Nokia Beta Labs has today introduced an 'Ovi Mail Setup” application', allowing anyone to sign-up for an Ovi Mail account directly from a S60 device. The same utility is being built into the upcoming E72 and into the new N97 firmware. If you already have an Ovi account then it will provision Ovi Mail and configure the email client already on the device.
Rafe and I attended the Over the Air mobile developer conference this past weekend (expect to hear more about this on the next Insight Podcast) and a number of the presentation made are now online. Scott Weiss of the Symbian Foundation talked about "Open Source and the User Experience" which can now be found here.
The latest Chinese i8910UZCII1 firmware for the Samsung i8910 (Omnia HD) adds kinetic scrolling to the built-in S60 web browser and takes the browser build number up to 7.2.13841. However, the Chinese firmware contains some other issues which break compatibility with European languages, Samsung's PC Suite and some other application. So how can this help you? ... read on to find out.
In All About Symbian Insight 88 (AAS Podcast 150), Rafe and Steve talk about the release dates for some upcoming devices and preview the Nokia 5730. Rafe reports back from the Ovi Developer Day and Steve shares news of the latest Nokia 5800 firmware and upcoming firmware for the N86. There's also discussion about the Ovi Store and Vodafone 360. You can listen to AAS Insight 88 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Are there times when you don't want to keep picking which music to play? Wouldn't it be nice if a utility picked up on your mood and automatically chose music to fit it? Playlist DJ, reviewed here by Rafe, does just that, picking tunes from the music library in your S60 5th Edition smartphone and generally helping you through the day. Best of all, it's free for the next month or so while the developers build up their song databases, so why not give it a try?
The Ovi Store team have just started to roll out the ability to re-download purchased content. Content is tightly linked to your Ovi account, which means you can re-download content either to the same device it was purchased on, or a different device (e.g. when you upgrade). Previously Ovi Store content could only be downloaded once, on original purchase, to a single device. Currently the re-download functionality is only available for selected content and there are some caveats. Read on in the full story for more details.
You may have noticed that the newer S60 3rd Edition FP2 phones, the ones that ship with the new v7 version of Nokia's Webkit-based Web browser, had been left high and dry regarding a client for Nokia's Ovi Store - trying to install the existing client resulted in an unusably slow experience. There's a new, Web v7-compatible client now though, v1.05(313) - you can get it from going to store.ovi.com in Web on your device - it's a 620k download. In use, the new Ovi Store client is faster than I've seen on any previous device. Anyway, that's one less thing for the Ovi Store people to fix up! (via Ovi Applications)
Back in July I reviewed Mobile Task Manager, a Java powered To-Do list and was pleasantly surprised at the flexibility it offered. I also hoped it would continue to improve. Well developer Tommi Laukkanen has released v1.2 with plenty of updates and a handful of bug fixes, mostly focused on prioritising your to-do's to make the best use of your time. You can download the free app here.
How about a new way to look at, integrate and play online with your media? That's what Kinoma Play promises, for S60 3rd Edition and QVGA screens at least. Integrating Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Last.FM and many others, together with all the content already on your phone, seems like Kinoma Play is all-encompassing. Here's Ewan's largely positive assessment of this (commercial) new media suite.
If you're a camera geek like me and wish there was a way to view the EXIF information for photos on your S60 5th Edition phone, well now there is. XpressEXIF does need a little fiddling around, plus Python, and there are a few caveats, but SymbianWorld brings us a walkthrough showing that viewing EXIF data is possible with this utility.
Guest author David Gilson provides a brief look at Tweets60, a freeware alternative to the well known commercial Gravity. It certainly lacks Gravity's polish, but how useable is it in real life? David also explains why he prefers freeware - it's to do with lack of hassle more than lack of cost, a very valid viewpoint.
A little bit of lateral thinking by the Nokia Beta Labs team sees Braille Reader coming to touchscreen S60 5th Edition phones, making the most of both touch and haptic feedback. I'm not qualified to comment on its usefulness, but see below for the launch video.
It's coming close to the one year anniversary of Nokia's all you can eat music service, “Comes With Music”, and that birthday is pretty important to those who picked up the first wave of devices from The Carphone Warehouse. Because the 'all you can download' part was only ever going to last a year... so the flow of bits and musical bytes is about to run out for the early adopters. Or is it? Read on for my thoughts.
A new release of the Java-hosted Opera Mini is always a big event. This is a beta launch, but still extremely interesting, with Opera Mini 5.0 adding smooth font aliasing, multiple browser windows, a password manager and much better support for touchscreen phones. On the downside, the application is larger, at 220kb (still small in the overall scheme of things, though), and custom form and editing fields mean that you can't now copy and paste text in and out of the application. I was going to produce a walkthrough of the new features, but there's absolutely no point because our good friend Stefan has already done this in good detail. You can get Opera Mini 5.0 by going to mini.opera.com/beta in Web on your phone.
It was an early Series 60 legend - the file manager utility that also cooked the tea and did the laundry. And today FExplorer has surfaced into the modern Symbian age, fully updated for all S60 3rd and 5th Edition phones, courtesy of SBSH. The bad news: it's now commercial software, as Ricky Cadden reports, along with a selection of screenshots. However, if you don't think you can rise to the purchase price, there's also a launch competition to win 5 license keys.
