You'll know him as kflyer from our forums, but Miyuru also runs his own blog and sites - and he's also a nice kid and has given me a heads up on several news stories this year. Miyuru's created a survey of some of the Symbian/smartphone questions that most of us are interested in - it only takes 2 minutes to go through, so why not give it a try? I'll make sure the results get linked to here afterwards.
Right on schedule (for a change), Smartphones Show 61 is out, with a video version of my hands-on review of the Nokia E71, plus news of an impending change of a name for the show. It's worth pointing out that show 61 was recorded before yesterday's big news, by the way...
This is officially huge, and in many ways. It's a breaking story on Reuters right now, more here through the day I suspect... "Finnish cellphone maker Nokia Corp said on Tuesday it was buying out other shareholders of handset software firm Symbian, and opening the software for royalty-free use. The net cash outlay from Nokia to buy the approximately 52 percent of Symbian shares it does not already own will be about 264 million euros (208.5 million pounds)." There are now official Nokia press releases here and here.
Nokia has snapped up Berlin-based Plazes, an SMS-based location-aware social network. Plazes has been in beta for ages and the developers promise that all their plans will carrry on under the new ownership. Now - I wonder whether Nokia can go the extra mile and add GPS-support to Plazes? (via PhoneBoy)
My review of the Nokia E71, after a week with a production device, still left a few questions in the air, apparently. Rounding up everybody's comments so far, I've attempted (below) to try and answer all the questions about the E71, with Rafe (who also has a production device) pitching in to help. [Heavily updated - again]
Well, we haven't seen the hoped-for releases of Sims 2 or Pro Series Golf, but there have been one or two N-Gage-related developments this week. Click on the news headline to see a complete rundown.
Another one of those Interesting Things Which You Might Not Have Noticed: the Finnish phone network operator Saunalahti has a service called Wippies with the same idea as Fon. You order a free Wippies Wi-Fi router which lets all Wippies members access your home connection wirelessly, and you can access theirs, with the aim of building a free nationwide or worldwide service. It was initially just an experiment in Finland last year, but it's now expanding to cover other countries too, with Sweden, Denmark and most recently Estonia joining the network.
In this beginners tutorial, I share a little of my sat-nav experience, hopefully of help to anybody suffering from slow GPS locks, especially under S60 and Nokia Maps, and frustrated by the apparent 'unreliability' of mobile navigation software. Here's how to make sure your GPS locks are faster and how to speed around Nokia Maps.
Over on All About N-Gage, we've just published a guide to S60 3rd Edition games, or "unofficial N-Gage games" as we like to call them. If you're new to S60 gaming, you might want to check out this article which goes through what S60 games are, where you can get them, how you install them and which games you should download or buy. It's written with owners of N-Gage-compatible phones in mind, but the article could equally apply to almost all S60 3rd Edition devices.
You'll recall that the Nokia E90 Communicator recently received a major official firmware update, to v210.34.75, as reported by me here. This brought the E90 into a pretty mature state apart from the fact that Web's Flash integration seemed horribly broken, but only for some people. Read on for my investigation...
Think you missed out by not being invited to the S60 Summit? Are you interested in the whys and hows of how the smartphone industry works and where it's going? Then check out Rafe's comprehensive slide gallery from the two days in Barcelona, complete with comments as appropriate. More content from the Summit to follow....
S60.com's recent video competition, "Show your S60 Smarts", has ended and the winners have been picked down at the S60 Summit. Our very own Rafe came in third, with a little help from his dog. You can view all the winning video entries here - that's your lunchtime viewing sorted and you'll learn a few things along the way too!
Wednesday morning sees the start of the S60 Summit in Barcelona, with Rafe and Ewan in attendance, more from them as it happens. See below, though, for photos and information on so-new-it's-almost-vapour Nokia N100 - the ultimate S60 smartphone? Plus my thoughts on Nokia's design strategies - maybe some of these will be taken on board by the manufacturers represented at the summit?
All About Symbian regular Matt Radford is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists this week, it's here at his All About iPhone blog. Carnival 125 is a bit of a cracker, actually, with discussion about whether content providers should pay the carriers for the data consumed by the end user, with a look at a huge new mobile-related craze from Japan, plus a detailed look at the implications of Google's Android (and the aforementioned Apple iPhone) for the rest of the smartphone industry.
Sweden is the latest country to get its own Nokia Music Store. The deal is along the same lines as those in other countries, with 10 krona per track, 100 krona per album, and 100 krona per month for unlimited tracks on your PC.
