Nokia's "Share on Ovi" service has announced that the popular live video streaming service Flixwagon will be available on handsets. By linking your Ovi account to your Flixwagon account, whenever you finish a broadcast on your handset via Flixwagon, it will upload the completed video to your Ovi account (as well as your Flixwagon account), giving an immediate benefit of having your archive of live videos alongside the rest of your Ovi hosted media.
You wouldn't think we would mention the US elections on a site devoted to mobile devices, but there's an interesting and fast-growing phenomenon known as the "cellphone effect" which is potentially throwing polls off by several percentage points, reported over on the excellent fivethirtyeight.com. Essentially it boils down to this: some polling companies have a tendency to only interview people through their landline phones, so anyone without a landline simply isn't represented in their surveys. That means politicians with strong support among mobile-only households would do much better on election days than landline-only polls predict.
Even more chat about Firmware Over The Air - here's a set of interesting videos featuring Mikko Kuusisto from Nokia's firmware group, talking about how NSU and FOTA came about and with some interesting titbits about automatic notification for users of new firmware. (via S-G)
Sheesh. First Rafe is all over Mobile Industry Review's video podcast and now Ewan's on camera, pontificating about the state of the Symbian world. He was caught at the London Smartphone Show, of course. Oh, and regarding his book - the main reason why it's probably not appropriate to buy it any more is that [very sadly] OPL itself doesn't run on modern devices. Unless you want to buy it anyway and help Ewan out with some royalties?....
There have been quite a few new games announced in connection with today's Nokia Games Summit, including FIFA09, Need For Speed Underground, Spore Origins, Monopoly Here & Now World Edition, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Boom Blox and The Sims 3 from Electronic Arts, Tomb Raider Underworld and Pandemonium from Eidos, Nokia's own Dance Fabulous, and Gameloft's Asphalt 4: Elite Racing and Real Football 2009. You can find out more about all of these by heading over to our sister site All About N-Gage.
Last week, at the Symbian Smartphone Show, the Samsung Mobile Innovator developer program opened its doors for developer registrations. The program provides support, both technical and business, for mobile developers creating applications across the entire range of Samsung S60 devices. As part of the launch Samsung are offering to put to 300 applications through the Symbian Signing process for free. Read on for more.
Nokia's marketing department continues to think outside the box. In fact, outside the building altogether. It has created a set of musical park benches, each equipped with three phones and sets of headphones, to be plonked down in city parks across the UK. All the crazy details and a photo here. (Thanks, Matt)
I can't be the only one wondering at the claims of one of the Smartphone Show's demos at exhibiting 'zero shutter lag' on a phone. Here, courtesy of the official show blog, are the details - looks like this could be in each of our phones within a year or two! Of special interest is that the developers claim that it's even possible to present photos from before you press the shutter button. Spooky or Super?
AAS regular 'jbpseudo' has been writing here on his experiences with Taptu, specifically their new beta-status standby screen widget. I have to confess to having forgotten all about Taptu, so this article is a timely reminder of a valid competitor on the mobile side of things for the mighty Google.
Mobile content portal Mippin has unveiled the 'social' part of their service. They're already able to re-purpose thousands of sites for a mobile display (mainly by using their RSS feeds rather than the full blown regular pages), but now your userlogin gives you a personal profile that can be used by others to discover news that they should like, based on the respective profiles.
It was interesting at the show to see that Samsung had tippexed out the i8510 name in a lot of their press releases and replaced it with INNOV8 after all - maybe common sense is prevailing, and INNOV8 is certainly a lot easier to remember. The devices on the Samsung stand had much newer firmware (HH9) than the current review hardware (HH7), but we're still waiting on an issue-free release before delivering our AAS verdict - the INNOV8 has too much potential to simply prematurely write it off as 'buggy'. In related news, The Register has just put up their own INNOV8 review, although from the lack of criticism I'm assuming that they only really gave it a cursory trial. Rafe and I are putting a lot more time into it.
Nokia do seem to be getting better at communications with the outside world, as evidenced by the very switched on and honest status update just posted by the 'Nokia Email' service team. If you use this service then take a look.
If you've been following the semi-official S60 blogs over on S60.com then note that the old blog feeds have just been discontinued and the blogs archived. There are now just two main feeds/blogs to follow in your feed reader: S60 Living and Developing on S60. A simpler system and less confusing all round!
