For those who grew up with 'Series 60' and are now trying to get used to 'S60 3rd Edition', there's a timely article here from Ravindra, pointing out that the old d-pad shortcuts on the 'home'/'standby' screen are still available as an option. I can quite see his point and I'll bet that many people reading this had totally forgotten about this alternative app launcher.
Living near a big city, it's all too easy to think of my phone/smartphone experience as being typical of the norm. During the course of a week away in the country, I made several observations which show that we should never take 'our' mobile environment for granted or assume any level of capability in other mobile users. And, along the way, I managed to crash an 'iPhone' and get a couple of people to go all dizzy while explaining what I was doing with the N95 8GB...
Ewan wasn't at all happy with my choice of test 'Real World Tasks' earlier in the week, and has come up with his own - and I have to say - much more interesting list. Here find another, more Scottish, comparison between the Nokia N95 8GB, the Apple iPhone 3G and the HTC Kaiser (AT & T Tilt)...
Nokia's opened a new site called N-Gage Feedback Forum, which lets you submit ideas and feedback, and vote on other people's submissions too, all in a Digg-style interface. It's hosted by the consumer feedback company UserVoice, and it should be very interesting as long as Nokia does actually respond to the points raised. The top suggestion right now concerns the continuing lack of N93/N73 support...
If you have an N-Gage-compatible phone (at the moment that means the N81, N81 8GB, N82, N95 or N95 8GB) you may like to take a look at this article over on AAN which details an ultra-simple method for installing the N-Gage application. It works entirely through the phone's browser, and doesn't require a computer at all. We've mentioned this method before in other articles, but it seems a lot of people missed it and Nokia doesn't really publicise it either, so here it is again in greater detail.
Spec-sheet comparisons are all very well, but how good are the Nokia N95 8GB, the Apple iPhone 3G and the HTC Diamond in real life? The AAS team has come up with a dozen things that we all like to do with our phones and Steve was then set to accomplishing all of them on all three devices. Can the sheer usability and likeability of the iPhone triumph over Nokia's N95 design and S60? Is the HTC Touch Diamond a competitor here? Find out in the full usability feature.
It's been a busy week over on All About N-Gage, with videos, polls, sales charts, themes, the big Brothers In Arms review, and other assorted gubbins. For those of you who haven't been following AAN lately, we present a quick round-up.
Nokia Pilots, a new programme to get people like you to give feedback on new prototypes and services (sounds like fun), is going to launch in September - here's the holding page for it. If you like playing on the bleeding edge (heh, OK, so that's all of you), then bookmark Nokia Pilots now.
There have been some great posts from Mark and Al at their Nokia blog in the last couple of days. Worth a look are Going Green while travelling (creating mobile PDFs of your important documents), a video with Nokia product manager Chanse Arrington, and a walkthrough of sending locations from Google Earth to Nokia Maps.
The BBC News website is reporting that Sony Ericsson is to cut two thousand jobs over the next year, in order to cut operating costs. The company was making a profit this time last year, but in the last quarter it reported a small loss.
The file-sharing service Share On Ovi is holding a competition for the next couple of weeks to find the best photo uploaded to the service. If you want to take part, just choose what you think is your best photo on Ovi and add the tag "best1" to it. You can view current entries by clicking on this link.
In AAS podcast 84, a.k.a. Insight 32, Rafe, Ewan, Steve and Stefan talk about the new GPS-enabled Nokia Chat, the Nokia 6220 Plastic err.... Classic [just kidding, Nokia, we say lots of nice things about it really], Pro Series Golf and Nokia Download! Held together by wit, chewing gum and a piece of sticky tape, it's compered this week by Ewan, so you probably know what to expect(!)
Aha. Things really do seem to be coming together on the sync front. From GooSync's extensions to My Nokia Backup to the imminent Ovi Sync, I've now spotted that Google's GMail contacts is a) about to acquire a SyncML interface, meaning that you can sync from any Symbian OS phone, and b) now changed so that your contacts don't get flooded with email addresses (this has been a longstanding bugbear of mine).
Nokia's unified login system Nokia Account is now working again and accepting new registrations, just click on the "New Account" link below the login form. As we noted before, it's not yet in use by most Ovi services, but the plan is for your Nokia Account username to replace all the separate logins Ovi currently requires. If you want to make sure you get your favourite username, it's worth registering it on Nokia Account now so you're ready for the unification. (Note that the registration only requires an e-mail address OR a phone number, you don't have to give both.)
Nokia has completed its acquisition of Plazes, a privately-owned start-up company in Berlin. By acquiring Plazes, Nokia "will be able to extend its context-based service offering with social presence and time-based activity planning features." It's not clear whether this service will be rolled into another service (Nokia Chat?) or developed standalone and rebranded.
