In All About Symbian Insight 85 (AAS Podcast 147), Rafe, Steve and Ewan discuss the glut of Nokia news ahead of this week's Nokia World. We cover the Nokia Booklet 3G, Nokia 5230, Nokia Money (an under appreciated announcement) and the Nokia N900. There's also some discussion of Maemo 5, service strategy and the Sony Ericsson Satio. You can listen to AAS Insight 85 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
It seems that when you're trucking along (in the USA, UK, France or China, at least), navigating using Google Maps on your smartphone, you're actually helping crowd source traffic data for Google, i.e. the application is reporting back to Google on your position and speed, a process described here in detail. While there are possible privacy implications in this, it does seem an interesting approach - or at least it would be if there were enough people using the system - so far in the UK, only motorways seem to be tagged for traffic status. Comments welcome.
Following on from my review of the Nokia E52, it transpires that Nokia do intend to make a black(ish) version (with less keypad visibility problems) - here's their official photographic proof. Also, although Internet Radio isn't in the firmware, the version for the 6210 Navigator apparently works perfectly (official download here). Now, what about Podcasting, ladies and gents? (thanks to kazutoyo and WizzMob)
Nokia today introduced Nokia Money, a mobile financial service, which will offer basic financial management and payments from a mobile phone. It will allow you to send money to another person, using just their mobile phone number, pay for goods, services and bills or recharge pre-pad SIM cards. Financial services are widely considered a very significant market opprtunity for the future: there are 4 billion mobile phones, but only 1.6 billion bank accounts.
The Nokia Music Store India was formally launched today at the Music Connects conference. More than 3 million tracks are available and, as with Nokia Music Stores in other countries, there is a heavy emphasis on including local music. Nokia has signed up India's major independent labels including Tseries, Yashraj Music, Saregama, BIG Music and Venus; it has also partnered with India's leading music body, the Indian Music Industry. Nokia also announced that its Comes with Music service would be arriving in India later this year.
We here at All About Symbian have been using Ovi Store for quite a while now, and have noticed a number of things that need to be fixed or could be improved. We don't doubt the effort and resources that Nokia has put into this so far, but we think it's fair to demand that Ovi Store lives up to the same general standards as other online content shops. Here are 23 suggestions for the Ovi Store team's to do list, neatly categorised into 'urgent', 'gripes' and 'suggestions'!
Version 1.1 of Skyfire, the mobile browser that aims to offer a 'PC-like' browsing experience, is now available. The update delivers a number of significant improvements including zooming and scrolling optimisations, updated reconnect behaviour, better recognition of mobiles sites, and support for legacy WAP sites. Read on for our short initial preview.
Sequence Point Software's ARound project is now in beta, a free download for the Nokia N97 and compatible S60 3rd or 5th Edition phones. The project's aim is to incorporate feed data from Twitter, from geonames.org and from landmarks databases, combining the live camera viewfinder and compass and GPS information to produce an augmented reality solution for Symbian. Screenshots and links below.
Lara Croft has returned to N-Gage in Tomb Raider: Underworld. This time the aim of the game is to retrieve Thor's Hammer. Tomb Raider was one of the more popular N-Gage classic games, and this new version has a similar style. But in contrast to the original version, which was a full port of the classic version of the game, Underworld is a simple N-Gage port of a limited Symbian version of the Underworld game which was released last year. Oh dear.
Google's native S60 YouTube client has just got itself a significant update, to v2.2.17, now working in full-screen mode (at last!) on S60 5th Edition phones like the N97, 5800 and Samsung i8910 HD and with new countries and languages added to its officially supported list: Brazil, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia and Sweden. You can get the update by going to m.google.com in Web on your phone. Screenshots below the break.
Over on Ovi Gaming we've been reviewing lots more games, we have another batch of Ovi Store client installation walkthroughs, and we'd like to know which games you want us to review. See below for a complete list of links...
Just a quick link to a couple of nice software mini-reviews in the last 24 hours over on the Nokia 5800 'Tube' blog, looking at PixelPipe, which plugs a number of popular image and video sharing services into S60 Share Online, and at Shazam TrackID, which tries to identify music that's captured by the phone's microphone. A couple of nice 5-minute reads.
In All About Symbian Insight 83 (AAS Podcast 145), Rafe and Steve discuss the enterprise focused alliance between Microsoft and Nokia and ponder its implications. Steve shares news of Gartner's Q2 smartphone shipment figures, before moving on to first thoughts on the Nokia E55. We then answer some reader questions. You can listen to AAS Insight 83 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
A minor firmware update, version 12.0.024, has been released for the Nokia N97. The updates fixes a number of bugs and improves performance and stability. The firmware is being made available through both Nokia Software Updater (part of PC Suite) and OTA on the device. The firmware is currently available for SIM-free models; as usual the availability of the firmware will vary by market and device variant.
Looking for fully-working freeware for your Samsung i8910 HD (Symbian flagship smartphone)? Look no further than my definitive top 20 list (with a few apps 'bubbling under'), everything here has been tested to install and work. And, most of all, not to require you to dip into your wallet! I'll also be doing a 'Top 20' commercial software for the i8910 HD (Omnia HD) next month, so watch for that. Comments welcome, as always.
