So summer seems to have arrived in the UK and it's a slow news day. In the meantime, Rafe's off to the USA for Orange Partner Camp, Ewan's been busy playing with his Nokia E61 and promoting unsigned music bands on national radio, and I've been trying to extend my big comparison table of Series 60 hardware - except that I've still got more question marks than I'd like - can you help fill in any of the blanks?
Here are two session summaries from Orange Code Camp Opio (October 2005). Engineering with a Business Plan (part of a starting up guide) looked at the business side of mobile software development. While Developing for the Sony Ericsson P990 examined the developer options for Sony Ericsson's UIQ super phone. Orange's next biannual developer event, which I'll be attending, starts on Monday and we will be bringing you more developer coverage in the near future.
Here's an interesting addition to the S60 freeware canon. MobiFlirt is a S60 client for the worldwide craze, in which your smartphone checks out the local 'talent' for you. Never mind being nervous, your smartphone now does the chatting up for you! The mind boggles...
Opera has announced Opera Mobile 8.60, their native browser for S60 smartphones, which is now compatible with S60 3rd Edition devices such as the Nokia 3250, N91, etc. Highlights of 8.60 include auto-completion for URL entry, password manager for easy logins, improved smooth scrolling, a new skin and the ability to read and bookmark newsfeeds. Full press release after the break...
Nokia's Research Centre has posted up the binary files that will allow you to run an Apache server on your S60 smartphone. As well as the server files, there is a mod to allow Python integration, so you can use the scripting language to power the web page generation.
There's a new release of Opera Mini now available. Version 2 of the most popular mobile browser in the world adds favourite-speed-dial, better navigation and extra search engine selection. The full press release follows.
This S60 Blog page has some sample video footage taken on the Nokia N93 (warning: Quicktime, broadband and patience required!). Great clarity, though I'm not convinced about the claimed 30 frames per second yet - maybe they've not optimised the code yet?
Symbian Themes has announced it has now converted all of its existing themes to be compatiable with S60 3rd Edition. That means there are now more than 5000 themes available for the Nokia 3250 and other 3rd Edition phones (one for every day of the next 13 years). Symbian Themes has almost 10,000 customisation elements for your S60 phone ranging from themes, to wallpapers, operator logo and fonts.
Following last week's 48 hour poll to take a snapshot of the Symbian-powered smartphones you're currently using and your plans for the future, Steve Litchfield picks through the stats and draws out a few surprises.
In this feature article, Nokia N91 - Real World Usage, Rafe takes a closer look at Nokia's new music smartphone. In an addendum to our review he discusses the device from various usage stand points and concludes the N91 is the best converged smartphone music device currently available, but may not be for everyone.
Hey, listen up! There's a whole new release (1.69) of OggPlay on the loose for all S60, Series 80 and Series 90 users. So that's basically the whole Symbian world apart from UIQ users (who are still on 1.1). S60 3rd Edition users read on...
A bunch of AAS readers (including me) are trying to gather some data on write speeds to 512MB and 1GB cards of different makes, in an attempt to sort out why Kingston 1GB cards cause jerky video recording and lost application assignments. Can you help?
