The much-awaited Nokia N85 is now available in Finland, and it also seems to have now gone on sale in France too. It's already been available in Italy for a short while now, and presumably should get a continent-wide rollout as the month goes on. The package deal of the SIM-free model varies from country to country, but most people seem to get a voucher for some free Nokia Music Store tracks, a free Nokia Maps subscription and a free N-Gage game.
S60.com are giving away (look under 'My exclusives') another of their periodic 'exclusive' themes. This time it's the rather dynamic 'Sporty' - one for your collection, at any rate!
Nokia Beta Labs brings us news of an update to Communication Center 2.0, with bug fixes and optimisations in all areas. Good stuff, though my previous comments about a fragmented PC-side software portfolio remain!
I can't resist linking over to AAS regular Matt Radford's latest post over on All About iPhone, talking about why the release of the S60 5th Edition-powered Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is going to be good for the Apple iPhone. At the latter's launch, the talk was on how it would be good for the mainstream phone industry - both views were absolutely right, as is Matt's observation that there will never be a 'winner' or a 'finish line' in this industry, just continuing advancement and improvement.
After a certain amount of hoo-ha in the E90 v300 firmware thread, it seems that Blackberry Connect has been upgraded after all to work with the new firmware. See here and select your region and operator and you should see a v300 compatible version of Blackberry Connect v4.0. Panic over, everyone?
Nokia continue to explore virtual worlds with their meetings in Second Life, and tonight sees the next event organised by the Connected Worlds in Team. Meeting in the Blarney Stone bar in the Dublin Sim of Second Life (direct link to venue in Second Life), Hydra Shaftoe will be chairing a discussion on European Communities inside Second Life, followed by 'live' music from Bedford Banstand, relayed from The Bedford in Balham, South London. It all starts at 11am SL time (around 7pm in the UK).
In Italian, at least. But we've come to trust p@sco's judgement and here, after a week or two of real world use, he pronounces the Nokia N85 as both 'very, very beautiful' and the 'top' Symbian-powered phone in the world, even trumping the Samsung i8510 and Nokia N96 overall. If you can read Italian then you're in for a treat.
The next two years could be trickier than expected for the nascent mobile advertising industry (thinks Tricia Duryee at MocoNews). Agencies are likely to become more conservative in their approach, focusing on proven strategies to get the marketing word out. That could prevent advertising initiatives on various mobile platforms making a large impact on revenue.
I have to confess a liking for the Boy Genius Report - all very American, but they don't pull their punches. In this case going over the first Google Android device, T-Mobile's G1, with a very Steve-like critical eye and pointing out a number of serious 'version 1' flaws and summarising the challenge facing Android. Also excellent is the G1 Review, from Matthew Miller, on ZDNet's Smartphone and Cellphone blog. Android looks set to be one of Symbian's more significant competitors in the years ahead.
Take Nokia USA, 30 Nseries still and video finalists, plus pro director Spike Lee, and what do you get? An arty music video, entitled 'Humanity'. Ostensibly showing off what sort of footage you can grab on Nseries smartphones. Which is all very well, though if someone could explain to me what the song 'Love is not the enemy of life' means......
Just a quick link: Nokia Beta labs want feedback on their Communication Center product and are giving away Amazon gift vouchers for some of the respondents to their survey. (via the Guru)
These roundups are never 100% definitive, because there always seems to be at least one favourite service excluded (in this case, Ovi) and also because of the nature of the game - the goalposts are always moving. But still, there's a useful SyncML service review roundup over on Mobile Royale today, including several services that I'd never heard of - worth a read.
There's an interesting interview here today in which Richard Bloor talks to Antony Edwards, Vice President, Developer Product Marketing at Symbian, discussing how developers will be able to contribute to the Symbian Foundation, the challenge of software distribution and how the Symbian Foundation's developer program is shaping up.
Carnival of the Mobilists 145 is over at mjelly this week and well worth a look, with interesting mobile-related reading plus some splendidly bizzarre carnival imagery....
CommonTime recently announced an upgraded version of its mobile solution for Lotus Notes, today it announced support for all S60 3rd Edition devices. mSuite is a solution, similar to Mail for Exchange, which allows enterprise users to access Lotus Notes based email, contacts, calendar and tasks from a mobile device.
