Mobile Systems has announced availability of v5.0 of its OfficeSuite, with the headline feature being viewer support for Office 2007's XML file formats. Here's the press release. (Long time readers will know that rival Quickoffice already has full Office 2007 editing, but more competition in this field is always good)
In All About Symbian Podcast 99 (Insight #46) we talk about the N96 which has received mixed reviews from initial users. In the second half the podcast Ewan provides his first impressions of One, the latest N-Gage game, before we move on to discussing manufacturer commitment to the Symbian Foundation and what the future may hold for UIQ.
The application/service Nokia Friend View, which has been made available on Nokia Beta Labs today, is a combined location and micro-blogging application. It allows you to share your location (automatically using GPS or network-based location or manually) with your friends and see where they are, or at least where they were when they last posted a status update/post. Screens, details and thoughts below. Of particular note is that it has both a Web component (for desktop access) and also that it works on any S60 phone and not just Nokia devices.
Nokia's "Share on Ovi" service has announced that the popular live video streaming service Flixwagon will be available on handsets. By linking your Ovi account to your Flixwagon account, whenever you finish a broadcast on your handset via Flixwagon, it will upload the completed video to your Ovi account (as well as your Flixwagon account), giving an immediate benefit of having your archive of live videos alongside the rest of your Ovi hosted media.
UIQ is dead! But not for CellPhoneSoft, one of the most active software houses that still supports UIQ and who has produced File Associate, which can assign different applications to open files. For example, it can associate .DOC files with Docs To Go instead of the built-in Quickword. And it has a generic viewer to view .ZIP, SWF and TXT files too! Screens after the break.
DataViz have announced a new version of RoadSyc. RoadSync allows secure, direct push synchronisation with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007 servers (push email, contacts and calendar). The big addition in version 4 is support for full HTML email, but it also adds a number of usability improvements, and support for task and Contact photo synchronisation.
More video from our coverage of the London Smartphone Show 2008, in which I chat to Phil and Tanya from Quickoffice about their new v6 office suite for S60, plus Sari from S60 waxes lyrical about S60 5th Edition.
Today, at the Nokia Games Summit in Rome, Nokia announced the forthcoming availability of Dance Fabulous, a new firsty party game title for N-Gage. It is a dancing / rythmn game where you create and customise a dancer (avatar) and then lead it through dance moves. The games has built in community and sharing features and comes with a set of music created by Dave Stewart and sung by Cindy Gomez.
The long-awaited 3D fighting game ONE is out now on the N-Gage platform. Go to the Showroom section of the app and select the Update Now option to see it. For more info see All About N-Gage's ONE game page, and the official trailer is visible below.
WorldMate has announced that they now have over a million S60 users of their free (and optionally paid for) service. I've included the brief press release below, also partly because the company promises that the next generation of their software, WorldMate Live, is 'currently in development'. The 'Live' version incorporates social elements such as itinerary sharing and contact discovery via overlapping travel plans.
In All About Symbian Podcast 98 (Insight #45) we are back from last weeks Symbian Smartphone Show at Earl's Court. There some discussion on the feel and size of the show, Symbian Foundation related announcements, and the start of our run through of some of the devices and demos we saw.
Just making sure that you catch up with Ricky Cadden as he presents his real world thoughts on Nokia's Share Online, pointing out that it's far too laborious when you've got more than a handful of photos to share with the world. Quite agree. Also agree with him that the PC/web-side of things is now really slick.
AAS regular 'jbpseudo' has been writing here on his experiences with Taptu, specifically their new beta-status standby screen widget. I have to confess to having forgotten all about Taptu, so this article is a timely reminder of a valid competitor on the mobile side of things for the mighty Google.
GMail's Java-based client seemed to have been stuck at v1 for decades - it's just had the big 2.0 upgrade. It's still Java and larger (at 500K), but it's faster and, it's claimed, more reliable, especially when working for short periods offline. There's also now support for multiple GMail accounts and sending email in the background. To download version 2.0, go to m.google.com/mail in your phone browser.
Nokia do seem to be getting better at communications with the outside world, as evidenced by the very switched on and honest status update just posted by the 'Nokia Email' service team. If you use this service then take a look.
