Mobile Industry Review have just announced the winners of their 2008 Awards, and in the incredibly competitive Best Mobile Blogger category, the All About Symbian team have come out as winners. While Rafe, Steve and myself were named in the show, we couldn't have managed it without all our other contributors and readers throughout the year. This one really is for you all.
Myslopes.com has been launched as 'the first mobile skiing portal', with snow reports and weather forecasts on any mobile-web-connected phone. m.myslopes.com is the address to use and coverage is for the top-10 European ski-hosting countries.
Sometimes technology is all about the spec sheet, sometimes it's something a little bit more artistic. Announced on Friday in London, and starting at midnight Sunday, the campaign based around the threat of Extremely Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis will be seeding clues around the web to physical items distributed around London. All these items, when viewed on a map, will reveal a picture. The team behind the project includes UK based Moblog, and they asked if All About Symbian would highlight the project... which we're more than happy to do.
AAS reader Mirko Corli is setting up a social experiment about how people name their Bluetooth-enabled phone. It's based on Google Maps. If you'd like to get involved, see Mirko's Tumblelog or look directly on Google Maps
If you've been following the saga of Nokia's new next-gen email system, note that there's a whole new shiny beta of Nokia Email available, writes the Beta Labs team. There's more localisation, wider compatibility and plenty of minor bug fixes and detailed improvements. There still seem to be some issues regarding Google services though - indeed, the very Email home page doesn't render at all in Chrome, which didn't bode well for me.... In other news, Ovi Share has added a decent Map View so that you can see all your photos in a channel and where they were taken in a single glance.
The BBC have kindly responded to posts about iPlayer for S60, claiming that they only support the N96 because of the better way it handles passing an Internet connection through from browser to RealPlayer - and yet Nick Anstee reports that the N96's RealPlayer setup is the same as on other S60 devices, in that you have to manually pick a streaming access point in RealPlayer's settings. Update: the comments below shed light on this confusing situation.
You may remember my own four part article series looking at connecting an S60 phone to an Apple Mac? Symbian Guru's Dotsisx has written up her own experiences along similar lines and with similar 'Nokia, must do better' conclusions, here (part 1) and here (part 2).
Kudos to neois over on Forum Nokia for producing a layman's illustrated guide to S60 5th Edition, looking at it from the point of view of a S60 3rd Edition user. If a picture's worth 1000 words, then this is a veritable thesis.
Over on All About N-Gage we've had various news items over the past few days, including confirmation from Nokia that game transfers ARE still possible through customer service (despite the misinformed words of a few service reps recently), there's been an updated version of the game Pro Series Golf to fix compatibility problems with the updated N-Gage app (and it also now works on the 5320), and we've had a bit of a nostalgic wallow as it's five years since the original gen N-Gage launched.
While the desktop computers got their 'browser war' in the nineties, it never really took off in the mobile space. Not that we're restricted to one browser - Opera, Skyfire, WebCore/Safari and various proxy powered java browsers are all available to us – it's just that there was never a bloodbath or legal threats. Anyway, Mozilla may be joining the browser party sooner than we think, according to reports in The Mercury News (via MoCoNews).
Although nothing's been officially announced yet, I've noticed that both Google Docs and Google News have had their mobile sites overhauled recently. Some screenshots below, including WYSIWYG views of documents and spreadsheets.
Well done to Ricky Cadden for putting together a nice little 'how to' on using Contact groups over at Symbian Guru, including practical examples of why they're useful.
Perhaps not surprising, but Nokia are really pushing the N96 this week - the really interesting Hello N96 blog has a Bluetooth video that was pushed to his N96(!) while in Charing Cross station, plus photo examples of big screen advertising.
Yes, those clever chaps at Nokia are still trying to confuse us by offering more and more overlapping PC-hosted connectivity applications. :-) Communications Center just hit 2.0, incorporating a lot of feedback from the v1.x release. The software adds to the functionality of four of the standard PC Suite modules, namely Phone Browser, Text Message Editor, Contacts Editor and Multimedia Factory. Here's the download link if you want to give it a whirl.
The UK's Gadget Show remains a respected review source, even if they don't go into quite the tech detail that AAS does... in the latest Web TV episode, Jon Bentley goes into reasonable detail on the Nokia N96, covering the improvements over the N95 while also being disappointed by the slow speed overall, by the poor Wi-Fi reception and by the lack-lustre BBC iPlayer.
