Nokia has now integrated their long available Internet-based Search utility with the local (i.e. on your device) Search previously only (officially) available with the Nokia E50. Less confusion and more functionality all round. Mobile Search is available for every S60 3rd Edition smartphone. The full press release follows. Update: See comments below before visiting site...
Warring Nations is an established turn-based strategy game for other handheld platforms - but it's now available for UIQ 3 smartphones and RPG maestro Ewan tries it out. Summary? A great and detailed RPG but not a very good fit for a multi-tasking smartphone.
Good games for S60 3rd Edition seem to be arriving in a steady stream. Quite a number of them from ZingMagic's direction, it has to be said. Here I review Magi-Mix, a superbly-implemented and very challenging word puzzle.
X-Plore is a file manager for S60 phones from Lonely Cat Games the authors of Smart Movie and Profimail. X-Plore is currently available as a free beta. It includes the usual file manager features and also includes a images and text viewer. It does not use the standard S60 UI elements and consequently is able to fit more information on the screen at one time.
According to a report on Pocket Gamer, a secret workshop for American and Asian publishers and developers on Nokia's next gen gaming platform was held in Santa Monica last week. Perhaps most notable in the article is the incredible list of publishers that apparently attended the event: Disney, Sega, Sony, Universal, Square Enix, Capcom, THQ, Glu Mobile, Digital Chocolate, EA, Tecmo, Namco and Vivendi. The article also claims 3rd party publishers just got their development kits in January, which could suit a Summer launch and Xmas advertising push fairly well (old generation N-Gage titles usually took 6 - 12 months to make). These revelations seem to confirm what All About Symbian exclusively revealed last October. Another event will apparently be held in Madrid next week for European publishers and devs.
In addition to podcasting, street magic and PSP gaming, it turns out that Ewan's not bad at Bridge either - here he reviews ZingMagic's Omar Sharif Bridge for all S60 3rd Edition smartphones.
Unlike P990 and M600 where Pdf+ is included in the ROM, the Sony Ericsson W950 Walkman smartphone doesn't have a built in PDF reader. With this new release, it is now possible to read PDF files while listening to your favourite music collection in your W950.
If you own UIQ 3 smartphones, especially P990 and M600, you ought to check this excellent utility called Tweak Peaks from CellPhoneSoft (Producer of Swiss Manager). It get rid of the transition effect, making navigation and general usage faster.
Oh yes! The hugely respected cross-platform hypertext document reader iSilo has now entered open beta testing for S60 3rd Edition. Here's v4.33 - if you do install it, be sure to feed problems back to the developers.
If you're into trivia, pub quizzes or fact finding, note that my free Trivopaedia (... a trivia enecyclopaedia) has had a huge update and is now up to v2.2, with over 300 entries. It runs inside (the also free) Mobipocket Reader for all Symbian OS-powered smartphones. Comments welcome!
