Even before Apple's iPhone App Store and Google's Android Marketplace Nokia's Download! service was mediocre. Now it looks decidedly sub-standard. In this feature article Tzer2 takes a detailed look at what's wrong with Download, asks whether a third party could step in and gives some pointers about the right way to do things.
Video conversation site Seemsic has released a beta N95 client for the service. It allows you to record and subsequently upload a video to the site either as a new post or as a reply to an existing conversation. The service is free to join (as is Seesmic itself) and you can download it by pointing you N95 at http://m.seesmic.com/.
S60.com do like giving away free bits and pieces, and themes that they approve of are usually of very high quality. This month, there's an Autumn theme, 'Seasonal', which you can grab for free after registering and logging in.
Possibly the first of several mobile chat clients to support Facebook chat, eBuddy has taken the wraps off its new Facebook support. It's Java, although Mobile Royale (who tipped me off about eBuddy) coincidentally has a challenge open for someone to write a S60 Facebook Chat client. And has anyone here tried weaving Nokia Chat in with Facebook - can it be done yet?
A new version of Nokia Photos, a media (images and video) sync and management application for your PC, is now available through Nokia Beta Labs. The new version, 1.5, has a new look to fit in with the Ovi branding, improved support for importing images from non-Nokia devices, tools for adding and visualising geo-tagged images, and improved integration with Share on Ovi and other Nokia services. Read on for further details.
[Cue spooky music] "The Darkness is coming...." In fact, the Darkness arrived today, in the form of PiZero's latest work, available in super-polished custom, default and Flahorn icon versions. It works very well on black S60 devices, but I wouldn't recommend it on the silver N82 and N95 classic!
You may have gathered, over the years, that Ewan's a bit of a Mobipocket Reader fan. Personally, I sit there fuming wondering why the developers still haven't got round to programming a 'Find' function, but that's another rant for another day. Anyway, Ewan's penned a useful beginner's guide on how to make your own ebooks, for reading on the move and for saving huge amounts of excess book-weight when travelling.
Nokia's LifeviNe project has been renamed, it seems, to just Nokia ViNe: Jeff Clinton provides a detailed walkthrough of the application and service, for automatically logging your photos, videos and listened music, for sharing with the world, while Ricky Cadden asks whether the application makes sense, pointing out that it doesn't give much that's new and worrying about possible battery drain implications. I'd echo some of his worries, preferring to simply geotag my photos and upload them to Ovi or Flickr or similar. What do you think of Sports Tracker's evolution?
I can't really believe I'm writing a news post about a new version of Calculator - but hey, it's a Friday - and fair play to Nokia Beta Labs - at least it's still improving and there seems to be an intention to put it in future firmwares - so get on over, grab it and give Nokia some beta feedback. New for this release is a redesigned front panel.
"If music be the glue that holds nations together (c.f. the Eurovision Song Contest), then a Social Music Player should be the stuff of Peace Treaties". Or so writes Ewan Spence, wondering if Strands can pull everything from your music experience together? He slips on some lightweight headphones to find out... How good a music player is it, and how integrated is it with the online world?
Following on from Ewan's thoughts yesterday on the freedom in the Symbian/S60 developer world, I have to say that I take a slightly different view. Over and over, I'm finding that applications I download (from developer sites, from AAS, from Handango, etc) can't easily be installed, each coming up with 'Expired certificate'. Read on for a Steve rant....
A couple of great little articles over on the N82 blog, covering ways of manually hiding your media files so that others don't stumble on your goodies (although there's also always the fairly new Media Safe 2, in our software store, which does everything automatically) and a how-to on setting a GIF or Flash animation as your S60 phone screensaver.
Google Maps for S60 (and also the UIQ and Java versions) just got more accurate, with news that Google has significantly improved its cell tower location algorithms for its 'My location' feature ("far more accurate") to take into account tower coverage areas - hmmm... I'd assumed that these were already taken into account.... No matter, Google Maps is free, as always, at m.google.com, and this will help anyone without a GPS in their phone or in areas of poor sky visibility. (via Google Mobile)
Another trip away, another opportunity to really test out Nokia Maps, here in its latest v2.0 version with updated maps. And it all went horribly wrong, with navigation completely unusable. Read on for more and to comment if you've experienced similar problems. [update] From the comments so far, it seems that map data for some countries is simply broken.
Live streaming video from a S60 handset is something that only Ewan (on the AAS team) has any real world experience of - so we set him to compare the latest versions from the two main contenders, head to head. Qik vs Flixwagon. Ewan helpfully provides a couple of live-ish example videos too, so that you get the idea.
