I have to admit that, like Rita el-Khoury, when I saw the proud boast by a Palm Pre Plus reviewer that they had managed to run 50 apps at once in its 512MB of RAM, I'd thought: well, some Symbian devices of yesteryear and a few from today could match that. Rita's taken the time to demonstrate this on the Samsung i8910 HD, managing 50 apps (and more) at once in only 256MB of RAM. Cool little post. Though I reckon I could get close to 50 on the unmodified Nokia N95 8GB, E90 or E71, for example. Anyone care to try?
Coming on the eve of Apple's big tablet release and Nokia's Q4 09 results announcement, IDC gathered all their numbers, analysts and (ahem) runes and produced a forecast for the smartphone market in 2013. Unusually, for an American data analysis firm, there's surprising understanding of the worldwide scene, with the headline stat being that the smartphone market will exceed 390 million units per year by 2013, with Symbian holding on to its world marketshare lead over the next three years. Quotes from the IDC press release and my own predictions below.
Another writer whose opinions I trust is Rita el-Khoury and here she reflects back on four months with the Sony Ericsson Satio and on the imminent arrival of the new Vivaz. She writes about the evolution of Sony Ericsson's take on S60 5th Edition and Symbian - it seems that she too sees the Satio as a testbed handset (as I'd argue are Nokia's N97 classic, N900 and Samsung's i8910 HD) with the Vivaz being the one that will make an impact on the market.
Everyone has been wondering why Ovi Maps hasn't been offered, for convenience, through the Ovi Store client - and, with the release of the new all-free, official v3.3, that's exactly what Nokia has done, indicating a high degree of confidence on its part. Great to see it heading up the store, anyway, and now merely a download away. And a side note for those for whom this doesn't appear - many other S60 3rd Ed FP2 phones will work fine with Maps 3.3 - just grab the closest version via your desktop and side-load it.
As the Symbian Foundation finish transitioning the OS and its applications over to the EPL (Eclipse Public License), various individuals and companies are responsible for different 'packages' - two such are the Image and Video editors. In the first such move, these two packages have just been transferred from one 'owner' to another. In this case, it's respected company Ixonos who has taken on responsibility and there's an interesting interview with Mikael Laine from Ixonos here on the subject.
Nokia Conversations has been doing a series of 'Three favourite Nokias ever', asking the question of famous people around the Nokia ecosystem, and it's our humble site-master's turn today. The N95's inclusion was probably a given, but the other two will surprise you. Worth a read!
For anyone who's digging the new Nokia Ovi Suite all-in-one system and who wants to both to live on the bleeding edge and have a say in how Ovi Suite develops, note that v2.1 has been opened up to public beta testing. There are some links and change notes below to help you make up your mind...(!)
Yes, yes, there should probably be no such word as 'webinar' - but Quickoffice is using it anyway, to describe a new series of free video, online seminars centred around their office suite for Symbian/S60. If you have questions about an aspect of Quickoffice, or simply fancy learning a few new tricks, then check out the series. The first one is on January 20th at 8pm GMT (2pm CST) for half an hour. Each webinar will also apparently be recorded and an edited version made available for download later.
Time to play 'spot that phone' in another Nokia factory/test centre video, this time from Nokia Conversations, embedded below, intended to show Nokia's state of the art design, manufacturing and testing centre in Beijing. There's a section with a load of white N86s, but what else can you spot? Was anything confidential filmed by mistake? Somehow I doubt it, but it does make for a good game!
Two cracking posts on the Symbian blog today about application development and the story behind the applications. Mobbler, the music tracking web service; and Mobilyze, and in-development app to help patients undergoing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Nokia have announced that their Beta Labs are closing the online portion of the Mobile Web Server (MWS) product, launched some two and a half years ago, is closing at the end of this month. By allowing your mobile phone to act as a web server for the content it carried, MWS was an alternative ad-hoc style connectivity option for a number of users. Nokia have stressed that the local parts of the application will continue to work, and are reminding people that not all Beta Lab products have a happy firmware ending.
I just thought I'd announce that The Phones Show (born The Smartphones Show) has just reached programme 100, which just went live. This latest show contains my attempt to bust some 'Mobile Myths', along with a Blackberry Top 10 and some heavily-Symbian-centric (it seems) user stories.
OK, so I made the last three words up, but the extensively titled Nokia 5530 XpressMusic Games Edition has been sighted by CJ in the USA, equipped apparently with "20 Full version games (10 from Gameloft, 10 from EA Mobile)". It's a nice idea, is available from Nokia USA and only costs $10 more than the standard phone. Even with a number of Java titles, that can't be bad value.
As with the Evernote widget yesterday, I think the time has come to start recommending that you consider removing Nokia PC Suite and consider installing Ovi Suite, provided you have a reasonably recent PC. The latter has just been updated to v2.0.2.42 (according to NokNok) and its resource requirements have been steadily coming down from the stratospherics of the early betas. Comments welcome if you're feeling brave - has Ovi Suite come of age now?
