Rob Glaser has a new word – 'superphone' – to describe the latest batch of mobile phones on the market. Given the fun we’ve had defining the smartphone in the last few years, adding a new level to the nomenclature might seem a cheap marketing move, but it has allowed Glaser, chairman of RealNetworks, to expand his view on where mobile technology is moving. Read on for my thoughts.
Christina Warren has put together an interesting selection of tips for mobile application developers over on Mashable. It’s cross platform, and is worth printing out and pasting in front of whatever ever big printed PDF you use while coding.
The Symbian Podcatcher project has been in development for Symbian^1 (S60 5th Edition) for some time now, but it was announced yesterday, via Twitter, that Podcatcher has finally been backported to S60 3rd Edition. Nokia made the inexplicable decision to remove Podcasting support from their Eseries S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 phones, so the availability of this could be a breath of fresh air for the enterprise-orientated platform.
Is there anything stunning about the "Orange Wednesday" application that just popped up in the UK Ovi Store? Probably not, but there is more to it though, with Qt for developers, marketing for company strategy, and a great cinema listings app for UK users. Read on...
Damian Dinning, as promised, has put up the second part of his tech/examples series on the Nokia N8's camera, over on the Conversations blog. This time, he concentrates on the video capture side of things and, as before, we've summarised his main points below.
Damian Dinning, the architect of Nokia's N8 and other top camera phones, posting on Nokia Conversations, has shared some further insights into the development of the N8's stills camera. He explains Nokia's approach on the N8 and why this differs from earlier Nokia products and from other camera phones on the market. Rather than using every trick in the book to fool the eye into thinking it is a great image, the guiding principle behind the N8's camera is go for reproduction that is 'as natural as possible' in both visual and audio elements. Read on for a summary of the key points from the piece...
Symbian's Product Development Kit (PDK) 3.0.0, which is based on Symbian^3, is now available for download. This is the first PDK released since Symbian^3 attained its functionally complete status. The PDK contains a build of Symbian^3 platform, the complete source code, related utilities and an emulator. It is aimed, primarily, at platform developers and device creators, but the curious may also be interested in taking a look, as it enables you to gain a better understanding of the new version of the platform.
Two interesting pieces on the costs paid by mobile users, The first is the “termination fee” paid between UK networks. Ofcom have announced plans to drop this to 0.5p by 2015 but Westminster MP Mark Lazarowicz is pushing to have this lower rate in place in a shorter time frame. Meanwhile the technological marvel of in-flight WiFi is being used by around 10% of passengers where it is available (mostly on US internal flights).
Thanks to CJ for letting us know of an official, slickly produced tutorial video for Nokia Messaging, demonstrating the vast number of keyboard and keypad shortcuts, on the Nokia E72 and E52 respectively. Here's the video, from Nokia India, or its embedded below for your convenience.
Here’s an interesting one for a Friday afternoon, as Jack Schofield argues at Trusted Reviews for mobile phone subsidies to be stopped. If this were to happen he believes that the true value of both the phone and the usage of the network would be clear, and this would (through market forces) result in more value for customers. What do you think?
In April, Nokia announced a raft of new phones, including the side-sliding C6. The first sign of this phone coming to market has appeared today with Play.com now taking pre-orders. Play have priced the C6 at £269.99 (UKP) which is £30 below the listed recommended retail price. As with most early orders there is an an early adopter premium. Nokia's original press release set the C6 at €220, which roughly translates to approximately £213 (UKP, including VAT) at current exchange rates. We recommend holding back for now, as lower prices should be appearing once the C6 is officially on the market.
In a move to placate a lot of very unhappy mobile web users (including myself), the BBC’s Anthony Sullivan hopes that the upcoming BBC Accessibility Tools will allow people to replicate the “low graphics” version of the BBC News website. Unfortunately, for people who’ve been using that version of the site for over ten years, it feels like they’ve lost a close friend. There’s a lesson in here for web developers around the world, read on.
This year’s theme at the Symbian Exchange and Exposition has been announced as "free", both free as in the Operating System, but also that the event continues to be free to attend and you are "free to connect and free to help shape the future of the mobile industry." It runs on the 9th and 10th of November 2010, in Amsterdam, with more details at the SEE website.
With my tongue slightly in cheek and with the news that sheds(!) are now firmly back in fashion, I wanted to mention a growing trend in the tech world - that of fiddling, customising and tweaking. Of devices, of their firmware and of their software. It's all huge fun, of course, but if you want to keep your life on track and blood pressure down then I'd suggest having a second, fallback device, also synced to everything you know and love...
Community based UK MVNO Giffgaff has extended their offer of free mobile internet to all users until the start of October. Giffgaff launched without an automatic way to charge for data, they said “hey, data is free up to 100mb a day,” and planned to charge for data at the end of June. Well, now it’s the end of June, and O2’s core data network is in the middle of being updated. So it’s free data till October for GiffGaff users.
