Nokia has issued a press release today revealing some of the first 3rd Party games due on the Next Gen N-Gage gaming platform: Asphalt 3, Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway, Brain Challenge, Midnight Pool and FIFA 2008. Also, publishers Indiagames and THQ Wireless have now officially announced their support for the platform, joining Gameloft, EA and Glu Mobile. Nokia's Gregg Sauter is due to give a speech at the Game Developers Conference later today in San Francisco, where he will presumably give more details on this and other Next Gen gaming matters.
One of the companies that Rafe caught up with at the recent 3GSM was Abaxia - you might not recognise the name, but they play an interesting role in the S60 ecosystem. Users of the Orange Signature devices will be familiar with their work, as they are the company who programmed Orange's alternative Home. That's not all they do though, as Rafe found out in the All About Symbian Podcast #15 .
Widsets, java-hosted online widgets that bring you news or filtered web lookups, have a steadily growing following. They're also partly funded by Nokia, fully compatible with every Symbian OS smartphone in the last few years and the always excellent E-series blog has just published an eloquent Widsets write-up.
According to a recent report on Gamesindustry.biz, the mobile games publisher Glu Mobile has announced its support for Nokia's Next Gen games platform. EA and Gameloft have already officially committed to the platform, and a document seen by All About Symbian last year suggested that Sony, Square Enix, THQ and Activision would also publish games on it. A Pocket Gamer report earlier this year revealed that Disney, Sega, Sony, Universal, Square Enix, Capcom, THQ, Glu Mobile, Digital Chocolate, EA, Tecmo and Namco all attended a secret Nokia Next Gen games platform workshop in January 2007.
With its tiny size, slider form factor and extra telephony buttons, the Nokia E65 looks to be quite a special smartphone with a voice/business emphasis. Rafe has been living with an early production example for a week and here's his big E65 review.
For anybody still with a S60 2nd Edition smartphone (e.g. Nokia 6630, 6680, N70, N90), note that there's a new beta of FExplorer out. v1.16 (22 Feb 2007), adding better selection of multiple files, a rewritten file editor with copy/paste/select functions and some bug fixes. Note that we're still waiting for a proper public beta for S60 3rd Edition.
Research firm IDC has issued worldwide figures for smartphone sales for 2006, reporting that 80 million shipped in all, of which Nokia accounted for around half, 38 million devices. RIM's Blackberry came in second with 7 million, with Motorola's Windows Mobile and Linux portfolio in third, at almost 5 million. (via RingNokia)
Mash ups (mixing two services together) has been one of the keystones of the Web 2.0 toolset and we are starting to see this trend move into mobile. In AAS Podcast 13 Ewan talks to Tom Morris about his mash up of Twitter (a SMS social networking tool) and the London Underground.
Krisse explores the myths and deceptions involved with selling phones 'locked'. When is a free phone not really free? What about the so-called advantages of buying through a network operator? And how can you and I change the situation? Read on in another thought-provoking Krisse rant!
Announced over in our forums was that emoze, the popular (for those on flat rate data plans) push email/contacts/calendar system, has just been upgraded to work on S60 3rd Edition devices like the Nokia E61 and N73.
Krisse reviews this top flight S60 game and finds beautifully rendered scenes, great music, a good plot and a unique interface. Will anything spoil the idyll?
