Nokia has commissioned a survey by Nielsen Entertainment which interviewed 1800 users of mobile phone games from China, Germany, India, Spain, Thailand and the United States. The results are available in a press release and suggest that people will enjoy using Nokia's Next Generation gaming platform which is due for launch in the first half of 2007. Perhaps the most interesting is the average gaming session length: 28 minutes, which is far longer than is usually thought the case on phone games, and implies that the average phone gamer plays with as much dedication as they would on a portable console.
Nokia (and other Symbian licensees) naturally tend to keep user knowledge of what goes on under the hood as out of the way as possible, but for power users Jukka Silvennoinen's free Y-Browser utility is a true Swiss Army knife that will aid troubleshooting and give you increased functionality. Here's my review of the version for all S60 3rd Edition devices.
Nokia has released a new version of its PC Suite application . The new version, 6.82, adds stability fixes to the backup and restore functionality, improves Nokia Music Manager, adds fluency in information exchange with Microsoft applications (auch as Windows Media Player 11) and integrates Nokia Software Updater, which allows you to update your phone's firmware from home, into PC Suite.
You may know John Holloway as the guy behind ZingMagic (and before that Purple Software), but he actually goes back to the very beginning of the Symbian story, working at Psion. Ewan caught up with him at the Smartphone Show and covered a huge range of issues and anecdotes. Great stuff, catch it all in AAS podcast number 3.
The huge photo-sharing site Flickr is now properly mobile again. http://m.flickr.com/ now works from any smartphone, letting you browse photo streams without incurring huge bandwidth penalties. Well worth bookmarking from your smartphone browser. (Via SymbianOne)
Similar to Uno, the card game that's currently popular again thanks to the Xbox 360, Mau Mau is a well-executed card game for all S60, UIQ and S80 smartphones. Krisse plays through a tournament on the E61 and gives the AllAboutSymbian verdict...
OK, I said I was going to shut up about over-hyped security software, and judging from comments by one security developer on-camera at the Smartphone Show, it seemed that they'd learned their lesson. But here we go again... and again....
Long-time Civilization fan Krisse has been playing '4 Elements' for S60 3rd Edition (it's also available on S60 2nd and UIQ 2). Despite superb graphics and sound, 4 Elements lets itself down with poor instructions and more than a few playability oddities.
Lumisoft has announced that there's now a new Super Scale version of its GB road map product, for S60, S60 3rd Edition and Series 80 devices. As the name implies, this features higher resolution maps. There's a nominal upgrade path from S60 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition and apparently GPS support isn't far away/
Nokia is going to be one of the main sponsors of GDC Mobile, the phone game part of the Game Developers Conference. GDC and GDC Mobile take place in San Francisco from the 5th to the 7th of March 2007. Nokia's Next Generation gaming platform is due to launch across a range of S60 3rd Edition smartphones some time in the first half of 2007, so a March sponsorship of a major gaming event would seem to be well-timed.
Symbian has released an official (video) webcast, in both RealPlayer and Windows Media format, with CEO Nigel Clifford talking about the significant '100 million smartphones' milestone. Here's the link.
Eagle-eyed observers may have noted the changed toolbar on the site, with 'Media' added. The new Media section houses regular and semi-regular audio and video content, all of which you can listen to or watch online, in your browser, or (if you prefer) use the provided RSS feeds to subscribe in iTunes or S60 Podcasting or similar, to make sure you never miss new content.
