The San Francisco GDC conference is starting on monday and All About N-Gage's Ewan Spence will be reporting live from the event (there have been some interesting rumours regarding N-Gage news). To follow AAN's GDC coverage, you can visit our website of course, but we also have various other online presences such as our Twitter channel and our RSS news feed. And if we have any interesting vids to show you they should end up on our YouTube channel. Also see Ewan's personal Twitter feed.
Released yesterday was my Show 78, with a six minute video version of my Samsung Omnia HD first impressions, published here at the start of the week. A huge thanks to Rafe for helping with the video and you can expect text and video in more detail from him on All About Symbian shortly. Show 78 also includes my March Top 5 Phones. If you want to comment on either, please see the YouTube thread.
Hot on the heels of their new Mobile site, YouTube has now also released an official (native) S60 client application. It is compatible with most S60 3rd Edition phones. The video quality is good, and looks to have been optimised for QVGA screen resolution. There's a basic interface to browse and search through YouTube's extensive video catalog. All videos are shown in full screen, but widescreen videos are shown in a 'letter-box' format. Read on for more information and screenshots.
In a move that's utterly unsurprising, Nokia has announced its intention to close its file sharing site, MOSH. The intentions of this site were never crystal clear at the best of times and it has often been host to warez and adult material, all available without controls in place. MOSH is expected to close before the Ovi store opens in May.
Once again (Symbian's) David Wood's blog provides useful pointers to the future of the Symbian software world. In this post he discusses firmware upgrades and points out, specifically, that the old situation where firmware upgrades were limited by license to a particular OS Feature Pack level may not one day apply because of the way Symbian Foundation is open source and (commercial) license-free. Don't hold your breath, though, you're unlikely to ever see S60 5th Edition running on your old N95!
Aha. After my own (on video) mystification over why many quality S60 themes wouldn't work fully on the Nokia 5800 (tabs weren't working in some apps), it seems that theme authors have worked out what's wrong and are patching their productions. Here, PiZero has released new, working versions of Blue Haze, Spyro, DarkStar 09 and Valentine 09. Top stuff.
Long-time Arena user Clintonjeff has been one of the first in the world to receive the new business-oriented Nokia E75 smartphone. This is the first Eseries device to be compatible with N-Gage, and CJ has looked at how well it copes with gaming. Apparently not very well. There are quite a few "issues" such as the N-Gage icon being hidden too deeply in the menu system (in the "Media" folder!), restricted gaming key options, and a client that doesn't work in horizontal mode. Check the link out for more details and see below for CJ's E75 N-Gage video. It's a real shame that N-Gage is making such a disastrous debut on Eseries. If anyone from Nokia is reading this, take a look at CJ's article and make note of what needs fixing (the problems would mostly be very easy to fix too).
It seems the E75 fairy missed AAS out (an admin mistake, apparently), but fear not for Clinton Jeff has stepped up to the plate with a nicely opinionated and illustrated look at Nokia's latest Eseries qwerty slider. A man after my own heart, he has torn into the device in his first 24 hours and presents a long list of pluses and minuses.
Any set of figures which show Apple gaining in the smartphone race (up 300% year on year) are bound to be heavily commented on in the USA-dominated tech media, and Gartner's Q4 (and general 2008) worldwide sales figures are no exception. Definitely worth a skim though. Symbian OS still dominates the world, powering 52% of the world's smartphones, but the lead is down 6% from the previous year. RIM continues to rise with the Blackberry OS and the iPhone is on the up and up too. In terms of manufacturers, Nokia sold 44% of all smartphones last year, roughly the same (60 million) as in 2007, with RIM and Apple clocking up 16 and 8 million respectively. The leading Windows mobile handset maker, HTC, was a distant worldwide fourth, with only 4 million.
You have to hand it to David Wood of Symbian Foundation, he sure knows how to whip up and manage an OS release schedule. Here he publishes the timescales for the next few releases of Symbian Foundation OS, which make interesting reading. Of note is the numbering system (though don't get too tied up on the way Symbian OS 9.5 runs S60 5th Edition Feature Pack 1 which will become Symbian^2, and so on) and the mammoth software engineering exercise that will be keeping no less than five major OS versions all in planning/development/release all at the same time. A recipe for disaster or a masterplan that will result in world domination? Comments welcome!
Of course, Jaiku's been in such a moribund state since Google bought it that it's arguably not as earth-shattering - we now have a world where Twitter is king of the microblog and Google's own Maps/Latitude is arguably king of location sharing. But location-aware blogging tool Jaiku still has a place in many people's hearts and news is just in that not only is Jaiku now Open Source and running on its final destination server (Google App Engine) but a new S60 native (and presumably also Open Source) client is also coming very soon. Can't wait.
A while ago we asked the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation if they had an online OPML directory of their podcasts. They replied they didn't but would make one, and true to their word it has just gone live. You can now browse and subscribe to all CBC podcasts on your S60 device by adding the directory address http://www.cbc.ca/podcasts.opml to your Podcasting application. We will be publishing a more detailed article about this later, but for the moment see our previous article on how to add directories to the S60 Podcasting application (the link also has the URLs for the BBC and NPR podcast directories). Also see our guide to podcasting on the Nokia 5800.
The BBC News website is carrying a report about a new way of making lithium batteries which could massively speed up their charging time. It's unclear quite how long the charging would take with the new batteries: the BBC report talks about "20 seconds" in comparison to "6 minutes", so they clearly weren't testing a full capacity battery. However, if we scale that up, a 90 minute charge on current batteries would be reduced to 5 minutes with the new battery type.
Hot off the press, Ovi just added support for S60 5th Edition phones such as the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and N97. Each can now be added in the 'Manage your device' section and, crucially, you can now sync your Calendar, Contacts, To-dos and Notes to Ovi. For 5800 owners like me who have felt a little uneasy about the lack of OTA backup, then this is very welcome. Screen grab proof below.
