Video-calling has been much hyped over the years, notably during 3G spectrum auctions, but it does retain some practical applications. Skype video calls are popular for their cost (free) and are frequently used by geographically separated families (e.g. on business trips). As such, given their respective popularity, fring's implementation of Skype video calling on mobile is, at least for some users, arguably more useful than operator/cellular enabled video calling.

Example video call using Fring enabled Skype video on the N97 (to a N97 mini).

As you would expect of a mobile to mobile video call, the video is relatively low quality (similar to that of a cellular/operator based video call for me). A mobile to desktop Skype call gives slightly better video quality, although this may be partly due to the quality of the web camera at the other end of the call (multi-megapixel as opposed to VGA resolution).

fring already provides a comprehensive set of voice and instant messaging communication options across a range of bearers and services (Skype Google Talk, MSN/Live, ICQ, SIP, Yahoo, AIM, Twitter and Facebook). Skype video calling is treated as an additional communication options (see screenshot above), which can be chosen when you select a fring contact to call.

The Skype video calling functionality is available on the Nokia X6, N97 mini, N97, 5800, N95 8G and N95 devices. Additional device support will be added in due course. You can download fring from m.fring.com

Video

From the fring press release:

"fring, the multi-award winning mobile application that lets users communicate and share web-based experiences from their mobile devices, today announces the world’s first mobile video calls over internet protocol (IP).

fring video enables users to conduct video calls with other fringsters as well as with Skype contacts over their device’s Wi-Fi or 3G internet connection."

Key features of the Nokia 6700 Slide:

• Sleek design with aluminum casing and rounded corners, that follows in the footsteps of the 6500 Slide and 6700 Classic.
   
  
• Dimensions of 95.2 x 46 x 15.9mm and a weight of 110g.
   
  
• Connectivity options include quad band GSM (800/900/1800/1900), and tri band WCDMA (900/1900/2100) with HSDPA and HSUPA, USB (PC connectivity) and Bluetooth (note: no WiFi).
   
  
• 5.0 megapixel auto-focus camera with Carl Zeiss optics and a dual LED flash, plus support for VGA resolution video capture at 15 frames per second.
   
  
• 2.2 inch QVGA (240 x 320) TFT screen, 16 million colours with back-light and ambient light sensor (automatically adjusts screen brightness to optimise power consumption).
    
• Around 40MB of internal memory and support for microSDHC cards up to 16GB in size.
  
  
• 2.5mm audio port and an integrated FM radio.
   
• BL-4CT (860 mAh) battery.
    
• Runs S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2
    
• Emphasis on imaging and sharing capabilities - with direct sharing from camera and notification to home screen. The 6700's data sheet notes that the 6700 Slide has 'Advanced SW features for capturing, editing, viewing and printing pictures, enabled by the Symbian platform' (interesting to see reference to Symbian, rather than S60).
    
• Customised home screen including application shortcuts, contact bar and other home screen plug-ins as seen on earlier XpressMusic devices.
   

Video

Nokia say:

"With a choice of six fresh and vivid colors - pink, red, petrol blue, aluminum, lime and purple - this slimline slider is sure to turn heads. Its compact size, modern design and aluminum finish feels great in the hand, and fits perfectly even in the smallest pocket or bag.

The smart capabilities of the Nokia 6700 slide are beautifully easy to use: The 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics is perfect for capturing and sharing moments as they happen. Favorite images can be edited on the go and uploaded to the web directly from the camera menu. The device's high speed 3G connectivity ensures your favorite communities are always as close as your Nokia 6700 slide."

The X6 is a clear successor to the successful 5800 series, and ups the specs considerably with 32GB of on board storage; the same 16:9 ratio screen but now with a capacitive touch layer; and a five megapixel Carl Zeiss lensed camera.

And I love the fact that while stand-by time is no longer promoted, music playing time is – in this case the X6 is rated at 35 hours from Nokia.

Arriving just in time for the Christmas rush, this could be an interesting handset to watch in terms of sales figures and promotions. Will you be queueing up on Friday?

Read on

We'll be having a more detailed look at the client this week and how it compares to Comes with Music and other streaming music services, but for now Spotify members can head over to http://m.spotify.com/ on their handset and give it a whirl. For now, here's the preview video Spotify demoed last month of the service.

Now, to clarify, I'm not necessarily ranking devices by good design, although quite often good design and good build quality are linked at the hip. Some of the phones listed below aren't beautiful (though, again, some are) - but all of them are built like tanks and pretty much guaranteed to survive numerous drops, scrapes and even drenchings, without missing a beat.

So, with a hefty dose of first hand experience, a dollop of anecdotal evidence and a tinge of humour, here are the Dozen Best Built Symbian OS-powered smartphones EVER. And, yes, I did do something similar a year ago - guess this chart is becoming an annual event!

[Honorary mention to the Nokia 7650, which is just about built to mil-spec. It would have been no. 1 but it was disqualified by me by being so early and so primitive that it couldn't really do anything!]

1. Nokia E51. My wife has one of these. It's sleek, it's metal-backed and it's indestructible. We've tried. It has been submersed in water at least twice now. It has been dropped, stepped on, abused in the bottom of more shopping bags that you've had hot dinners, and it just refuses to die. Apart from the smallish screen it's in many ways the perfect smartphone.

2. Nokia E61. This is what you get if you basically build a candy bar phone out of aluminium. The E61 is incredibly robust and my early example has survived being played with by 4 years of my daughter's friends. And has come out still looking like new (after a dust down with some detergent!) and working perfectly. Amazing. And the battery goes on for a week.

3. Nokia E61i. Essentially the E61 but thinner and with a camera, the E61i is almost as robust and mine was sold as-new after a year of use. Still a great find on eBay if you're looking for something that will just keep on going.

4. Nokia N73. No metal here, this early Nseries camera-centric candybar was all plastic - but the number of people who've abused it and seen it shrug everything off is impressive. A worthy inclusion here.

5. Nokia N82. Again Nseries, again candybar and again all plastic. And, famously, the subject of one of my own real world robustness tests - what a trouper. Again, will go and go and go....

6. Samsung G810. One of the forgotten S60 devices, this is chunky but built like a Terminator. It's what the Nokia N95 would have looked like if it had been designed by 1960s USSR in their fight against the capitalist Americans. It's a mean camera phone too, with 5mp camera with Xenon flash and optical zoom. I'm proud of mine and no, I'm not going to sell it to you on eBay!

7. Samsung i8910 HD. Ah yes, the current smartphone of choice for the real Symbian zealot. But there's no denying the solid hardware. And the one piece design is beautiful too, in a way - and not just when you turn that big OLED screen on!

8. Nokia E71. The slimmed down, smaller-screened version of the E61, and with GPS on board this time. And build quality's almost up to the same standard, every second hand E71 I see looks almost as good as it did new out of the box. The one piece design makes this another great bet for buying second-hand.

9-. Nokia N86. A device rather out of its time, this is the dual-slider par excellence that doesn't really fit in the 2009 smartphone world. Yet there's no denying that it's both beautiful and solid, with a metal chassis and sliding mechanism - and the tempered glass front and discrete buttons make it a joy to hold.

10. Nokia N97 mini. The metal backed redesign of the infamous N97. Of course, it's still a bit early to decree that it's a robust champion, but let's just say it's looking good so far!

11. Sony Ericsson P900. The original P800 was an outstanding physical design, I reckon - but was let down by everything being so plasticky. The P900 was a step backwards in terms of design elegance, but was three steps forward in terms of materials used, style and build quality, and so the P900 gets the nod here.

12. Nokia E90. A device set apart in terms of form factor, the use of lashings of metal and industrial strength hinges make the E90 also a long-live competitor.

With only a handful of current devices in the top 12, it's tempting to bemoan the lack of industrial design flair in 2009. Are more fashionable materials winning out over long-term-better-choices? But, as the N86, N97 mini and i8910 HD prove, it is possible to produce something both stylish and well-built, so the current generation of designers aren't totally without flair.

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 22 Nov 2009

Okay the Gizmodo headline of "having to be approved by robots" might be a bit b-movie ish, but this is down to the volume and security game. Steve's already talked about the issue of volume in an App Store, but no matter what solution comes out of arguments like that, there's still a certain level that applications should be reaching in terms of code - don't crash; don't brick the machine; don't do anything that costs the user something without asking them; and so on.

To be honest the howls of protest can just stay as that - howls. If you use undocmented features and put a phone at risk, then that's fine... if it's just your phone. You should be allowed to do that. But to release that into the wild? I'm not so sure.

Part of the problem isn't the raw numbers, but the perception of each platform. With a closed ecosystem, the iPhone is not as vulnerable in the press to claims of “rampant piracy” as to other platforms. Given the Nintendo DS and PSP warez scene, I'd say they were at similar levels, but the PSP carries the “I'm a pirate target” flag while the DS keeps relatively quiet.

Nokia had to deal with this in the first generation N-Gage and never really solved the problem beyond “you might not be able to connect to the Arena with a pirate copy” but the machine was tarred and feathered and never recovered from the stigma.

So what can be done? This is a tough area, because there is no magic wand, and the rule is simple. No matter how big your team, or how much you invest, there are billions of people in the world, and enough free time to crack any system. And it takes just one to break it, and the copy is then released for everyone. The internet is rather good at copying digital data once it's hosted in a single place, you know.

Something for authors and developers to consider is that the piracy scene has created a phenomenally efficient distribution system – if you want to get something out there, the quickest way to do so is have it pirated. The catch of course (rather like the NHS) is that these copies are free at the point of download; so to have some sort of income stream, the cash and the user need to be separated a little bit further down the line.

World of Warcraft does this really well. It doesn't care how you get the client software, because once you have it you'll be logging on and paying a monthly subscription.

Ad-supported software also follows this money. Yes, it's a much smaller income per user, but it does work and uses piracy to your advantage. And ad-supported is something that the iPhone ecosystem does very well – witness Google's purchase of AdMob recently as evidence that there is money out there.

Or you could go down the route of having some in-game credit system which would allow a virtual currency to be spent and traded. Second Life has a huge economy built on this principle and many social games (e.g. FarmVille on Facebook) have the ability to buy additional credits to help you advance in the game at a faster rate.

Yes, piracy is around but the answer isn't as simple as “let's just stop it.” Rather than that, it's time for the industry to get creative alongside all those people who remember that buying a developed application helps you get more applications developed.

-- Ewan Spence, Nov 2009.

It's interesting these numbers are coming out through a personal blog rather than a full blown Nokia press release, although it does indicate that Nokia are happy for Ovi to be just there, rather than actively promoted. Maybe telling people about the success of Ovi requires a large army of success stories and they only have a handful at the moment who are happy to go public?

Of course without knowing what the September numbers were, we don't have a fixed number, but any service that can gather a 70% growth is going the right way, so let's acknowledge that something is going right.

Thanks to CJ for the link.

-- Ewan Spence, Nov 2009.

"The Asia Mobile Awards were created by the GSMA as a platform to showcase leadership and diversity for mobile content, products and services across Asia. Judged by a panel of independent analysts, journalists and industry experts, this year’s Awards attracted more than 100 entries from operators, vendors and the broad value chain from across the mobile industry that provide products and services that are commercially available in at least one Asian market. For the first time, this year’s winners will also be shortlisted for the Global Mobile Awards, which take place next year at the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona."

It amuses me when I hear of, for example, Apple blocking a certain application from making it into the App Store for some dodgy anti-competitive reason. So, for example, they famously blocked the (presumably) professionally programmed Google Voice, while simultaneously, in just one week, allowing ten (more) fart apps, a hundred hastily programmed 'reference' and ultra-niche utility apps and a thousand home-made games of dubious scope and playability. Which is kind of where the problem lies.

Now, I've nothing against Apple's policy - it's their App Store and they can let in, and keep out, anything they want, whenever they want. But picture the poor user of an Apple or (in this case) Nokia smartphone. Making a beeline for the App (Ovi) Store icon on their brand new device, they're bombarded with thousands (in the iPhone's case) or hundreds (in Ovi store's case) of items which essentially offer little but distraction from the really high quality content that is in there somewhere.

The iPhone App Store tries to help out by providing 'Top 25' (/50) lists (free/commercial/highest grossing), but the first two of these tend to get taken over by the current 'joke novelties' or by whichever commercial apps have been on 'sale' most recently, respectively. Outside of the top 25 charts, it's very hard to find exactly what you're looking for. So, for example, search for 'golf', or 'diet', or 'fitness', or whatever, and you simply get shown a seemingly random selection of 10 matches. Out of hundreds, if not thousands of possibles.

The Nokia Ovi Store is far more primitive still, with just a 'recommended' pane of items and a selection of (not entirely believable - e.g. 'most popular') filters. On a number of occasions, I've been looking for a particular application that I know should be in the Ovi Store and yet it doesn't show up on (the first few pages of) any of the content lists or in search results.

The problem is, you see, one of numbers. Imagine you 'fancy reading a really good new book'. You wander into a Waterstones (in the UK) - note that this is a fine bookchain and I've nothing against them - and are presented with a dozen rooms over two or three floors, with just about every book still in print somewhere on its shelves. If you're going there for a specific quality book, then it'll take you a while to find it - and if you're going there hoping to get a few ideas for what to try next then you'll be utterly overwhelmed. 

Similarly at the supermarket. You head down to the jam aisle to 'get some marmalade' and are presented with 33 different alternatives, including about 20 subtly differently flavoured and quality-graded variants under the supermarket's own 'brand'. Which one do you go for?

In each case, the chances are that you'll actually walk away, since the sheer choice is too much. Or at the very least walk away with a purchase but also a sense of unease that you didn't really end up with the best product for you.

Now imagine walking into a local village bookstore - we have one near my house. One room, only about 1000 book titles stocked and a viable way to find out what's new, what's popular and what's potentially interesting without being overwhelmed. Imagine walking into your local village grocery store. Again, one room. You ask for marmalade - they stock two brands. You make your pick - that was easy.

What's needed, I contend, is far more draconian control of what makes it into each smartphone application store. Far more heavy handed quality control. What it needs are human QA controllers, discarding submitted applications (or at least filing them away in a deeply hidden 'Other' section, from which they only be accessed by the public in answer to a specific query): "No, sorry, not allowed into the main store, its interface is too amateurish". "No, only makes joke sounds, will reflect badly on the platform". "No, only of interest to about 100 people in the world - too specialist". And so on.

The applications that do make it through this severe QA would be those that look professional, serve a real purpose, aren't too specialist, are tightly coded, are well behaved, and so on. The 'presented' contents of each app store would then solely consist of the very best for each platform - no joke apps, no pointless screensavers, no 'Model X train wheel size calculators' [apologies if you own a model X train and quite like the idea!], no specialist reference apps in 20 different languages.

With such a scheme, the iPhone App Store would end up with 'only' about 1000 apps immediately presented, a far more manageable number. With such a scheme, the Nokia Ovi Store would end up (from its current catalogue) with about 150 apps immediately presented, a number which could be browsed through by newcomers in five minutes at most.

And yes, 'long tail' advocates, note that all other applications could still be 'there' in the background, available should a user dig deep and want something really specific (by name or topic). But new users and the man in the street shouldn't be exposed to the raw, seething pool of content that seems to be de rigueur in modern application stores.

Such drastic quality control would be labour intensive*, yes, at the manufacturer/platform-coordinator level, but I reckon the results would be well worth it, with more people happier at making decent discoveries and purchases, rather than recoiling from the whole app store idea in confusion and disappointment.

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 19 Nov 2009

*Ovi Store, should you be looking for a QA controller along these lines, I'm available!