Nokia is continuing to evolve the desktop version of its Ovi Maps service: the latest 'release' sees the ability to add 'Good Things' (user generated Points of Interest - PoIs) to the map. The functionality is aimed at allowing you to share interesting locations with the world, be it the location of your favourite coffee shop of the venue for an upcoming gig. In order to see and to add your own Good Things you will need to upgrade to the latest version of the Ovi Maps browser plug-in (via Symbian-Guru). Read on for more.
Just a quick note that programme 6 of my Phones Show Chat audio podcast is now live, in which Tim Salmon (of this parish) and I natter about N97 hardware issues, Ovi Suite problems, how Android is licensed and then I rant about smartphone batteries. If you're interested, here's the RSS feed. And the iTunes one.
Nokia Beta Labs has today introduced an 'Ovi Mail Setup” application', allowing anyone to sign-up for an Ovi Mail account directly from a S60 device. The same utility is being built into the upcoming E72 and into the new N97 firmware. If you already have an Ovi account then it will provision Ovi Mail and configure the email client already on the device.
Kudos to Dave Cozens for coding up a useful set of news-focussed widgets for the Nokia N97. There's 'Nokia and Symbian news', 'UK traffic news' (couple of screenshots below), 'World news' and (ahem) 'Football news'. There's Twitter integration, automatic update checking and you can grab them here, on the All About Symbian forum.
I was fascinated to read of the continued progress of some of Symbian's 'Wiki books' over on the Symbian Blog today. Essentially, these slightly niche guides and reference texts are being created in collaborative style by a number of authors, all contributing online into a 'wiki', a hypertext shared document. The 'wiki books' can then be electronically massaged into free electronic 'ebooks' or even passed over as needed to an on-demand book printing service. And it goes without saying that content can be kept up to date a lot more easily than with conventional '100% paper' titles.
Just because we've (temporarily) stopped writing about the Nokia N97 (back in its box, awaiting v20 firmware in my case!) doesn't mean that you should be short of reading matter. Clinton Jeff has spent time putting not one but two N97s (one black and white white!) through an exhaustive photoshoot and review, so if you're craving more N97 discussion then head over to his self-proclaimed 'Ye Giant Nokia N97 Review'.
Sorry for the urgent 'stop press' item, but I've noticed that my domain manager company has gone out of business and that my old smartphones-show.com domain had lapsed. Can I ask any (lovely, friendly) AAS readers with web page or blog links to 'The Smartphones Show' or 'The Phones Show' to check where any links point to? The best URL to use is simply 3lib.ukonline.co.uk - Many thanks!
Yes, another year has passed and the annual Symbian bash is upon us. But with a slight twist, with the Symbian Foundation now well established and with the whole ecosystem, like much of the rest of the mobile industry, definitely in something of a state of flux. SEE (Symbian Exchange and Exposition) 2009 is free to attend and easy to get to. But what's on offer this year, what should you look out for? Steve Litchfield provides a few pointers...
Business Week have released their latest "Top 100 Global Brands" and not surprisingly telecommunications and IT companies are riding high in the list. Nokia is in fifth place and the highest placed non-US company, just behind IBM (#2) and Microsoft (#3), while Google has climbed up to #7 while Apple pops in to #20.
You may have noticed that the newer S60 3rd Edition FP2 phones, the ones that ship with the new v7 version of Nokia's Webkit-based Web browser, had been left high and dry regarding a client for Nokia's Ovi Store - trying to install the existing client resulted in an unusably slow experience. There's a new, Web v7-compatible client now though, v1.05(313) - you can get it from going to store.ovi.com in Web on your device - it's a 620k download. In use, the new Ovi Store client is faster than I've seen on any previous device. Anyway, that's one less thing for the Ovi Store people to fix up! (via Ovi Applications)
Nokia has been named as the world's most sustainable technology company according to the 2009/10 edition of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Already rated for several years as the leader within the Europe and Communications categories, this year Nokia was also chosen as "World Technology Supersector Leader", making it number one across the entire global technology sector. See below for extracts from the press release.
Standing down today and retiring from his role as Chairman of Psion Teklogic is the spiritual Grandfather of Symbian OS, Dr David Potter. He founded Psion in 1980 with £70,000 of his own money, and over the next twenty years grew it to be one of the leading mobile computing companies, and in the process laid the Foundations for the current smartphone with the spinning out of Psion Computers as Symbian in 1999.
PC owners might want to check out the latest beta of Ovi Suite 2, now apparently getting closer to final release. This latest beta has better support for photo sync between desktop and phone, plus many other minor fixes. It's a 90MB download from here if you want to keep bang up to date.
