The Symbian Foundation today officially unveiled Symbian^3 at Mobile World Congress. In this video, Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Foundation, gives us an introduction to Symbian^3 and highlights some of the platform's key features, including new user experience enhancements and architectural evolution.
As expected by many, Nokia chose to concentrate on their services for their second event this morning at Mobile World Congress (the first was the Moblin/Maemo merger), announcing a barrage of stats, covering the Symbian-relevant Ovi Maps and Ovi Store, plus numbers for Life Tools, all summarised below. Nokia also announced a live pilot of their Nokia Money, designed to allow mobile payments throughout developing countries.
Nokia and Intel’s creation of Meego, from the Maemo and Moblin projects, is a big move, from both companies, and we’ll be covering the announcement and further thoughts over on All About Maemo. This should make Nokia’s strategy over the mid term a little clearer, and perhaps answers the question of what the future is for the Nokia Booklet. Apart from that pesky GMA500 graphics chip, Meego should run “out of the box” on the Booklet when it makes an appearance in Q2.
The Sunday Times has put together an interesting profile on Nokia, published on the eve of MWC. It looks at their position and market share, and takes a pretty even look at where the Finnish company is at the moment. It’s interesting that the story, while framed by the emerging markets of India, compares Nokia to Apple and the service cultures that are growing from each company.
Adobe are making a lot of noise at MWC with their Flash technology moving into the mobile space. Symbian have joined Adobe and their Open Screen Project, with a view to having the Flash Player on “future versions of Symbian”. With over 70 companies now working on the Open Screen Project, the dream of write once, run anywhere is still being kept alive.
With the mobile industry gathered in Barcelona, MWC Day 1 is underway. In this post, we'll be bringing you live coverage from Nokia's event. The event kicks off at 10:30am GMT and we'll be covering both the press conferences and some of the follow up events and interviews.
We don't link to every other blog's hardware reviews, but we do link to the best: those that are well written and insightful, rather than just being a mass of specs and photos. In this case, here's the Prodigal Fool summing up the Nokia E72 very well, both good points and bad points. In other E72 news, people are reporting a firmware update to v23.002 - comments welcome if you spot anything new. Wonder if this addresses any of the Prodigal's points?
The Symbian Foundation has today unveiled Symbian^3, with details quoted below. And, courtesy of the video-friendly chaps at Nokia Conversations (YouTube channel), we now have an impressive video 'design preview' of Symbian^3 in action. Remember, this is the OS and user interface that will be included in Symbian-powered smartphones in the second half of 2010. Highlights from the video, embedded at high resolution below, are multiple homescreens, 3D 'Coverflow' for music albums, 'single tap' direct manipulation UI everywhere, multitouch (pinching, splaying, to zoom) and live visual multitasking (Web OS/Maemo 5-style). It's quite a visual feast, so look below and enjoy.
Popular Symbian Twitter client Gravity, hot on the heals of the addition of geo-location, has now added support for Foursquare to check in from the client. Driven, like many of the changes in Gravity, by user requests, you simply add your Foursquare account from the main screen then click through and update your location via GPS. It’s currently available to download for 5th Edition devices in the alpha builds of Gravity. Read on for screens etc.
At a pre-MWC press event, Sony Ericsson has announced the Vivaz Pro, essentially a slightly chunkier Vivaz with sliding qwerty keyboard. Other specs remain the same, with 3.2" resistive touchscreen and it runs vanilla S60 5th Edition with Sony Ericsson panelled homescreen and Media browser/player (same as Satio). Sony Ericsson are emphasising, amidst the simultaneous launch of other smartphones on two other OS platforms, that they're aiming their user experience to be 'OS agnostic', a similar strategy to Samsung's. You'll find specs, photos and promo below. Rafe's at the event and we're hoping to get more details and photos in due course.
Entertainment is a strong brand story for Sony Ericsson. Announced today, Sony Ericsson Creations leverages that brand story, with the goal of transforming the creative entertainment process into a community. A key facilitator in Sony Ericsson’s new community will be applications to enable the citizen entertainer.
Wild Ducks is a Symbian Foundation project that aims to demonstrate how the recently open sourced Symbian platform can run on open hardware. The project uses the popular Beagle Board as the main board which, together with a modem and few other components, gives you everything you need to make a phone. This allows anyone to build their own Symbian based phones with off the shelf hardware. Over two videos we talk to Arunabh Ankur to get the details on the project and take a look at the project's hardware running Symbian^2. Read on for more.
Tower Defense games are popular on Flash web sites, but can Digital Chocolate, in the Nokia Ovi Store, use their Java programming wizardry to bring a tiny battle to your smartphone screen? Ewan dons his peaked cap to find out, in our Ovi Gaming Dictator Defense review.
Python for S60 has been in a state of flux for oh so long, with multiple forks and levels, but it seems we can put all that behind us now with the formal release of the big shiny v2.0 - the dev kit was released today. You may have noted that we reported on PyS60 being made available via Sw update on some 3rd Edition FP2 devices (and above) a month ago. This new kit represents all the other bits developers (and users) might need to write in Python. The announcement, quoted below, also mentions that the source code is being donated to the Symbian Foundation.
A slightly cheeky Friday link of interest, but I noticed that the most excellent Sky Force Reloaded (reviewed by Ewan here) is now only a quid (£1) in the Nokia Ovi Store, which has to be the gaming bargain of the century. Oh, apart from four even bigger bargains, in that they're all still free in the Ovi Store: Raging Thunder (reviewed here), ToonWarz, Wave Blazer and Armageddon Squadron.
