You may have already bookmarked my own 3-Lib web guide, but there's another mobile web portal on the block, 247mini, run by recent Nokia E61 convert Shaun McGill. It's pretty impressive, too, and well worth bookmarking from any PDA or smartphone.
Interesting to see Darla posting the news that ROK have launched a free mobile-based Voice over IP service. The catch? Well, it currently requires S60 2nd Edition smartphones at each end, each running the client application and each within a few metres of their home or office broadband connection with Bluetooth-enabled PCs. Hardly mass market, but let's drink to continuing innovation.
Map24 has launched Map24 Mobile, a free mobile version of it's mapping and routing service. The mobile version downloads data over the air (watch those data charges) and includes full map coverage of Europe. The application is currently in Beta and is available for both 2nd and 3rd Edition S60 devices.
According to a report on Gamesindustry.biz, Nokia is to be joint sponsor along with PC World of the 2006 BAFTA Games Awards. Nokia will sponsor the Gameplay award which is voted for by members of the public, and is apparently carrying the N-Gage brand. This continued support for the name implies that they're going to continue using it with their Next Gen games service due to launch in the first half of 2007 on new Nokia S60 smartphones.
Ruby for Symbian is a version of the Ruby object orientated scripting language for Symbian phones. It currently runs on S60 2nd Edition phone and is available only in a preview release version (intended to demonstrate different milestones in the project). Ruby for Symbian was funded by the Google Summer of Code program.
This is a biggie - I review the Nokia N73, featuring perhaps the best camera ever put into a smartphone but with a few less impressive design and quality issues. Stuart Clark provides a welcome second opinion. And you can leave yours in the comments...
Nokia has agreed to buy out gate5, a leading supplier of mapping, routing and navigation software and services. Nokia will then be able to offer consumers maps, routing, navigation and other location based applications on its smartphones. The navigation genre for S60 3rd Edition was already busy, but an official Nokia solution, perhaps built into many devices, would be more than welcome. Press release follows...
News from Somusar that their application-generator can now produce self-signed programs for S60 3rd Edition. It's an almost code-free way to get text, sounds and graphics into a working smartphone application. Press release follows.
A tiny bit skewed by not including free applications, but there's still plenty of merit in an app being nominated as a 'Handango Champion'. Here are the official 2006 finalists (click through and choose 'S60' or 'UIQ', warning - it's a Flash-based site)
I don't normally post software news items here (after all, they're listed in the right hand strip, in date order), but TimeTrack was one of my most-used utilities on S60 2nd Edition and it's now available for all 3rd Edition devices. Recommended for any professional who needs to account for his or her time.
Rafe demonstrates in illustrated detail how to use Nokia's new Phone Software Update tool to upgrade your S60 smartphone with the very latest firmware version.
Very welcome though perhaps early days, Nokia has released a S60 Phone Software Update utility/service, letting users update their own firmware. For more on this huge story, read on...
S60.com continue to put out licensed games as free 'exclusives', this month featuring shoot-em-up Galaxy Fighter. Curiously, their exclusives are for only older S60 2nd Edition smartphones though, which is a bit of a shame...
Shozu, the multimedia upload tool for smartphones, now supports sending videos directly to YouTube, the video sharing service, from your phone. YouTube is now an optioanl destination for your video uploads. Shozu's advantages is that you can upload a multimedia item just once, but send it to multiple destinations.
Python for S60 , the opensource port of the Python scripting language for S60 phones, now has an official Wiki. The Wiki features a list of Python applications, instructions for installing Python for S60, Python for S60 documentation and links to resources of interest and note.
