With the Nokia N92 and DVB-H mobile TV still not really established in most of the world, I was interested to see Marek Pawlowski's blogged review of his data-based 'Mobile TV' experience on a S60 smartphone. The jury's still out on the best way to provide TV on a smartphone, but suffice it to say that Marek was seriously underwhelmed by his trial.
Almost unnoticed in a post about another topic, the official N-Gage Blog recently revealed for the first time a specific month for Nokia's Next Gen Gaming Platform's launch: September 2007.
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.
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.
TalS of Howardforums posted a video today apparently showing the forthcoming Nokia E65 smartphone, which seems to match all the unofficial photos floating around the internet. Although there's still been no official word from Nokia about the phone, Finnish retailer Lohenette.fi already has the E65 available for preorder with a Q1 2007 release date and a €458 price tag (that's €357 when you take away Finnish sales tax).
If you're into trivia, pub quizzes or fact finding, note that my free Trivopaedia (... a trivia enecyclopaedia) has had a huge update and is now up to v2.2, with over 300 entries. It runs inside (the also free) Mobipocket Reader for all Symbian OS-powered smartphones. Comments welcome!
Nokia's results are in for the last quarter of 2006, you can read the full press release here. In short: Nokia's sales are up to record levels, their market share has remained at 36%, S60 models are increasingly playing a part in the entire company's lineup, not just from its Multimedia division (who sold over six million Nseries smartphones in Q4 alone) but also the main Mobile Phone division (the 5500 and 6290 are mentioned in the report as highlights of the quarter) and the business-oriented Enterprise division (who make the Eseries).
