Nokia have recieved a loan from the European Investment Bank to support Research and Development in the Finnish company. Spread over five years, the 500 million euro loan will be used by Nokia to "make Symbian-based smartphones more competitive." While not directly for the Symbian Foundation the work will benefit the Foundation and other Open Source initiatives.
Well, this is very late news, but better late than never: There's been an update to the Mobipad application, which allows you to wirelessly control S60 devices through a standard Nintendo Wii controller (particularly useful if you've got your phone connected to a television through TV Out). The new Mobipad 1.2 beta lets you customise all the buttons to your own liking, which should solve the control problems that were experienced by previous Mobipad users. The catch is that you have to make a 5 euro donation to the developers to get the new version (previous donors get the new version free). The old version 1.0 is still free though.
Over on All About N-Gage we've been covering quite a few stories lately, here are some of them: Fishlabs have just announced five games for N-Gage including the next gen's first RPG, AAN has started its own Twitter channel, a selection of N-Gage games have been greatly reduced in price, there are several N-Gage contests where you can win holidays, phones and games, the S60 Ambassador programme is giving away N-Gage games in a new campaign, and of course Nokia's recently announced six new N-Gage-compatible phones.
In all the rush of innovation and new devices, we missed the announcement by F-Secure that they are the first anti-virus company to support S60 5th Edition. Their Mobile Security 5 product is now available via F-Secure or Nokia Download, if you feel the need for some extra strength protection.
Ovi Store has been announced, and many people just saw another smartphone applications shop. But it's actually a lot more than that, and its launch could be the most significant thing Nokia has done since entering the mobile phone business, or so reckons Tzer2 in an All About Symbian editorial.
At last night's GSMA awards, Nokia walked away with the inaugural award for Outstanding Environmental Contribution for their global environmental program that includes a recycling scheme for unwanted phones operating in 86 countries. Sports Tracker, while still a beta product, took the prize for Best Mobile Internet Service. Since the full launch in July 2008, it has seen over 2.5 million downloads, allowing users to track and share their daily fitness routines while out and about.
Continuing to round up Mobile World Congress 2009, a few links of interest for Wednesday morning. Nokia Messaging just got itself an upgrade, with the return of Access point selection and a better experience for Yahoo! Mail users; well spotted Symbian's William, showing a veritable wall of Samsung Omnia HD phones all waiting to be carted off to AAS for review(!); plus our own Rafe has been busy overnight, see the live link above for his own photos and thoughts on the new phones announced; finally, Rafe was cornered by the chatty MIR team at the show and asked for his thoughts so far.
The team behind the internet telephony company Truphone have announced their Local Anywhere service at MWC. A SIM card based virtual network, it promises a full voice and data service with clear pricing for the users. Details on those charges should be available before the service launches later in the year.
The GSMA has announced a plan for major phone manufacturers to produce one standard charger that would work with all handset brands, using a microUSB plug as the connection point (not miniUSB, as some sites have reported). The plan has the backing of almost every major phone maker, and if it succeeds presumably the rest of the phone industry will fall into line too. There are already some phones which do charge from microUSB, and the aim is to make most new models use standard chargers by 2012.
Today sees an announcement from Qualcomm that they will be working with Nokia in developing UMTS devices, initially for the North American market. Given that, up until a few months ago, the two companies were at legal loggerheads over the licensing of IP over 3G implementations and chipsets, we'll read this as an amicable end to the disagreement (helped, no doubt, by Nokia's one time payment of close to 2.3 billion dollars to Qualcomm in October 2008).
While the Symbian ecosystem has been making a lot of noise at the Mobile World Congress, most of the rest of the mobile industry has also been making its own wave. Ewan takes a little look around the other highlights coming out of Barcelona. Read on...
Forum Nokia has published the official technical specifications of the Nokia E55, Nokia E75, 6710 Navigator and 6720 Classic. Interesting to note that the E55, 6710 and 6720 all have single processors running at 600mhz (as does last week's 5630 XpressMusic) which is a big step up from the 369mhz speed of most previous single processor S60 models. However, the amount of free RAM available for user applications isn't listed for any device.
The Symbian Foundation, as well as debuting their new corporate style at MWC, are using a number of social tools to allow you to follow them. The most obvious is their blog at blog.symbian.org which runs on the open source Wordpress system. Alongside this, they have a photo pool at Flickr where anyone can add relevant pictures; a Twitter account for the Foundation; and most importantly for a conference... their own coffee machine on Stand 8A77 in Hall 8.
The Ovi Store, announced by Nokia today at MWC, is the Finnish entry into the rapidly growing market for on-device software stores. Promoting their reach of 50 million devices and a simple route to market for developers, Nokia's presentation hit all the right notes. The revenue split of 70% to developers was also clearly announced, along with publish.ovi.com, which is open for developers to register from today (and upload from next month). More thoughts below.
Sony Ericsson has laid out a proposition for their customers at MWC. Entertainment Unlimited is their name for “the true fusion of communication and entertainment” that the partners have been working on since 2001. It's a statement that makes clear their corporate direction of smartphones, and as such is a good marker to remind journalists what Sony Ericsson want to do. Coupled with their concept smartphone Idou announced yesterday, this is a line in the sand drawn by the Swedish company, answering the obvious question of “what now after UIQ?”
