The Symbian Foundation today officially unveiled Symbian^3 at Mobile World Congress. In this video, Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Foundation, gives us an introduction to Symbian^3 and highlights some of the platform's key features, including new user experience enhancements and architectural evolution.
With the mobile industry gathered in Barcelona, MWC Day 1 is underway. In this post, we'll be bringing you live coverage from Nokia's event. The event kicks off at 10:30am GMT and we'll be covering both the press conferences and some of the follow up events and interviews.
Popular Symbian Twitter client Gravity, hot on the heals of the addition of geo-location, has now added support for Foursquare to check in from the client. Driven, like many of the changes in Gravity, by user requests, you simply add your Foursquare account from the main screen then click through and update your location via GPS. It’s currently available to download for 5th Edition devices in the alpha builds of Gravity. Read on for screens etc.
Wild Ducks is a Symbian Foundation project that aims to demonstrate how the recently open sourced Symbian platform can run on open hardware. The project uses the popular Beagle Board as the main board which, together with a modem and few other components, gives you everything you need to make a phone. This allows anyone to build their own Symbian based phones with off the shelf hardware. Over two videos we talk to Arunabh Ankur to get the details on the project and take a look at the project's hardware running Symbian^2. Read on for more.
Python for S60 has been in a state of flux for oh so long, with multiple forks and levels, but it seems we can put all that behind us now with the formal release of the big shiny v2.0 - the dev kit was released today. You may have noted that we reported on PyS60 being made available via Sw update on some 3rd Edition FP2 devices (and above) a month ago. This new kit represents all the other bits developers (and users) might need to write in Python. The announcement, quoted below, also mentions that the source code is being donated to the Symbian Foundation.
Nokia has begun the process of rolling out a series of updates for its Nokia Messaging for Email service. The first update available is for the S60 5th Edition Nokia Messaging client. It is available in the SW Update application and is labelled 'Nokia Messaging 10.2'. Further updates, including an updated client for S60 3rd Edition devices and server side updates will be made available over the next few weeks. Read on for further details.
Following on from my review (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4) of the Nokia X6 32GB Comes with Music, I have received the new v12 firmware with open arms and report back here on the transformation it makes to my intensive use of this music-focussed smartphone. There are still issues that need attention, but at least I can trust the X6 - for the first time.
Much of the buzz around the Symbian platform in the past year has been around open source and the move to Qt and a new UI in Symbian^4. However there is lots of on-going development in other areas too. One example of this is the Social Mobile Framework (SMF), a major contribution proposal to the Symbian platform by Sasken. In this video we talk to James Aley of the Symbian Foundation who explains what the SMF is and the potential benefits to developers.
Following the announcement earlier this evening of Google Buzz, the extension of Google and Gmail into social networking, Google Maps (for Mobile) 4.0 has been released, advertised with the feature: "Post and view real-time messages & photos at places around the world". For Symbian at the moment, Buzz is just implemented as another Layer in Google Maps' existing system, though there will be a compatible web site soon as well. For the Gmail integration to work, you'll have to click the link on the Google Buzz web site and then reload your Gmail page. Otherwise, just use Buzz direct from the new Google Maps, just 'Add Buzz', tap the speech bubble and you're off. Screenshots, video and more below. Comments welcome if you've got it working as well.
The calculator genre has been a popular one in all handheld and phone ecosystems over the years. Here I look at TouchCalc Lite, a recent addition to the genre explicitly for S60 5th Edition phones, finding that an austere interface hides an evaluation engine which is surprisingly powerful.
Following up from user feedback, the team behind Nokia Messaging for Social Networks has released a second beta of the application. Improvements in the handling for both Twitter and Facebook are included, plus support for S40 based devices. You can download from the site, but caveat emptor, this is clearly a beta and will have rough edges.
In All About Symbian Insight 104 (AAS Podcast 168), Rafe and Steve start with a quick look ahead to Mobile World Congress and then round up a number of small news items, including multiple firmware updates (N97 mini, X6, 5730, E52), details of a new version of the Ovi Store client, information on Greystripe and the Ovi Store and the lowdown on 1.4 million Ovi Maps downloads. In the second half of the podcast we discuss the big news that the the open sourcing (EPL) of the Symbian platform (40 million lines of code) has been completed four months ahead of schedule. You can listen to AAS Insight 104 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
It’s been making its way around the various territories in the last few days, and now we’re happy to say that we have the updated firmware running on the Nokia X6 here at AAS (link to our review). The update to v12.0.091 can be installed (once available) either Over the Air or via the Nokia Software Updater on your PC. Even though your data should be preserved during the update, we would always recommend backing up any phone before an update is started.
While you can argue about what the numbers actually mean, it’s nice to see that the main players in mobile browser are all feeding back changes to the WebKit open-source project. Alongside Nokia (and Trolltech), Apple, Google and RIM are all contributing in some form, as shown in Evan Martin's blog post to the Chromium web
David Gilson recently performed a big feature on Twitter applications on Symbian and S60. Mind you, thanks to the feedback of AAS readers, he has now expanded his survey to now cover an eye watering seventeen Twitter options for S60 users wanting to get more out Twitter. Gulp. Read on!
