rough and ready, but if you must, it’ll do the job.
While it’s not the Q3 smartphones table, the latest numbers from IDC on global phone shipments make for interesting reading. As always, the devil is in the detail and you can argue this is good (or bad) news for any company, but Apple displacing Sony Ericsson will be a cause for celebration at Cupertino, especially as this is the first Top 5 table Sony Ericsson has not been in since this report started in 2004. Nokia is still on top of the pile with 32.4% market share on increased shipments of 1.8%, worldwide.
My day just got off to a potentially great start. Opera has just released a beta of their proxy-based (read time and money saving) Opera Mini web browser for all Symbian phones. And not just for these phones, but written as a native Symbian application and not as a Java application, so we're talking faster startup times and smoother browsing. Plus you can now switch all text input to use your phone's native system, even T9. And compatibility is, amazingly, right back to Series 60 (effectively S60 2nd Edition). With Web receiving criticism for slow handling of huge web pages, Opera Mini 5.1 beta on Symbian impresses by being many times faster than any native browser on any platform. Some screenshots, links and details below.
