All About Symbian - S60 News

E71 gets a big thumbs up from The Register

Well, at least they didn't give the E71 to Nokia-hater Andrew O.... Writer Dave Oliver gives the new E71 his seal of approval, concluding that it's "a brilliantly efficient piece of technology that does pretty much everything you might want it to do and it does it all extremely well. Like a technological servant of sorts, it serves up its many excellent facilities and a host of other titbits with a minimum of fuss - and no small amount of style."

UK rail times to Calendar

Lifted from the comments to a previous story, I wanted to highlight an addition to the excellent traintimes.org.uk. When accessed from your phone browser, the site now has the facility to add a UK train journey (via a vCal file, don't worry, it all happens seamlessly) into your phone's Calendar. Very cool, and the site only needs just over 100K of data per lookup, much less than the full Nation Rail equivalent.

A really really easy way to install N-Gage on a compatible phone

If you have an N-Gage-compatible phone (at the moment that means the N81, N81 8GB, N82, N95 or N95 8GB) you may like to take a look at this article over on AAN which details an ultra-simple method for installing the N-Gage application. It works entirely through the phone's browser, and doesn't require a computer at all. We've mentioned this method before in other articles, but it seems a lot of people missed it and Nokia doesn't really publicise it either, so here it is again in greater detail.

Automating Open Signed Online

Non-programmers look away now. Budding Python wizards might like to note Arkadiusz's scripts here that automate the building of an Open Signed SIS file, saving you having to do everything manually every time you change something in your code and want to build a new SIS for installation on your test device. (via Forum Nokia)

Get Quickoffice 5.0 for S60 for $1

Quickoffice are offering the chance, for one day only (July 22nd), to buy Quickoffice Premier 5 for just $1. [Offer now ended] The usual price is around $70 (or less if you buy via your phone). Quickoffice enables the reading, editing and creation of Microsoft Office files on your S60 phone. You can read our full review of software here.

Version 5 includes support for Microsoft Office 2007 file formats (and printing support for Eseries phones). This is an absolute bargain and we definitely recommend this as a 'must have given' the price.

Quickoffice is based in the US so we imagine that will be the criteria for the timing of the day.

A dozen Real World Tasks - the Nokia N95 8GB takes on all-comers

Spec-sheet comparisons are all very well, but how good are the Nokia N95 8GB, the Apple iPhone 3G and the HTC Diamond in real life? The AAS team has come up with a dozen things that we all like to do with our phones and Steve was then set to accomplishing all of them on all three devices. Can the sheer usability and likeability of the iPhone triumph over Nokia's N95 design and S60? Is the HTC Touch Diamond a competitor here? Find out in the full usability feature.

"Regular readers may know that, in the interests of knowing what to recommend, I'm fond of device advocacy, i.e. comparing the pros and cons of different phones to try and come up with some kind of ranking. Usually these pieces are centred around specification or feature lists, not unnaturally, but here I'm going to take a dozen real world tasks, things that you or I do (or would like to do) every single day, and then assess how easy and/or quick these tasks are to perform.

For the purposes of this comparison, I'm going to take the six month old Nokia N95 8GB, typical of the current S60 range, the brand new Apple iPhone 3G and the also-new HTC Touch Diamond. If Apple (and HTC's) marketing is to be believed, the iPhone should be an easy winner in a usability test, but the extra maturity and featurettes in S60 3rd Edition also make it a hard act to follow."

Read on

The N96 to be available in September on 3

Network operator '3' just held a big launch event, showing off what's coming up on contract, and SMS Text News' Ewan (always entertaining) was there. In the absence of any actual releases on the '3' web site, he's our lifeline to news and video from the event, showing off the Nokia N96 (to be available in September) and white E71 (available now), among others. There's also a well-placed rant about the sheer uselessness of mainstream media and some of the freeloaders in that world - worth a read if only to reinforce why you read AAS and SMST!

Open Source Goes Mobile, Free San Francisco Developers Event

Forum Nokia are organising an "Open Source Goes Mobile" workshop at the upcoming LinuxWorld conference being held in San Francisco's Moscone Centre on August 6th. The event is free to all developers, and Forum Nokia are also providing a fee one-day pass to Linux World. Places are limited, so if you are interested the sign-up page is here.

Hat tip to Symbian One for the link.

Qik Now Available to All As It Moves to Public Beta

'Cool in the Valley' company Qik who's Qik application allows you to live stream video from your S60 handset, has today moved the service from private (invite only) beta to a full public beta status. In practice this means that anyone can sign up for the site and download the software for their mobile phone. While there are a number of live video services already out there, very few of them have a component that runs on a mobile phone - and Qik is one of the fastest of those providing mobile. More at www.qik.com.

It's also worthwhile signing up to the site even if you only plan to watch others, so you can take part in conversations and leave comments on video. Also rolled into the new version is the groups feature, so users may collate single videos into an easily identifiable collection. And to help with the problem of getting people to watch a live stream that pops up for only a few minutes, an events page is now being provided to help with scheduling.

More at Qik.com, where you can also sign up for the service.

The Nokia E66 - Business, Multimedia and conclusions

In the second and final part of Rafe's definitive review of the new Nokia E66, he looks at the device's business credentials and multimedia capabilities, before wrapping things up with the AAS verdict. See also part 1 of his E66 review.

"We've already detailed much of the PIM, messaging and communications functionality in previous sections of this review of the Nokia E66. From a business point of view, the basic functionality of these applications should be sufficient for most users. While messaging is currently a weak element, it does work. Outside of the omissions we mentioned, you'll find a well-polished application with decent IMAP support, signature support, system level email alerts and excellent handling of multiple accounts."

Read on

N-Gage News Round-up

It's been a busy week over on All About N-Gage, with videos, polls, sales charts, themes, the big Brothers In Arms review, and other assorted gubbins. For those of you who haven't been following AAN lately, we present a quick round-up.

- AAN's current on-going poll is attempting to find out where people play N-Gage games the most. To take part in the poll, visit this link.

- The latest global game sales chart for the N-Gage platform has been published, and you can see it on All About N-Gage.

- An interview with Scott Foe for the Portfolio.com website has apparently revealed the launch date for Reset Generation.

- All About N-Gage has done four brand new gameplay videos of the excellent Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep, with each video covering one of the game's resorts in depth.

- An official S60 3rd Edition theme based on Pro Series Golf has been made available for download from n-gage.com.

- For those of you still a bit unsure of how to choose a club or fine-tune a shot, AAN has done a gameplay video of Pro Series Golf in action, and you can find links to tutorials on Pro Series Golf's AAN game page.

- As N-Gage is part of Nokia's Ovi suite of online services, it looks like N-Gage player names will eventually be replaced by Nokia Account usernames. If you want to make sure you get your favourite username, you should register on Nokia Account ASAP.

- Brothers In Arms has been released on the N-Gage platform, and Ewan Spence has done a screenshot-laden review of the game (along with a very justified rant about the stupidity of 20 second demos).

- AAN's survey of favourite retro computers, consoles and handhelds has closed, and the results can be read in this article.

...and that's it for another week, see you next time!

If you want to find out more about the new N-Gage platform take a look at AAN's N-Gage FAQ.

If you have a Nokia N81, N81 8GB, N82, N95 or N95 8GB you can install the N-Gage platform right now directly onto your phone, see this step-by-step tutorial on how to do it.

Nokia Pilots to launch in a couple of months

Nokia Pilots, a new programme to get people like you to give feedback on new prototypes and services (sounds like fun), is going to launch in September - here's the holding page for it. If you like playing on the bleeding edge (heh, OK, so that's all of you), then bookmark Nokia Pilots now.

Earth to Maps, Travelling, and more

There have been some great posts from Mark and Al at their Nokia blog in the last couple of days. Worth a look are Going Green while travelling (creating mobile PDFs of your important documents), a video with Nokia product manager Chanse Arrington, and a walkthrough of sending locations from Google Earth to Nokia Maps.

Share On Ovi looking for your best photo

The file-sharing service Share On Ovi is holding a competition for the next couple of weeks to find the best photo uploaded to the service. If you want to take part, just choose what you think is your best photo on Ovi and add the tag "best1" to it. You can view current entries by clicking on this link.

If you haven't yet joined Share On Ovi you can do so by clicking here.

Insight 32: Chat, Golf, 6220 and Download!

In AAS podcast 84, a.k.a. Insight 32, Rafe, Ewan, Steve and Stefan talk about the new GPS-enabled Nokia Chat, the Nokia 6220 Plastic err.... Classic [just kidding, Nokia, we say lots of nice things about it really], Pro Series Golf and Nokia Download! Held together by wit, chewing gum and a piece of sticky tape, it's compered this week by Ewan, so you probably know what to expect(!)