All About Symbian - Links of Interest News

N96 marketing getting underway for real

Perhaps not surprising, but Nokia are really pushing the N96 this week - the really interesting Hello N96 blog has a Bluetooth video that was pushed to his N96(!) while in Charing Cross station, plus photo examples of big screen advertising.

Nokia Communication Center hits 2.0

Yes, those clever chaps at Nokia are still trying to confuse us by offering more and more overlapping PC-hosted connectivity applications. :-) Communications Center just hit 2.0, incorporating a lot of feedback from the v1.x release. The software adds to the functionality of four of the standard PC Suite modules, namely Phone Browser, Text Message Editor, Contacts Editor and Multimedia Factory. Here's the download link if you want to give it a whirl.

On a personal note to Nokia: I don't want FIVE different PC-connectivity solutions (PC Suite, Ovi Suite, Eseries suite, Nseries suite, Comm Center), I want a single, not-confusing application suite that runs well on real world hardware. The vanilla PC Suite does this job - but with all the other options you sure are confusing people....

Steve

The N96 gets the Gadget Show treatment

The UK's Gadget Show remains a respected review source, even if they don't go into quite the tech detail that AAS does... in the latest Web TV episode, Jon Bentley goes into reasonable detail on the Nokia N96, covering the improvements over the N95 while also being disappointed by the slow speed overall, by the poor Wi-Fi reception and by the lack-lustre BBC iPlayer.

Show 66, the N85, wonder phones in Japan, and an N95 body-cam

Possibly my most link-packed news post ever, but.... The Phones Show 66 is now live, with a video preview of the OLED-equipped Nokia N85 and video of the 5800 XpressMusic in action (Hi-res version RSS feed). It sparked comments on YouTube too, with Paul commenting that in Japan they have phones like the SoftBank 920sc, with OLED screen, 3x optical zoom AND Xenon flash. I'm impressed. And viewer Micky turns out to be making videos of his own, prototyping a wearable N95 body-cam. And I haven't even had breakfast yet...

Nokia N79 support site goes live

The upcoming Nokia N79 has now got a support site available at Nokia.com, including the full manuals and user guides in many different languages. As always this may or may not indicate an imminent release, but Nokia devices are usually released within a few weeks of their support sites appearing.

You can find out more about the N79 in All About Symbian's hands-on preview of the prototype hardware.

SpinVox and Ping.FM Let You Update All Your Friends With One Voice Call

One of the cornerstones of modern social networks is the status message, “what are you doing right now,” and other similar examples. Once you join your second network, keeping these updates current is usually a mess of API accesses, or using third party services such as Ping.FM (the recommended approach). Now you can forget about typing your updates, as voice to text purveyors SpinVox announce a new service with Ping.FM to let up to 30 networks know what you're up to.

By calling into the new “Ping Through SpinVox,” you simply speak your activities, and let SpinVox do the translation while Ping.FM will post the update to up to 30 sites, including Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Identi.ca, MySpace and more. The full ist is currently in graphical form on the front of the Ping.FM website.

I've always joked that the best way to destroy the internet is to set up a feedback loop in the Web 2.0 sites... your Twitter status is sent to Facebook, which sends it to Friendfeed, which sends it to Jaiku, which sends it to Twitter, which is updated and passed to Facebook... I'm half way there with a number of sites looking at other sites to start the domino of messages. Ping.FM clears up that problem, making it easy to maintain presence over multiple spaces. The addition of voice might be seen as nothing but 'cute' by some, but it's actually very useful either at your desk, or especially when out and about.

Existing users to Ping.FM just need to add the SpinVox service, everyone else can sign up for a free Ping.FM account right now.

Marble Maze Updated for User Generated Frustration

Marble Maze, from Cahoona Games, has been updated. The infuriatingly simple ball rolling game (reviewed previously here) now allows you to create your own levels in addition to the 40 that come built in to the game. This game is always one I use when demo'ing my N95 to people – the principle of tilting the phone to roll the marble is disarming, coupled with the highly addictive nature makes it an almost 'must install as soon as possible' application.

Download the trial or purchase the full version from the AAS Software Store the All About Symbian software store.

The Music Industry Reacts To Online Music

Some interesting noises from the music industry over the weekend, and this morning's Guardian ties it in with Nokia's Comes With Music (Discord Over The Phone). In short, musical artists are worried that the labels will not pass on enough of the proceeds from online music back to them. To that end, they have launched the Featured Artists Coalition. But what does this mean to the digital music landscape? Read on for my thoughts...

To be honest, in the short term, not much. Bands and artists with the major labels have contracts that pretty much let the publishers move into these new mediums and retain the existing fee structures. The Featured Artist's Coalition (FAC) is looking to set in place the idea that music is leased to publishers for a fixed term, and they have more artistic control over what happens to the music when new technology and markets appear.

The music industry is changing – to put it simply, you can always make money when a resource is in short supply. Selling little silver discs (or vinyl discs, or fragile shellac) is the perfect restricted market. Once people could start to create their own shiny discs, the market started to contract. Now, with the internet able to copy music perfectly from place to place, there is a glut. You can legalise some barriers in the short term, but the walls will come tumbling down soon.

That's why Nokia's Comes with Music is so disruptive. You have to assume that the legal limits of the current distribution licensing model have been reached, so whatever comes next is going to change the model of music – paying per track (or per album) is on the way out. The money is going to be in ancillary licensing, concert tickets and merchandising sales. In short, the sort of activities where having a strong recognition in the act is going to be paramount.

The oncoming storm of online legal music is not going to be about selling, it's going to be about promoting – and with the major labels now potentially in the pocket of every mobile device that ships with Comes with Music, that's a lot of eyeballs they'll be receiving at a much lower cost than traditional advertising. Without fanfare, the labels are moving to fight the next online music war, not repeat the last one.

-- Ewan Spence, Oct 2008

The largest 5800 'Tube' preview... until Rafe's!

It seems that Russian Mobile Review impressario Eldar was also at Thursday evening's launch of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (running S60 5th Edition, etc) and he's put together an amazingly detailed set of photos and well arranged thoughts on the device (in English, thankfully), based solely on his hour or so's hands-on. Kudos. It's certainly the best 5800 preview at the moment, though doubtless Rafe is beavering away, marshalling his own impressions...

Nokia N85 now available in Italy?

Nokia's Italian online shop currently has the SIM-free N85 listed as "in stock" with a price of 439 euros plus taxes, so presumably the handset's Europe-wide release is imminent (or it's just a mistake on the Nokia Italy site?). (Thanks to WhoUnregMe for pointing this out.)

Updated version of N-Gage application released

There's a new version of the N-Gage app available for all compatible phones which (amongst other things) fixes the infamous 10,000 points bug. You can download the new version straight onto your device by opening the app, selecting "Options" and then "Check For Updates". Alternatively you can download the new version onto your PC and then install it manually, which you can do from the official website's "Get N-Gage" section. You can read more about the new version over on the official forums. (via the Official N-Gage Blog)

The N-Gage platform is currently available on the Nokia 5320 XpressMusic, N81, N81 8GB, N82, N85, N95, N95 8GB and N96. The latest firmware versions on most of these phones should include the N-Gage app built in, but if you want to install it manually see our handy guide.

N96 promos misleading about iPlayer

You can't help thinking that some people are going to be disappointed by the Nokia N96. First they hear it's got built-in digital TV. "Oh, no, that's not available in most countries yet". Then they latch onto the prominent marketing blurb about it 'coming with BBC iPlayer'. "Oh, no, that doesn't work with 'normal' data, you have to use 'Wi-Fi'. And so on. If I may say so, a bit of a product pitching mess all round...

Google Picasa Web Albums for S60

Google has soft-launched Picasa Web Albums for S60, making available an optimised version of the service via their usual m.google.com starting page. There are some screenshots below. You can play slideshows, comment on other peoples' media and, of course, organise your photos into albums. Note that not all the functions seemed to work as I wrote this - maybe some switches have yet to be thrown!

Interestingly, there's also an interview here with the guys behind the new interface for Picasa, explaining that they went down the browser-hosted route rather than a native S60 application because it gave them more flexibility in terms of updates, i.e. they didn't have to rely on a user remembering to check for new versions and then having to download etc. For such an online tool, this does make sense, and the data would have to be downloaded anyway. The only disadvantage is the RAM overhead of having Web open all the time, but this won't be a limitation for most people.

Steve Litchfield, 3 Oct 2008

Nokia N85 support pages appear

Nokia's support site has just added a section for the upcoming N85 which (amongst other things) lets you read its manual in dozens of different languages. Devices are usually released within a few weeks of their support page appearing, though they may sometimes take longer.

Nokia Remix London - 5pm tonight, virtual event

In case you hadn't gathered, Nokia's big launch (device? new service? We're sworn to secrecy...) is tonight, at 5.00pm BST (4.00pm GMT), entitled 'Nokia Remix London' and, as usual, there's a virtual event page where you can follow all the happenings, releases and chat. If there's a video stream, look out for Rafe, who'll be there to capture video and images for All About Symbian.