Next week Imperial College London will be hosting the second "Over The Air" event, where developers, programmers, companies and other interested parties will gather to hear about the latest innovations in smartphone technology during Friday, and then work through the night and into Saturday to hack together new applications using those ideas. it's a mix of Scrapheap Challenge and cutting edge mobile development. The draft schedule has just been announced, and free tickets are still available.
A little bit of lateral thinking by the Nokia Beta Labs team sees Braille Reader coming to touchscreen S60 5th Edition phones, making the most of both touch and haptic feedback. I'm not qualified to comment on its usefulness, but see below for the launch video.
Yes, no catches or tricks. Win a brand new Nokia N97 on behalf of All About Symbian and The Phones Show. The competition set-up video is also embedded below, I'll look forward to your video responses/entries! The competition will run for just over one week.
We keep being told that Near Field Communication and wireless is the future - that's certainly the case in this fun video from Jack Schulze and Timo Arnall. Called "Nearness" it's a Wile E Coyote hodge podge of mechanisms and gadgets to create movement from nothing. Enjoy!
For completeness (and, yet again, to prove to ne'ersayers that I'm not in anybody's pocket), The Phones Show 90 is now out, with almost no Symbian content whatsoever (it's mainly about the HTC Hero). However, just to keep this news item on topic, Phones Show Chat 4 is also out, and this has large chunks of Nokia E71, Opera Mini 5 and musings on new qwerty phones.
A new release of the Java-hosted Opera Mini is always a big event. This is a beta launch, but still extremely interesting, with Opera Mini 5.0 adding smooth font aliasing, multiple browser windows, a password manager and much better support for touchscreen phones. On the downside, the application is larger, at 220kb (still small in the overall scheme of things, though), and custom form and editing fields mean that you can't now copy and paste text in and out of the application. I was going to produce a walkthrough of the new features, but there's absolutely no point because our good friend Stefan has already done this in good detail. You can get Opera Mini 5.0 by going to mini.opera.com/beta in Web on your phone.
It was an early Series 60 legend - the file manager utility that also cooked the tea and did the laundry. And today FExplorer has surfaced into the modern Symbian age, fully updated for all S60 3rd and 5th Edition phones, courtesy of SBSH. The bad news: it's now commercial software, as Ricky Cadden reports, along with a selection of screenshots. However, if you don't think you can rise to the purchase price, there's also a launch competition to win 5 license keys.
Now in it's tenth year, the World Mobile Phone Throwing Championship has been won by Pauli Kosunen, throwing his unspecified handset over 79 metres - roughly equivalent to an olympic level discus throw. In the women's competition the Finn's also saw success as Keikki Hamalainen threw her phone 37 metres, and the junior prize went to a 43 metre throw from Verneri Aleksejev. Unfortunately the final prize went to Japan, as Team Happi took that back to the Far East from the Far North.
It's always good to see a reminder of this particular bit of lateral thinking, so I'm happy to link over to Phil Schwarzmann's feature on his favourite Apple iPhone/touch-optimised web sites that also work well on his Nokia N97 (or 5800 or Samsung i8910 HD or any other wide-screened S60 touch phone, of course). Don't get too excited over the Stitcher example, though, it's essentially just a selection of podcasts, we're still waiting for a really decent Internet Radio client for S60 5th Edition [Steve looks meaningfully in the direction of Nokia here....]
For completeness, Phones Show Chat 3 is now online, and thanks to Tim Salmon, we've now got show notes for the three shows so far. There's also now, as of this morning, an official iTunes feed for the podcast, for convenience, as well as the main RSS feed. Comments welcome, as usual. Note that this audio podcast is cross-platform, so it's not totally Symbian-safe(!) Coverage also includes Android, iPhone and lots of N900/Maemo references.
Nokia Beta Labs 'IM Beta', part of the Nokia Messaging 'empire', previously only available for the E75, has now been upgraded to v2.0 and also supports the E71 and E63, according to the Beta Labs blog. Version 2.0 also adds support for Google Talk, in addition to the existing Yahoo Messenger and Ovi systems. You can investigate Nokia Messaging IM Beta here.
What happens when a west-coast geek smashes their iPhone? Well, they try the N97 for a month. Noted commentator Cali Lewis reports back to her GeekBriefTV online video audience on her month with the Nokia N97. Acknowledging her love of the iPhone and Apple's Mac OS, it sounds like the phone made a positive impression on her, but it felt over complicated, even though the better quality camera and flash appealed to her.
Top theme maker Tehk is branching out into the burgeoning market for 'premium' themes - with the complexity of modern Symbian devices, it's becoming harder and harder to create themes which contain icons and elements for every nook and cranny, and I don't think it's unreasonable for theme makers to charge a small amount for their time and effort. Tehk here introduces the first of a seven part design series, branded 'Evolution', with a variety of versions at various prices, from 1 Euro up to 6 Euros. Read on for a screenshot and some of Tehk's comments.
