All About Symbian - General News

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 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.

AAS Podcast - Interview with Alfie Dennen from Moblog.net

It's another interview podcast, this time with Ewan speaking to Alfie Dennen from Moblog.net, which launched a new version of the popular platform late last week. We cover the history of the Moblog company, how to deal with upstart services such as Ovi(!) and what makes a service like this 'sticky' in podcast #85.

Sony Ericsson "to axe 2000 jobs"

The BBC News website is reporting that Sony Ericsson is to cut two thousand jobs over the next year, in order to cut operating costs. The company was making a profit this time last year, but in the last quarter it reported a small loss.

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.

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(!)

GMail changes and direct SyncML support imminent

Aha. Things really do seem to be coming together on the sync front. From GooSync's extensions to My Nokia Backup to the imminent Ovi Sync, I've now spotted that Google's GMail contacts is a) about to acquire a SyncML interface, meaning that you can sync from any Symbian OS phone, and b) now changed so that your contacts don't get flooded with email addresses (this has been a longstanding bugbear of mine).

You're Invited to Nokia's Virtual Worlds Business Panel... in Second Life

Those of you involved in Second Life might want to take a note of tomorrow's Virtual Worlds Business Panel being run by the Nokia team. It's being held on the main Nokia Island ("Nokia," funnily enough) and runs from 7pm GMT (Noon in SL, 8pm in the UK). Those of you in SL can make a date, everyone else, you've got 24 hours to go find the client and get it running.

Nokia Account working again

Nokia's unified login system Nokia Account is now working again and accepting new registrations, just click on the "New Account" link below the login form. As we noted before, it's not yet in use by most Ovi services, but the plan is for your Nokia Account username to replace all the separate logins Ovi currently requires. If you want to make sure you get your favourite username, it's worth registering it on Nokia Account now so you're ready for the unification. (Note that the registration only requires an e-mail address OR a phone number, you don't have to give both.)

Nokia Q2 2008 Results

Nokia today released its 2nd quarter results for 2008. Converged mobile device shipments (S60 phones) were 15.3 million (up from 13.9 million in Q2 2007) including more 10 million Nseries and just under 2 million Eseries devices. Net sales from the services and software division was EUR 119 million (up 42% from Q1 2008). Nokia increased its overall market share to 40%, up from 38% last year and 39% last quarter.

How much should you pay for a game?

You've written your Killer App, now it's a matter of selling it. But at what cost? Ewan thinks about the issue of pricing games and applications in the modern world. In response, Steve points out the true cost of gaming and argues that purchase price is almost irrelevant. Comments welcome!

Nokia 6220 Classic in Smartphones Show 63

Smartphones Show 63 just went live, with a hands-on video review of the Nokia 6220 Classic. There's also a review of the HTC Touch Diamond, comparing it to the Apple iPhone 3G. See also the Hi-res YouTube version and the RSS feeds for the QVGA and VGA versions.

Mo-Mo, LBS and DW

Symbian supremo David Wood's new blog continues to pop up some interesting entries. Here, he talks about this week's Mobile Monday event, focussed on a topic close to my heart, 'Enabling Location in Applications', with relevant links and quotes. I was particularly interested to see the high profile of Skyhook's Wi-Fi location system, something which had hit my radar earlier in the week.

Nokia complete acquisition of Plazes

Nokia has completed its acquisition of Plazes, a privately-owned start-up company in Berlin. By acquiring Plazes, Nokia "will be able to extend its context-based service offering with social presence and time-based activity planning features." It's not clear whether this service will be rolled into another service (Nokia Chat?) or developed standalone and rebranded.

Nokia's 70,000 euro game concept competition ends soon

Nokia's Mobile Games Innovation Challenge is a contest to find the best new concepts for mobile gaming on either N-Gage, Symbian or Java. It's open to all professional game development companies, even the smallest ones, and the top three ideas will receive prize money to develop their ideas. Nokia doesn't want any actual code, they just want a text outline of an innovative unpublished game idea and optionally some mockup screenshots and/or video too. The contest closes on the 20th of August.