In this comment piece, 'Should Gravity come down?', James Whatley shares his thoughts on mobile application prices. Have on-device stores, such as iPhone's App Store and Android's Marketplace, changed consumer's perception of the pricing of mobile applications? What constitutes reasonable value? Read our first Whatley Wednesday, then share your thoughts in the comments thread.
Yahoo! may make blunders elsewhere in the computing world, but they've always had their head screwed on when it comes to mobile. Yahoo! has just launched its next-gen mobile home page, which you can find at new.m.yahoo.com in your phone's web browser. Some screens below to give you a flavour, but on first look they seem to have done a good job integrating news sources, weather and traditional mobile information with a new 'Social pulse' panel, in which feeds from the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Friendster can be amalgamated and presented in chronological order.
Just before the deadline we want to point out a few more April exclusives. There's the Symbian Foundation powered toaster (Smart Toaster X, from Hussel & Robbs, the first Symbian^2 appliance) and the TEXT'N'WALK application from Looflirpa (innovative camera usage).
Nokia has released version 1.1 of its next-generation smart email system. Nokia Messaging 1.1 includes much wider language support, Windows Live Hotmail support, support for up to 10 IMAP folders and HTML formatting in emails (at last). To download it, go to email.nokia.com in Web on your S60 phone. Note that support for the 5800 and S60 5th Edition is coming in 'May'.
Nokia's long-demonstrated Point and Find service seems to have appeared in very early beta form, with many known bugs and issues, for most (but not all) S60 3rd Edition phones and for UK and USA regions only. Point and Find uses your device's camera to identify product barcodes and movie posters, linking through to relevant Web URLs. See here to get/try the beta and here for CJ's coverage.
In All About Symbian Insight 63 (AAS Podcast 120) we briefly cover the N-Gage news out of GDC (1 million profiles, accelerometer Bounce and device support). Steve and Rafe mull over the importance of the underlying changes in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, before chatting about the importance of homescreens, with reference to TouchWiz on the Omnia HD. You can listen to AAS Insight 64 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Gameloft's soccer simulator Real Football 2009 has been released on the N-Gage platform. Just go to the application's Showroom tab, select "Options" and then "Update Now", and it's also available in the "All Games" section. As always, a list of current and upcoming N-Gage compatible phones can be found on the AAN FAQ page.
I'm not sure S60 really needed yet another photo browser, but Nokia Beta Labs has gone and released one anyway, at least in 'experimental' form. Nokia Photo Browser offers a fluid wall of photos (see screens and video below), with 'magnifying glass' feature and 'face detection' (swipe from face to face in a group shot). It's very limited though, in that there are no menus or ways of actually doing things with your photos. My guess is that some of the 3D tech in this release will make its way into future S60 5th Edition devices. Anyway, enjoy for now.
Mobimate have updated their Traveller's Utility Worldmate for 2009. The major addition is a dashboard like home-screen that provides an overview of the most popular functions inside Worldmate, including flight tracking, weather and your current location, as well as the familiar Worldmate icons allowing you quick access to the world clocks, currency conversion tool and the comprehensive flight scheduling tools.
If you are into microblogging, in particular, if you love twittering and using Symbian, this is the app you are looking for. Gravity v1.00 by Mobileways is now released, the first fully-featured and native Twitter client for the S60 platform (3rd Edition and 5th Edition). It supports multiple accounts, Twitter Search, Laconica, TwitPic and wraps everything into a gorgeous looking interface. Screens and more info below, while Ewan will be having a more detailed look at the app later this week.
Another Nokia 5800 tutorial for beginners, this time we're taking a look at the e-mail options currently available on the 5800. We cover the basics of how to set up a POP or IMAP e-mail account on the phone's built-in messaging app, how to make new e-mails alert you just like text messages, how to set up multiple e-mail accounts on the same phone, and more. (We haven't covered the dedicated Nokia Messaging e-mail client or Gmail's Java client because they don't yet have proper 5800 versions.) As always, you can see a complete list of these how-to articles on our 5800 tutorial index page.
If you go to the official N-Gage Need For Speed website and click on the "Competition" pack of cards near the bottom left corner of the site, you should receive instructions on how to claim a free activation code for Mile High Pinball, Reset Generation or Pro Series Golf. This contest opened unofficially earlier in the week and some people had trouble getting their code to work, but hopefully they've fixed things now that the compo page has officially opened. Incidentally, if your activation code begins with the number 0 (zero), make sure you enter 0 (zero) and not the letter O.
I've been investigating the fact that Nokia Maps' online searching for full UK postcodes is currently broken, the last two or three characters are always missing in the results - a spokesman for Nokia said "We are aware of the problem and are working to get it fixed as soon as possible". More data points would be welcome - If you're outside the UK, do full postcode searches work in your country at the moment?
If you go to the official Need For Speed Undercover N-Gage site, you'll see a competition section labelled "coming soon". Try clicking on the words "coming soon", and you'll see a contest which tells you how to get free activation codes for Pro Series Golf, Mile High Pinball or Reset Generation. According to the n-gage.com NFSU game page, the code you require is NE3D 4 5P33D, though the prank form says NE3D 4 S433D. (via mavilacivert on the Arena forums) (UPDATE: It appears that the competition has been taken down as the "coming soon" link no longer works. We suspect they activated the link too early, as a lot of people couldn't get the codes to work.)
Astraware is selling Astraware Boardgames and Astraware Solitaire at the reduced price of $5 each until the end of this month. The games are available for Symbian S60 3rd Edition and UIQ3, and can be purchased at the reduced price from astraware.com: click here for their S60v3 section, and click here for their UIQ3 section. (Astraware's parent company Handmark is also having a sale until the 29th of March, with a "buy one, get one free" offer using the discount code "DEMAND".)
