When it made its first appearance at the Symbian Smartphone Show last year, it was the talk of the town. DreamSpring, the team who brought us DreamConnect, have at last announced the availability of DreamLife, an integrated contact and calendar manager for UIQ 3 smartphones. Read on for the press release.
Google has released a native client for Google search for S60 phones. The application, available via the Google mobile site, places a shortcut to a Google search box on the Idle screen (unfortunately only for devices with either a 'Ctrl' or 'pencil/edit' key), but is also accessible via the usual application launcher on all devices. Typing in a query to the search box and pressing search opens up Web and takes you to the results page for that Google query in one go. It uses the new Google Mobile search service we mentioned a few weeks ago. Read on for more.
You've got to love all the cool widgets and utilities coming out of Nokia Beta Labs. They just announced the availability of Nokia Text Messenger, a Windows Vista desktop gadget to show your received text messages and let you send new ones.
Popcap Games (or the online gaming equivalent of crack cocaine) have inked an agreement with Nokia to bring a number of their titles to mobile, and to use the SNAP mobile platform to provide multi-player support for the Java based titles. In rough terms, SNAP is similar to the N-Gage Arena, but primarily for J2ME applications, and it can also be run by a network provider as their own gaming portal (eg YourNetwork Gaming Portal, SNAP powered), which should make the networks as happy as the gamers.
From accelerometer enthusiast(!) Andrew Galpin comes news: "The first of Samir’s two new apps have been released to beta testers. The first one, ShakeMe (video below), allows the user to perform certain actions on their phone by Shaking it, rather than using a keypress. Currently it supports 4 modes, with more to be added in the next release! More below."
At the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Fransisco Glu Mobile and Nokia unveiled a number of new N-Gage games. The Dark Knight ties in with the new Batman movie and sees you fighting to eradicate crime in Gotham city. SPEED RACER, also tying in with an upcoming movie, is a racing game while Super Slam Ping Pong is a fight title in the style of Super K.O. Boxing.
In All About Symbian Insight #13 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss their first impressions of Mobile World Congress 2008. Rafe gives his impressions from the show floor while Steve and Ewan pick out their highlights from the various announcements and cover a variety of news from last week.
Playyou, the social gaming network that lets you build your own games (Hmmm, why does that sound familiar) has a nice Q&A on their blog with Kars Alfrink, who does consulting work with them. Partly it's to highlight his upcoming talk at the Games Developer Conference on Casual Social Gaming, but also about Playyoo's Games Creator software.
Handmark were promising a native S60 version of their information portal app at last year's Smartphone Show. It seems it just went live, at least for UK users. It's a 2.4MB install though, and you need to surrender phone number and postcode info before it'll do anything. As with the original Java version, you get news, sport, dictionary, weather and finance stats for free, but you need to pay for mapping and travel help (via IntoMobile)
Released as a Valentine's present is the latest build of Mobitubia, one of a handful of third party YouTube viewing applications. With the ability to download the FLV videos and watch them while offline, it's a popular choice for a number of you, and it shows the powerful nature of having a fully open platform that third parties can write applications.
Yamake has broken cover, in the latest N-Gage press release. A 'game creating game,' players are able to pick and mix their own games from a range of mini-games, add in their own skins, themes, text, sound clips and movies from their PC. These can then be uploaded and shared with the rest of the Yamake community.
Gamasutra has a fascinating editorial by Russell Carroll, from Reflexive Games, talking about the amount of piracy in casual games and what measures have proven effective. The scary number is that piracy runs at up to 92% for their titles, and rather than one pirate copy equals one lost sales, Reflexive found that they had to stop one thousand pirate downloads to gain one extra sale.
Push email specialist emoze seems to be improving in all areas. Their free push service has just been extended to anyone with any POP3 account (i.e. no GMail or Exchange needed). And, unlike the GMail dedicated client, this one's native Symbian OS, so it's faster and leaner. Well worth checking out if you've been lusting after push email but didn't know how to get started.
Anyone know whether we should read anything into the fact that emTube's web site has been taken down? Legal action from YouTube about unauthorised access to their streams? emTube (direct YouTube video access) continues to work, but it would be great if someone could fill us in with hard news on this, arguably the best S60 app yet created.
Before you get too discouraged by Ewan's 'sharing' analysis(!), here's a nice (Flash) demonstration of what can be achieved by Ovi's Share (/Twango) - working on the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words, the slideshow is equivalent to a small book...
