Following a presentation at the recent Towel Day, Symbian’s Lars Kurth has blogged an update on their Incubation Projects (community initiated projects where more help is needed to deliver on the promise of the projects). Coming along nicely are the Wild Ducks handset, GCC Compilation of Symbian ^3 and Python.
It's not everyday that you learn something - I've known for a while that a) OLED displays are supposed to be more power efficient than TFT and that b) the brighter the colours, the more power is actually consumed. But I hadn't realised the scale of the problem until now, with hard evidence from a semi-official Nokia source. Read on for links and comments by me. Summary? On a OLED-screened smartphone, a pure white theme uses 14x as much power as a pure black one!
Following on from last week's look at the PIM suite on Symbian smartphones and what you can do to suggest changes, Ewan turns to one of his favourite apps... the music player. How would he change this application, in terms of integrating more media sources and online feeds? And, along the same lines, I've exclusive news about an old Symbian OS music favourite that's now branching out to include video. Read on for extracts, links and more...
Announced at the same time as today's Nokia Bicycle Charging kit are four new low end Nokia C series phones. While none of these phones run Symbian or could be considered anywhere close to today's smartphones, they do offer a timely reminder that low cost devices continue to dominate overall sales. The C1-00 (€30) and C2-00 (€45) are Nokia's first dual SIM phones, a feature that some smartphone users would love to have. Moreover, they illustrate the breadth of Nokia's service ambitions with the C2-00, C1-01 and C1-02 phones supporting Nokia Messaging and Ovi Life Tools. It is such devices that will, on a global basis, be the biggest engines for social change.
Keep a close on your network’s data plans over the next year, as the long expected reduction in “all you can eat” data plans has started. US network AT&T is dropping support for the unlimited plans and moving to a 200MB or 2GB choice of data cap for users. With network congestion in popular spots, how these bottlenecks are dealt with is going to be an interesting topic in going forward to 2011.
David Gilson tackles that age old problem of how to manage web passwords using your desktop and smartphone - and he ends up at a solution that most readers won't even have heard of. It's also a solution that doesn't actually store your passwords anywhere at all, making it device-independent and utterly secure from hacking, in the case of theft or loss.
As part of its promotional activities for the N8, Nokia is releasing a series of overview videos presented by Chris Bennetts, a Senior Product Manager at the company. The first video covers the homescreen, messaging, Internet and mapping functionality; rather than just linking to it or embedding it, we've broken this video down in detail as it offers some great insight as to what you can expect from both the N8 and how, in many places, the UI and applications of Symbian^3 have been reworked. Read on for further details.
Nokia have released their latest promotional video for the Nokia N8; it showcases the N8's video capture and HDMI-out play back functionality. Normally promotional videos don't justify a news story on their own, but in this case I think we can make an exception. The video shows a group playing foosball (table football) and performing some rather impressive skills and tricks - seeing is believing. View the video in the full story.
The initial website for this years annual Symbian show recently went live. They reveal that SEE 2010 will take place in Amsterdam at Beurs van Berlage on the 9th and 10th of November. On the site you can find the basic information about the event and register your interest in attending as well as find out more about sponsor and speaker opportunities. SEE 2010 could be the venue for the first substantive look at the new UI of Symbian^4 and will set the scene for the Symbian ecosystem as it moves towards what is likely to be very busy 2011.
Nokia Conversations, the official blog of Nokia, is now available in Spanish as Nokia Conversaciones. The blog will be produced by a team working in Bogota and Miami and aims to find the most interesting stories from Nokia's Latin American operations, with the best stories also be translated and shared on the global (English) blog. The site was officialy unveiled in front of 50 bloggers at the NokiaTalk blogging event.
Published a few minutes ago (MP4s will be up shortly) was The Phones Show 112, including a spot on The Great Outdoors (starring the black Nokia N82) and my tips on taking better video with your Nokia N96 (or other camera-smartphone). It's embedded below, for watching convenience.
In a couple of Google-related Friday links of interest, we thought you might like to know that there's now a (fairly) slick mobile version of Google Buzz, proclaimed by the Google Mobile blog as compatible with 'Nokia S60'. A screenshot and a few notes below. Also, Google's planned world domination buy out of AdMob has now been formally completed, so ads within mobile web pages and mobile apps from these two sources will effectively start merging in the near future.
According to the official Sony Ericsson Product Blog, the qwerty-equipped Vivaz pro has now started to ship in 'selected markets' (we're pushing for a review unit - watch this space). The blog also confirms that both the Vivaz and Vivaz pro have now been tested and support 32GB microSD cards. As a reminder, here's our launch story on the Vivaz pro.
SPB Software launched SPB Mobile Shell a few minutes ago, a favourite of many on other mobile platforms, for Symbian, specifically for S60 5th Edition smartphones (and presumably compatible with Symbian^3 in months to come). Highlights of this replacement front-end are multiple customisable homescreens, widgets for tasks, agenda, weather (etc), photo contacts, app lau ncher, full kinetic scrolling, adaptive skins and support for OpenGL and a (somewhat mind-blowing) 3D carousel. Video, more details, links and screens below. Comments welcome once you've tried the trial version!
Yesterday saw a major strategic agreement between Nokia and Yahoo!, detailed in our news feature, with Nokia essentially providing Ovi Maps to Yahoo! users and Yahoo! taking on the burden of providing Mail and IM to Nokia users, both in the medium term. Initial reaction to this has been generally positive, though not everyone thinks the alliance is a good idea. I thought I'd round up a selection of quotes, reproduced below... For more AAS analysis of the agreement, we'll be tackling the subject in the next Insight podcast.
