Missed by us in the run up to MWC was Spotify's increased handset support for their streaming music client. They’ve now added support for the Nokia X6, 6700, 6760, E55 and Sony Ericsson’s Vivaz (and presumably the Vivaz Pro). For a monthly fee, Spotify will happily stream a huge catalogue of mainstream music to your handset.
Not great news for Sony Ericsson as the BBC reports on their censure from the Advertising Standards Authority (the ASA) in the UK this morning. The complaints about the advertising of the Satio handset and its Facebook integration – due to firmware problems the Facebook functionality was not present or available in the handset, the ASA have labelled the advert as misleading. Sony Ericsson have now sorted the issue.
Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs confirmed to the Helsingin Sanomat that they are working with Nokia to have a Snapdragon processor running with Symbian by the end of this year (reports Stefan at IntoMobile). Snapdragon is of course the processor inside the Google Nexus 1, and provides built in GPS, BlueTooth, WiFi cellular radio chipsets.
According to the official Ovi blog, the deployment of Nokia Ovi Suite 2.1.0.87 started yesterday, containing "many new improvements, bug fixes and features", including Ovi.com and Mozilla Thunderbird contacts sync, video transfer and playback and support for device application updates. You can get the new version from within an older version(!) or from here. This replaces the old PC Suite and other variants.
A month ago, I pitched the (then) brand new Google Nexus One against the Symbian-powered Samsung i8910 HD, a very close match in terms of form factor and specifications, concluding along similar lines - there was little to choose between them. But with the advancement of the original Nokia N97, a i8910 HD comtemporary, with its new v21 firmware and with hardware issues now largely fixed, I wondered how the N97 would fare when gently pushed into the same hardware-accelerated playground....
Ah, so it's not just me then. Respected über-blogger Jay Montano (far from an N97 fanboy, he's a Maemo 5 user these days) has compiled an interesting and highly illustrated list of ten reasons why Ovi Maps 3.3 utterly rocks on the N97. A good read over your afternoon coffee. (Note that the software itself works on a range of phones, mind you. Do buzz me if you spot Ovi Maps v3.3 (free nav) becoming available for more than the initial eight or so devices.)
One of the subjects that I like to keep coming back to is the lack of visibility that Nokia has in social media, not from content that the company creates itself (their official blog at conversations.nokia.com being one of the better corporate blogs out there), but the visibility created by reporters and consumers using and talking about the device. Because of where Nokia is geographically popular (or not), they've lost the adulation that other rival devices have. Read on for my musings....
Moubail is a handy place for third party S60 5th Edition widgets, being the home of DeviceInfo, which I've used for the last year. IMDb is the latest project, providing touchscreen, Web-like lookup of information in the Internet Movie Database. Read on for some screens, links and comments.
In our latest AAS podcast, Insight 105, Steve and Ewan discuss the news and announcements from Barcelona, including the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro, Symbian^3, Skype for 5th Edition, Nokia's Maemo/Moblin deal, Windows Phone 7 Series Pocket Pro Mobile (or something like that) and anything else which we thought of interest and relevance.
One of the more widely reported stories from MWC yesterday was the launch of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), with a number of networks and manufacturers (including Verizon, Orange, Samsung and LG) promising to “unite a fragmented marketplace by involving players from all related industries”. Sounds a dream come true, but like many similar initiatives, this is unlikely to succeed, I reckon. Read on.
Paul Boutin brings up an interesting question on VentureBeat today; why can’t Nokia sell phones to Americans?" Rather than a tear-down of the Finnish company, Boutin makes his starting point the geek-lust inducing Nokia 8110 that featured in The Matrix and details three area Nokia could address to conquer the continent.
Rafe and Ewan McLeod are hard at work bouncing around Barcelona, and they caught up with a number of companies at the MWC MobileFocus evening. One of those companies, Swype, promises a “faster and more efficient way of entering text on a touchscreen device”, as Rafe finds out in this Video Report with Mike McSherry and gets his hands on an alternative input system.
Exclusive: Skype for Symbian, long in beta for S60 3rd Edition and missing-in-action for the Nokia N97 marque, has now been overhauled, face-lifted and released for both, and is out of beta. You can get it by going to skype.com/m in Web on your (N95 onwards) S60 phone and downloading when prompted. Read on for lots of screenshots from my Nokia N97, comment and links.
In this video, recorded at Sony Ericsson's Mobile World Congress press event, we get a brief hands-on with the Sony Ericsson Vivaz looking at some of the key feature and design highlights. There's also a bonus video which shows of the 'rotation-sensitive' wallpaper on the Vivaz's homescreen.
The version 031.012 firmware for the Nokia E55 has just been released. This brings the E55 up to date with with E52, which had the same version firmware released earlier this month. See below for notes and links. The E55 has UDP, but, as noted below, do a backup of your data to card first - just in case.
