Following on from last week's episode, which focused on Nokia, here is the ninth episode of the 361 Degrees podcast. This week episodes focuses on bothersome things; we talk, grumpy old men style, about some of the (many) things that annoy us about mobile phones. 361 Degrees is a podcast all about mobile technology, created by Ben Smith of Wireless Worker and co-hosted by Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review and Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian.
Filmmakers last year may have spotted the "Nokia Shorts" competition, where successful pitches were handed two Nokia N8 smartphones, a small shooting budget, and sent out to create something wonderful. And the winning wonderful? It's called "Splitscreen: A Love Story", directed by JW Griffiths, has just debuted at the Edinburgh Film Festival... and it's embedded after the break.
Both Engadget and Mobile Burn have been given previews of the next version of Windows Phone 7, installed on real world hardware. Mango will be the variant of Windows Phone that will power Nokia's first handsets in partnership with Microsoft. There's been a lot of people pointing out missing features and wondering what the OS would look like at the end of 2011, and with the caveats that these are still developer builds, these previews should help a lot.
There is a fascinating series of essays from long-time PDA and smartphone expert Michael Mace over at Mobile Opportunity, looking at the increasingly thorny issue of who will pay for the ever-growing amount of mobile bandwidth that's being demanded of our phone networks. Here's part 1, part 2 and part 3 (in part quoted below), well worth a read over your morning cuppa.....
I just couldn't resist another short link of interest, to the May edition of the Nokia Creative N8 awards, if only because the winners that get picked are nothing short of jaw-droppingly stunning. I've included one of them below, but please click through to the awards themselves for the full rundown and comments by James Burland. And all taken on a phone, remember...!
A video of an internal meeting where Stephen Elop, Nokia's CEO, shows off Nokia's first Windows Phone device, has been leaked on the Internet. The phone, which is codenamed Sea Ray, is running Windows Phone Mango and has a design similar to the recently announced Nokia N9. The leaked video is available on technet.hu, an independent technology website, which is based in Budapest, Hungary.
There's a fascinating piece over on Nokia Conversations at the moment about a pilot study on how solar power can be 'harvested' to power the next generation of phones and smartphones across the world. We've already got a number of solar powered mobile chargers, the next step is surely to start adding the photo-voltaic cells to the backs of phones themselves?
Nokia Social 1.3, whose official appearance in the Ovi Store was reported on here, has formally 'graduated' from Nokia Beta Labs, according to a blog post today. Apparently it won't also appear in Nokia SW_update on current devices until Symbian Anna is released, presumably for technical reasons, so grab it from the Store instead for now. Interestingly, Nokia Social 1.4 was teased, including better Facebook integration and performance, plus automatic contact linking and smoother kinetic scrolling.
The Qt Labs Developer Blog has just announced an update to the Qt SDK. In a case of good timing, the Qt team have released Qt Creator 2.2.1, which is mainly a bug fix release, at the same time as integrating support for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Support for MeeGo Harmattan comes on the day that the N9 was announced at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore. Read on for more details.
At today's Nokia Connection event in Singapore Stephen Elop, Nokia's CEO, announced that the Symbian Anna software update for the Nokia N8, C7, C6-01 and E7 would start shipping in new devices in July and would be available for all existing device owners to download by the end of August. He also announced that, over the next 12 months, Nokia intends to bring 10 new Symbian based smartphones to the market.
Google has presented an interesting survey on mobile usage to the Mobile Marketing Association forum in New York (reports Search Engine Land). Admittedly sponsored by Google itself, it combines two surveys on mobile habits and, surprisingly, includes Symbian. The two key points to take away are that more than half of smartphone users go online each day, and over 80% of people search for local information, and the vast majority of them will act on what they find.
Nokia and Elle have joined forces to find the next fashion correspondent. We're not sure how much of a crossover there is between the average All About Symbian reader and fashion followers, but we do know our audience is a diverse and talented group. And this is a good opportunity to mention the Nokia N8 pink (and see the embedded video for a chance to win one), which was recently announced by Nokia and is being used in the promotion.
Somewhat bizarrely, Nokia Social 1.3 has received a formal release - through the Ovi Store, reports ZOMG, it's CJ. Build 1.3 (215) is now online and downloadable. Interestingly, build '215' is also available through Sw_update for the Nokia X7, so presumably we'll see this version through Sw_update for the likes of the N8, C7 and E7, in due course. There are some installation caveats and oddities though...
