Ewan reviews Pocket Sudoku, the latest freeware entry into an admittedly crowded genre. Summary? Functional and free, although it's fairly inflexible and it doesn't hold your hand like the more commercial offerings.
Steve Litchfield takes a detailed look at Onskreen's Fusion system for integrating latest news and information into your Series 60 idle/standby screen. Summary? It's cleverly done, but linked to inappropriate story URLs and could be very expensive in terms of GPRS.
Nokia has confirmed the N91 Music Phone, initially due out for Christmas 2005 has been delayed due to isses with the Music DRM (reports The Register). As the N91 launch date continues to slip (and starts to get a whiff of vapour ware), the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone from 3GSM is starting to look more and more attractive. Not least because its 4gig of memory is in flash, while the N91 runs off a 'miniature' hard drive.
Steve tests Mobile Search for Series 60 (and 80), for finding specific text strings in your PIM data and file system, and finds that it's now quite usable, with more promised from the developers in the future. Here's the review.
Ewan's broken out his N-Gage to review the latest epic from Nokia. Civilisation (II) is a port from the classic PC game of the early 1990s and looks to be solidly implemented.
RMR Software continue their high quality Series 80 applications with the launch of RMR VacTrac, the Vacation Tracker for employers. It's also useful to work out when your writing staff are jetting round Europe and the world to various conferences...
Steve Litchfield explores the goodies that Google Local for Mobile brings to any Symbian (or Windows Mobile, come to that) smartphone. Free mapping, aerial photography and route planning for anywhere in the world? Yup, but watch your GPRS bill...
I started reviewing Another World and gave up, it was just too hard - Ewan showed some Scottish grit and made it further into this 1990s epic, cinematic adventure game. Here's his review.
Steve discovers XXL Screensaver, a freeware utility to replace the default Nokia 'strip' screen saver, and finds it incredibly cool and rather useful. Here's the review.
ShoZu, the moblog client for Flickr, Webshots, Text America and Buzznet has been updated to v1.6 for S60 users. New in this version is the ability to back up and edit (via the Shozu website) your contacts. To get the latest build, log into Shozu with your username.
On Tuesday Skype announced a partnership with Hutchinson to put Skype on phones on the 3 networks around the world. However, Skype were not willing to answer questions on specific handsets saying only that they were actively working on development for the Symbian platform. However at the 'Do New' booth on the Nokia stand there was a demo of Skype running on two 6680s over a 3G network. Read on for details...
Moving away from Handango, Sony Ericsson have launched their Application Shop powered by Motricity (the company behind the Gear sites, including PalmGear and SymbianGear). The shop will support the Pxxx series of phones, from P800 to the P990, and the newly announced Walkman W950 and M600i.
Since debuting the UIQ3 SDK back in October 2005 developers have been working on porting and developing titles to run under Symbian OS 9.1. A number of them have been chosen by Sony Ericsson to have "try and buy" demo version pre-installed on the Memory Stick supplied with the P990 and other UIQ devices. The lucky eleven include ZingMagic, Epocware and Amazon's MobiPocket.
There's always been a huge fragmentation problem with mobile games having to be tested against every possible device configuration, even with the promise of write once run anywhere of Java. So to see Symbian and Microsoft stand alongside Activision, Digital Chocolate, EA, Ideaworks, Konami, Nokia, Montavista, Samsung, SK Telecome, Square Enix, Tau Group and Texas Instruments to define and support an open gaming architecture is promising, but of course it's results that count. Lets see what happens.
Zi has announced details of the latest version of its Decuma product, available on UIQ phones as Decuma Alphabetic. New in version 4 is predictive input, more supported languages, dual language support (use more than one language at once), used word dictionary (tracks, learns and prioritise words you write), personal dictionary, and user defined shortcuts.
Steve Litchfield explores the goodies that Google Local for Mobile brings to any Symbian (or Windows Mobile, come to that) smartphone. Free mapping, aerial photography and route planning for anywhere in the world? Yup, but watch your GPRS bill...
