Another Nokia N95-related link - I've just added it to my interactive smartphone-selector Grid. Plug in your personal preferences and see which are the most suitable devices for you. And if the N95 wins - well, you've only got another month or so to wait!
X-Plore is a file manager for S60 phones from Lonely Cat Games the authors of Smart Movie and Profimail. X-Plore is currently available as a free beta. It includes the usual file manager features and also includes a images and text viewer. It does not use the standard S60 UI elements and consequently is able to fit more information on the screen at one time.
The first part of a new series of tutorials on developing for UIQ is now available on the Sony Ericsson Developer world website. The tutorials are written by freelance developer Simon Judge and part 1 covers cover UIQ the platform and offers an architectural overview.
Just a note that I've now updated my big one-page S60 device comparison table over on 3-Lib to include this year's new Nokia S60 3rd Edition smartphones. As usual, comments and corrections welcome!
According to a report on Pocket Gamer, a secret workshop for American and Asian publishers and developers on Nokia's next gen gaming platform was held in Santa Monica last week. Perhaps most notable in the article is the incredible list of publishers that apparently attended the event: Disney, Sega, Sony, Universal, Square Enix, Capcom, THQ, Glu Mobile, Digital Chocolate, EA, Tecmo, Namco and Vivendi. The article also claims 3rd party publishers just got their development kits in January, which could suit a Summer launch and Xmas advertising push fairly well (old generation N-Gage titles usually took 6 - 12 months to make). These revelations seem to confirm what All About Symbian exclusively revealed last October. Another event will apparently be held in Madrid next week for European publishers and devs.
With less than a month to go until the closing date of UIQ Open, a scheme to promote UIQ 3 demos and new apps, Rafe interviews Sébastien Peirone, Developer Communications Manager at UIQ Technology. What's the competition about and what's up for grabs?
In addition to podcasting, street magic and PSP gaming, it turns out that Ewan's not bad at Bridge either - here he reviews ZingMagic's Omar Sharif Bridge for all S60 3rd Edition smartphones.
If you really want to overdose on N95 goodness and full-blooded Symbian enthusiasm, watch Symbian Freak (run by apocalypso from the AAS forums) over the next week, who has just taken delivery of his pre-production N95 and who promises 'not to sleep' during testing(!) His comments are especially interesting as it's all from a strict power user perspective.
Unlike P990 and M600 where Pdf+ is included in the ROM, the Sony Ericsson W950 Walkman smartphone doesn't have a built in PDF reader. With this new release, it is now possible to read PDF files while listening to your favourite music collection in your W950.
If you own UIQ 3 smartphones, especially P990 and M600, you ought to check this excellent utility called Tweak Peaks from CellPhoneSoft (Producer of Swiss Manager). It get rid of the transition effect, making navigation and general usage faster.
Last week an Eclipse PluginFest was held at Symbian's London offices. The PluginFest aims to test the inter-operability of Eclipse based development solutions and demonstrates one of the key advantages of using an Eclipse based development tool.
