Nokia have just unveiled a new first party virtual pet simulator, Creebies, for the upcoming Next Gen N-Gage platform. To find out more, head on over to All About N-Gage. Also noteworthy in the press release is that Nokia describes N-Gage as available for "Nokia Nseries and other S60 3rd Edition devices", although they haven't yet revealed exactly which non-Nseries models will support the platform.
Software genius Samir must be burning the candle at both ends, with apps coming out of his ears. YTPlayer (new screenshots below) is a first beta of a full YouTube searcher and player. And it works, within the beta limitations. If any programmer is worth a PayPal donation it's this guy. Go on, make his Christmas.
File this one under 'Cool, but very early days', Nokia Beta Labs has released 'PC Phone', a Firefox extension for your PC that gives you access to your S60 smartphone and its calling, messaging and contacts functions. Comments welcome on what this might eventually turn into!
Nokia recently released a press release about a report it had comissioned, 'A Glimpse of the Next Episode' which talked about the future of entertainment. The main trend identified was the coming of 'Circular Entertainment' (content created, edited and shared within a peer community rather than traditional media sources). Nokia have now released a number of videos featuring discussion around some of the key areas of the report. Read on for more and to view the videos.
Nokia Research Centre has made available, as a technology demonstrator, Activity Monitor for the Nokia N95 and N95 8GB. It uses the accelerometer built into the phone to count the number of steps you take in a given period of time. It then uses the collected data to display various statistics including energy consumed, steps taken and distance travelled. Activity monitor is therefore best thought of as an intelligent 'super' pedometer.
Now that Adobe's Flash Lite 3 has been 'released', ways of accessing YouTube on a smartphone are starting to leak out. Following a really convoluted method, there's been the commercial demo of Mobitubia (mini-site and 9 minute brand new video with appallingly funny English!), and now RotateMe wizard Samir brings us FLVPlayer - although it's currently hard wired to a few test videos and needs further development. Throw in an updated version of Web and it can't be long until the Holy Grail becomes possible, surely?
Yes, yes, it's just another 'news headlines and content' reader, but Nokia do seem to have some high profile content partners for this free venture, so worth giving Channels a try. Of note is that Channels auto-rotates the screen if relevant, i.e. it's accelerometer-aware on the likes of the N95 and N82 - as the blog entry notes , 'this is a sign of things to come'.
The Italians may have a few things that aren't exactly perfect in their economy, but boy do they have style. Following on from my rave write up of PiZero, here's your theme for today, 'Everything Burns' , from P@sco.
The hands-down best S60 theme ever created, PiZero's 'Gold' has had a big upgrade, to v2.0 ! How can you have an upgrade, with bug fixes and version numbers, all for a simple theme? Because this is no ordinary theme and, like most of PiZero's other creations, it's implemented in meticulous detail. Oh, and if you like Gold 2.0, drop him a few PayPal dollars - I did.
Shhh.... don't tell Rafe I told you this ( 8-) as you know, we do like you to buy software through our Handango-run store, so that we get commission to keep AAS going), but... Handango have one of their 'Free App Friday' offers on today only, giving away the S60 Calendar replacement Papyrus - completely free ! Thought you'd want to know, anyway...
Describing itself as the world's "first social bookmarking system completely designed and optimized for mobile phone users", PhoneFavs is new and free. In addition to the social bookmark element, there's a mobile link directory and a new "mobilizing" engine which automatically adapts standard web pages for improved viewing on smaller screen devices and, helpfully, has an 'images on/off' toggle. See below for screenshots, links and the press release.
Nokia and Telecon Italia today announced that Ovi services will be enabled on Nokia handsets, starting with the N95 8GB and N81, offered by TIM. TIM services will be offered alongside Nokia's Map, Music and Photo services. TIM joins Telefonica and Vodafone who have made similar announcements endorsing Nokia's Ovi vision.
