The Doctor Who brand may conjure up a vision of a game that's rather different to the one reviewed here. Top Trumps Doctor Who is a new commercial game for mobiles and we couldn't resist setting our resident time lord expert onto it in order to evaluate..... evaluate... evaluate...
If you run N-Gage games on a Nokia N95, its multimedia keys automatically turn into gaming keys equivalent to those on the N81 or N96. There still seem to be a lot of people unaware of this, or even claiming that we're mistaken, so we've done a very short video showing this feature in action. Click here to see it...
I know quite a few of you rely on my definitive pub-quiz-helper, Trivopaedia. It's now been brought up to 2008 levels, with up to date stats for v2.3 . It's available in Mobipocket reader and iSilo formats (i.e. compatible with any portable device or any platform), in addition to being fully online as well - and of course it's still free.
Have you had trouble installing N-Gage on your phone? Need some help with using the application? Want to know what other kinds of games your N-Gage-compatible phone can run? Perhaps you should check out a new site called the N-Gage School, which contains videos and step-by-step tutorials aimed at people of all skill levels, with more tutorials to be added on a regular basis. (Incidentally, to make things clear, the N-Gage School is written by yours truly, but it has no official connection to AAN or AAS.)
What are the first 10 applications you install on your phone? That's the question that was poised, and answered, by Mark Guim of the Nokia Blog. Also weighing in with responses were a number of other S60 Bloggers: Vaibhav Sharma of the the Symbian Blog, Steve Rowlands at S60 Blogger, Gerrymoth at Nokia Addict, Zack Epstein at Symbian-in-Motion and Stefan Constantinescu at IntoMobile. Read on for a summary of the applications mentioned and their popularity.
In its latest hardware feature, All About N-Gage takes a brief look at the N95 as a games machine. It turns out to be actually rather good, due to N-Gage and S60 games working in horizontal mode, and being able to use the multimedia controls as N-Gage gaming buttons. Those new to the N95 should also see the links to AAS's review of it as a general phone, which are at the bottom of the page.
The Finnish online electronics shop Verkkokauppa.com has started shipping its first Nokia N78 smartphones to customers, with a sim-free unlocked pre-tax price of 367 euros (the Finnish price behind the link is 448 euros which includes 22% local sales tax). The price includes a 1 year subscription to Nokia Maps Navigation for the Nordic region. It shouldn't be long before the N78 rolls out to other countries too.
Ferrari World Championship seems to have been a high profile game announcement that was followed by a very low profile release (e.g. it's not even in Nokia's Download! system) - but unnecessarily so, since it turns out to be great fun and one of the best Java games to yet appear. Cross-platform and running on just about any phone or smartphone, here's my full and illustrated Ferrari World Championship review. Highly recommended.
The eagerly-awaited next gen N-Gage game Snakes Subsonic is now available from the N-Gage application's showroom. However, one of us couldn't see it even after selecting "Update Now", click on the headline to find out how this problem was solved.
The N-Gage platform aims to usher in a new age of high quality connected phone gaming. However if you upgrade to a new phone, you cannot transfer any of your N-Gage games from the old phone. In a special feature article All About N-Gage looks at why this is such a damaging policy for N-Gage, what the unintended consequences are, and a number of potential solutions. Will Nokia change their minds on this issue? Update: Looks like Nokia has indeed now changed their minds, their official blog has announced a game transfer system is on the way! Read the Nokia blog's statement.
Sweden is the latest country to get its own Nokia Music Store. The deal is along the same lines as those in other countries, with 10 krona per track, 100 krona per album, and 100 krona per month for unlimited tracks on your PC.
In the spirit of better-late-than-never, we've finally done a brief summary of how the N81 / N81 8GB performs as a gaming phone for All About N-Gage's hardware section. This aspect of the N81 was missing from All About Symbian's original review of the phone as the N-Gage platform hadn't launched at the time, and we felt it was unfair to judge an N-Gage phone without N-Gage games.
MobiMate recently added extra real-time flight information and facilities to their flagship traveller's app WorldMate Professional. Luckily our own Ewan knows a thing or two about travel utilities and so I threw the app in his direction. The result? We now have ourselves another (though fairly rare) All About Symbian 'MegaApp'. Here's the full review.
A combination of 3G, 3.5G, Wi-Fi and flat rate phone data charges provide lots of possibilities for internet gaming on the new N-Gage platform. Take part in our new poll and let the world know which kind of online gaming you most want to see on N-Gage, or even tell us if you don't want online gaming at all.
You've got to admire some developers for the way they manage to release their titles across the range of smartphone platforms, in this case at least five varieties on Symbian OS. Attila Katona has been reviewing Herocraft's new Hexxagon Labs strategy game (think Othello but six-sided) on S60 and comes away quite impressed.