Quite scandalous really, my sympathies go out to S60-theme-supremo PiZero in his tale of woe with Handango and with the criminal fraternity. Summary: people are re-selling his free themes for profit - you'd better read the full story over at PiZero's site. How on earth do these rip-off-merchant's minds work?
A quick plug for our sister site, All About N-Gage, in which the number of listed 'unofficial' games has doubled in the last couple of days, as Tzer2 has seriously got to work, with new N-Gage games 'Prince of Persia Zero' and 'Million Dollar Poker' being announced, and with Nokia themselves being scored in an editorial assessing how well (or badly) N-Gage has been coming along.
A quick pointer to a little web-based game from Nokia's Maps team, over on their 'Mapsters' mini-site. You are asked to pinpoint cities on a world map against the clock, with prizes of Nokia 6210s and navigation licenses.
Not written from a Symbian viewpoint, but Michael Mace's latest missive, about smartphone/PDA ecosystems, is worth a read if you're a developer or if you're connected to a manufacturer. My initial reaction (again) is that Nokia's Download! system has the potential to be just as game-changing as the Apple example quoted - and it utterly defeats me why Nokia hasn't poured resources into this area.
Rafe is off to Finland for an event tomorrow, Nokia Open Lab, which "brings together a diverse group from across social media to discuss the future of mobile as well as content creation". There's more on Open Lab at events.nokia.com/openlab/, where there's a 'virtual event', too, open to all, from 10am – 6pm CET. A Tangler discussion forum will be appearing on the event site soon, and also at www.tangler.com/forum/nokia-open-lab. And, of course, Rafe will be bringing back photos, reports and insight, for posting on AAS next week. Stay tuned....
Stuff.tv are pretty prolific in their video output, often visiting smartphone territory - in this show they look at 5 of the top camera-phones, including the Nokia N82. Despite not having as many (gimmicky?) features as the opposition, the N82 seemed to come out overall winner (if the other presenter could have picked it as well, I think she would have).
There's an interesting interview here, on SymbianOne, with The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), who are behind the transitions and other animated elements in S60 3rd Edition FP2 and also, apparently, behind the Samsung i450's novel Music player application. While you're visiting you might also want to read this piece on a UIQ developer's perspective on the Symbian Foundation. Both are well worth a read over lunch or tea!
Every S60 3rd edition handset will now be able to run the Mail for Exchange application, Nokia have announced. That's a total of 43 handsets,across the Nseries, Eseries and regular S60 range. With MS-Exchange a popular corporate mail and syncing solution, removing the software barriers to any S60 device being able to run this application is a sensible move, and should help in a number of markets, including the USA. Read the full story for a video discussing the news.
UPDATE: Nokia have formally announced this, and Rogers will initially integrate Nokia Maps and the N-Gage service to their High-Speed Network. Ewan MacLeod is over at CTIA, and has posted an intersting tit-bit on Mobile Industry Review, namely that Canadian network Rogers will be "taking their [Nokia's] Ovi platform." I'm sure Ewan will post up more on this later, but for now, having Nokia provide the phone and the network software (even if it is just Ovi Sync) should raise eyebrows in a number of quarters.
Today, in an online event, Nokia summarised and demonstrated its recent additions to the Ovi.com service offering: Ovi Suite - a PC software offering media management and phone sync, Files on Ovi - an online file storage and remote access to PC files, and Ovi Sync - a service which syncs contacts, calendar events and notes to Ovi.com. Read on for more details.
Just a memory jogger about Nokia's Ovi virtual event, starting in under an hour (2pm BST, 3pm CET) at http://events.nokia.com/. There's currently an 8 minute video overview of the Files component, but today's virtual event will add a similar video for the PIM data section (Contacts and Calendar), plus there's a Q&A session with the product managers. If you miss the event, there's another chance tomorrow morning, starting at 6am BST.
Gartner's latest survey of the the mobile marketplace shows the growth of smart-phones continuing, with a worldwide increase in the order of 16%, but with a particularly large jump in the US market. Total Q2 sales were 32.2 million, and reflecting the recently released Symbian figures, Nokia retained the largest market share (47.5%), but with slower growth than others in the market.
Pre-order information on Expansys suggests that Nokia's Comes with Music handsets may have a premium of around £70-£85. Comes with Music gives you unlimited music downloads for a year (and the right to keep that music at the end of the year). However it is must be noted that these prices should be considered speculative and subject to change. Read on for more details.
Salling software has announced the release of Salling Media Sync. The software allows you to sync playlists, songs and podcasts from iTunes to Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile phones. Salling Media Sync is available for both Mac OS X and Windows PC. The basic version is free, the premium version, which costs 15 EUR, adds sequential intelligent sync (only new or changed files after first sync).
Over at S60.com, the team have recommended a number of freeware and trial applications for S60 owners.. More from Saara on the See Into S60 blog, but it's worth highlighting their link to Dr. Jukka Silvennoinen's Profile Scheduler, a utility that will switch between profiles at designated time. I see no reason why this shouldn't be on everyone's device, or even in the S60 firmware.
