Dreamspring has announced a 'Life Information Management' tool, DreamLife, planned to be released in early 2008. They are recruiting beta testers at the moment. DreamLife integrates DreamConnect 3 with the UIQ 3 Calendar, allowing you to link contacts to activities and giving you the ability to add and edit activities and contacts from one place. Full press release after the break.
Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show Nokia showed S60 running with a touch interface. The touch interface will support both finger and stylus input, has full multi lingual support, has support for tactile feedback (haptics) and is backwardly compatible with the existing S60 platform. Read the full story for and to view the video showing S60 Touch running on some concept devices.
Sony Ericsson, Motorola and UIQ Technology today announced that Motorola has taken a 50% stake in UIQ Technology. UIQ Technology was previously wholly owned by Sony Ericsson following its purchase from Symbian earlier this year. This represents a very significant endorsement of UIQ by Motorola and underlines Motorola's plan to expand its high end multimedia portfolio using UIQ powered phones.
There's a big new version for Gmail's Java application for mobile phones, released quietly yesterday. If you click on a contact in Gmail Mobile 1.5, you'll see full details, including their photo, and if you entered the phone number in your contact's details, you can call them directly from Gmail Mobile. More improvements listed below.
Google has created a version of its Google Maps application for S60 3rd Edition phones. Google Maps is now a native Symbian OS 9 application, which gives better overall performance compared to Java version. As an added bonus, the application now supports the use of the internal GPS in relevant phones; allowing you to see your current location. Read on for plenty of screenshots and a quick run through of the features.
Web portal, proxy service or online RSS reader? Sometimes the boundaries can get a little blurred. Ewan takes a detailed look at Mippin, launched yesterday, and finds it surprisingly useful.
If you happening to be visiting Finland and own a Nokia phone running S60 3rd Edition then David Dewhurst has just the application for you. Flash Finnish is a free Flash Lite game designed to help you learn Finnish. It currently has basic vocabulary, numbers and colour, but more additions are planned after the beta test.
Jukka Silvennoinen, creator the very popular YBrowser, a free file manager for S60, has gone one step further and released much of the core code in Open Source form, together with examples of how to plug-in your own code. All details and downloads here.
Jaiku, the activity streaming and presence service (also referred to as micro blogging), has been acquired by Google. The terms of the acquisition has not been disclosed. While Jaiku is often used via the web it also has strong mobile features (including a native S60 client) and the idea of presence is a very important part of the Jaiku message.
Telefónica and Nokia have announced that the two companies are to work together on Internet services. Nokia will customise its multimedia menu on Nseries devices to enable easy access to both Nokia (e.g. Nokia Music Shop, N-Gage) and Telefónica services. The announcement is significant because its puts Nokia's own service offering on an equal footing to those provided by an operator. Read on for more.
Nokia Beta Labs has released an interesting application, Device Status, which lets you access a variety of information and which can be helpful in solving support issues. There is an application for S60 devices which collects information about your phone and a companion PC application which allows you to more easily view the information about your phone as well as collecting information about your PC.
Guest writer Asri al-Baker has been trialling the brand new CorePlayer ports for both UIQ 3 (on his Sony Ericsson P990i) and S60 3rd Edition (on his Nokia N95). How well does this hallowed media player stand up to video and audio tests on both Symbian interfaces? Can it really play any media file in any format, codec or resolution? Find out in his CorePlayer Mobile review.
Garmin, maker of standalone and other GPS-focussed devices, has launched Mobile XT, a complete microSD-based navigation solution for smartphones, priced at $99. Details of international availability are sketchy at the moment, but we've asked Garmin UK if they can get hold of a review sample for us to try.
Guest writer Asri al-Baker has been trialling the brand new CorePlayer ports for both UIQ 3 (on his Sony Ericsson P990i) and S60 3rd Edition (on his Nokia N95). How well does this hallowed media player stand up to video and audio tests on both Symbian interfaces? Can it really play any media file in any format, codec or resolution? Find out in his CorePlayer Mobile review.
