Good news for fans of Nokia's Sports Tracker application – the technology is being spun out of Nokia and into a new company. Sports Tracking Technologies Oy (STT) has been started by Jussi Kaasinen and Yka Huhtala, the core developers behind Sports Tracker. Nokia will continue to have access to the app, and will be a client of STT.
Guest writer David Gilson talks about his switch from Windows to Linux (Ubuntu) and his (successful) struggles to keep his desktop-S60 connectivity going, from PIM data to music to backups to tethering. Could you make the same switch? Are there any showstoppers for you? Comments welcome.
Revising and adding to my feature from March 2009, I proudly present the All About Symbian Top 25 freeware applications for S60 5th Edition. Why risk infesting yourself with Hannah Montana screensavers or get disappointed by re-download behaviour in the Ovi Store when you can just use freeware to get the job done? No cash needed, no DRM, no issues giving to friends, no license manager, no hassles.
Mobile Jorge has uncovered another useful new entrant to the Java/S60 software scene, in the form of the strangely named J1CK.Tweet, a Java-based Twitter client that works flawlessly on S60 3rd and 5th Edition phones and which, from the screenshots, appears to be challenging the commercial Gravity client, with Twitpic support, multiple accounts, trending topics, and more. Well worth a look, seeing as J1CK.Tweet is (beta) freeware.
NAVTEQ would literally like to take you for a ride at SEE. Along with the usual activities, NAVTEQ Network for Developers (NN4D) will be giving developers the opportunity to gain an insight into how NAVTEQ gathers mapping and location information.
'furtiv', a startup that creates social media solutions for mobile devices, has released a beta of their technology showcase, which allows you to use Nokia's Share online application to upload to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Picasa. This effectively adds one click upload to each of these services to the Gallery/Photos and Camera applications. The service works with most recent Nokia Symbian devices (Nokia Share online 2.0 or higher required). Read on for further details.
Nokia today released betas for Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3, both of which include Symbian support. Qt is Nokia's cross platform application and UI framework, which is set to become a key developer offering in the Symbian and Maemo platforms. Qt Creator is a cross platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Qt developers.
In All About Symbian Insight 90 (AAS Podcast 152), Rafe and Steve briefly touch on the Maemo Summit before moving on to a discussion of the relative roles of Maemo and Symbian and the importance of the cost of devices. Steve gives us a run down on the N97 camera glass 'scratch' issue and how to get things fixed (though note that this was before the Care Point trip). There are also answers to a number of user questions. You can listen to AAS Insight 90 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
You've got to hope that today marks the point at which Nokia started to leave the whole sorry mess of its PC connectivity experiments behind it and moved forward with confidence. Ovi Suite 2.0 is now 'graduated' (from Beta Labs) and will start to be included in phone retail boxes. Here's the full report on Nokia's plans, and don't forget to grab your own copy (.exe link). Does Ovi Suite 2.0 now complete replace what you had before? Comments welcome.
It's been some time now since launch, so how well is the Ovi Store doing for Nokia? Is it providing enough applications for end users and a good user experience? Are developers knocking down the web-doors to get listed in the store? Or is it all being hushed up because it's not gaining any mind share at all? I wonder aloud what's going on...
Following the success of its UIQ version, DreamSpring has launched DreamConnect, its all-in Contact Manager, for S60 5th Edition. There are quotes from the press release below, but essentially you get hierarchical sub-categories, business card display and 'KeyMatch', which replaces the virtual keyboard on 5th edition smartphones with a finger friendly, compact quick-matching keypad.
Available for quite a few S60 3rd Edition and S60 5th Edition phones, Vlingo promises web searching, email, text and Facebook status updates, all with voice-to-text speech recognition. But how well does it work in practice? Not perfectly, it has to be said, but it's close enough to make it worth trying out with your voice and in your own use case. Here's my Vlingo review.
In All About Symbian Insight 89 (AAS Podcast 151), Rafe and Steve talk about the recent release of version 20 firmware for the Nokia N86 8MP. Rafe and Ewan report back from Over the Air (OTA) where they listened to presentations on Symbian approach to evolving UI and Nokia's Qt strategy. There's also discussion about Nokia's acquisition of Dopplr. You can listen to AAS Insight 89 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Yesterday's heads up from Google about a local search update left us scratching our heads. It was a redesign of the layout, as well as adding some category support, but fundamentally it was a tweak to the existing local search that's available in any city around the world by punching in http://www.google.com/m/local into your phone's web browser. Still, it got the blogs writing about the product again... read on for my thoughts!
Nokia is continuing to evolve the desktop version of its Ovi Maps service: the latest 'release' sees the ability to add 'Good Things' (user generated Points of Interest - PoIs) to the map. The functionality is aimed at allowing you to share interesting locations with the world, be it the location of your favourite coffee shop of the venue for an upcoming gig. In order to see and to add your own Good Things you will need to upgrade to the latest version of the Ovi Maps browser plug-in (via Symbian-Guru). Read on for more.
