If you click on the Ovi Gaming site's menu bar item labelled Ovi Store Games, you'll see it now contains pages and brief info about all of the games currently in Ovi Store, along with reviews and screenshots for a few of them. Over time we'll be adding a lot more reviews, screenshots and perhaps even some videos too, slowly building up a comprehensive guide to Ovi's gaming world.
My smartphones are usually geared around helping me work - email, web, IM, and so on. But every once in a while, real life intervenes, with family visits (in this case) demanding a complete break from work activity. And yet my Nokia 5800 turned out to be a star performer in everyone's eyes rather than a geeky 'Steve's trying to work when he should be chatting' electronic toy. Somewhat surprisingly.
Possibly as part of the whole Ovi server shake-up, possibly as part of the new Ovi Maps server architecture, Nokia's Maps servers have now been 'fixed' and will, after a frustrating couple of months of being broken, successfully match full seven character UK postcodes. Phew - just thought you'd like to know.
The rather brilliant N-Gage-exclusive 3D platform game Bounce Boing Voyage has been updated to include motion control on those phones which have accelerometers, where you can tilt the phone to control the main character (or you can use the traditional button controls if you prefer). If you've already bought the game you can get the updated version free, and if you haven't bought the game you can buy it from the N-Gage showroom tab. Instructions for updating existing games are below.
Kudos to Vaibhav's researching skills as he scours the Internet for photos and videos taken on the upcoming Nokia N97 and collates them all into a single post. The samples all look pretty decent, especially the videos taken at high volume - something which the N95 and N82 would object to.
The 'Comes with Music' version of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic will be available in the UK, SIM-free, for a cost of £300, from the Nokia UK Store from May 21st. It comes with a 12 month Comes with Music 'subscription' so that you can download an unlimited amount of music, from the Nokia Music Store, for one year. The 'Comes with Music' version has a £50 price premium over the standard Nokia 5800. Read on for more links.
In All About Symbian Insight 70 (AAS Podcast 128) Steve and Rafe talk about the upcoming N97 and the return of Comes with Music to the UK. However the main part of the show is taken up with answering questions from listeners. We touch on Ovi Store, Nseries branding, screen resolution and more. You can listen to AAS Insight 71 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
In the third of his tutorial series looking at Nokia Messaging, Asri al-Baker looks at the email setup process, using the Nokia 5800 as a guinea pig device. This guide applies for all users who are not using the E75 (at the moment) because this has a different (newer) version of Nokia Messaging. Asri explains the decision point about dropping back to S60 Messaging or deciding to press on with the (beta, but soon-to-be-commercial) 'push' service, the core of Nokia Messaging.
Many people have noted that the Download! client now gives a message saying that it will be "temporarily unavailable" today, while at the same time the Ovi Store site currently asks for a name and password to access it. Could something be stirring behind the scenes at Ovi Store?
The BBC News website today reported proposals to change EU rules governing consumer rights regarding software guarantees. In amongst the article was a gem of a statement from the Business Software Alliance which represents Microsoft, Apple, IBM and many other software giants: "(Digital content) is contractually licensed to consumers and not sold."
A heads-up that both of my recent tutorials for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic have just been updated, for completeness and for posterity, building in some of the comment that AAS readers have made. Thanks again for your input. Here are the links again: How to use Google's Gmail application on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and How to free up space on disk C on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.
If, like me, your Nokia 5800 has an internal disk that has seemed to shrink and shrink over the last five months, then you might be interested in another in our tutorial series, this time walking beginners through the steps of recovering space used by old temporary files and installed over-the-air updates. I managed to recover 40MB(!) on my 5800 XpressMusic, but your comments welcome here. [main article updated 6pm Monday to include helpful comments from AAS users]
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is tightly integrated with a number of media-sharing sites, including Ovi Share, Flickr and Vox, and you can upload your photos and videos to these sites directly from the 5800's camera and gallery applications. In the latest (somewhat epic) tutorial in our beginners series, Tzer2 leaves no stone unturned in explaining how to get going and imparts a number of tips along the way.
The N-Gage application has been updated to a new version. There don't seem to be any major changes visible, but apparently this fixes some score sync and predictive text problems, and possibly other bugs. If you want to update, open your N-Gage application, select "Options" and then "Check For Updates", then follow the instructions. Alternatively you can download directly from this link. Important Notes: The update download file may have the old app version number, but it IS the new version. Also, after installation the N-Gage icon may get moved from the front page to the Applications folder, you can move it back to the front page by using the instructions below.
Just a few miscellaneous Nokia N97 bits and pieces. Rafe, Ewan and I had the N97 as the core of our recording of AAS Insight 70, which will be up on Monday - we're all in agreement over the great 'N97 clock speed' debate, at least. Then there were yet more example N97 camera photos, looking good. And now there's a near-ten-minute arty video (the high quality version embedded below) from the guys who designed the N97, including some interesting snaps of the Nokia production line and some new screenshots and animations (plus all you ever wanted to know about the N97 hinge).
