All About Symbian - News

Nokia N86 8MP Review - Part 3 - Other features and Wrap-up

2009-07-05T18:56:32+01:00

You'll hopefully have been following our review series on the Nokia N86 8MP - here's part 3: "Other features and Wrap-up" for your enjoyment and education. It's fair to say that the N86 is a stonkingly good camera phone, but how well does it fare as a top end smartphone, where are its weak points and can it compete with the touch-heroes of summer 2009? See also Part 1 and Part 2 of this review.

Read on

Mippin's Buzz widgets for N97 homescreen

2009-07-04T16:11:07+01:00

Mippin has released four news 'Buzz' widgets, optimised for the Nokia N97's homescreen, each covering a different area: general news, tech, gaming and gossip. On the N97's homescreen, the widgets scroll through the latest news headlines, with the full story (in full screen mode) just a touch away. The widgets also feature an offline mode and customisable refresh time and content areas.

Mippin Buzz Widgets as seen on N97 homescreen, full screen and settings view.

A significant advantage of the Mippin Buzz widgets are that they have been designed with power and network constraints in mind. By default the widgets are set to update (go online) every 30 minutes. The widgets, when they update, save the text content of news stories to local disk. This means you can browse through the latest news even if you do not have a network connection.

Each widget can be customised both in terms of refresh time (from 5 minutes to 24 hours) and content area. For example, the Tech Buzz widget lets you choose from Tech News, Mobile News, Gadgets, Gaming, Tech Video and Symbian categories, allowing you to specify the type of news you would like to see.

The content is drawn from Mippin's extensive news and story database (as used on mippin.com). You'll see news from both mainstream news organisations (BBC, Guardian etc.) as well as blogs (including All About Symbian) and online media, depending on the widget and category customisation you use. The content is reformatted for display on a mobile device (no mean feat in itself) with the original story linked to at the bottom of every news item.

I've been using the News Buzz (set to UK news) and Tech Buzz (set to Symbian news) for the last week. It's great seeing breaking news stories automatically appear on the home screen of the N97. This 'living' element shows off one the greatest strengths of the N97's homscreen; its ability to provide dynamic information at a glance. Mippin have done a great job showing what can be done and, while others will follow in their footsteps, they will have a significant first mover advantage.

While the N97 does ship with a couple of similar widgets (AP News and Bloomberg), the Mippin widgets are more customisable and thus better aligned with my specific content interests. They also draw from a far wider range of content sources, which gives a more diverse feel to the news. The downside of this is that you do tend to see some stories repeated by multiple sources.

The offline support has obvious advantages if you're in an area with no network connection, but it also means that general usage is faster because there's no waiting time for a full story to load.

The widgets also work on the Nokia 5800 and 5530, albeit without the homescreen functionality.

Download

The widgets can be downloaded, for free, from the Ovi Store (New Buzz currently, the others in the next few days), or by using the links below.

Futher reading

Mipping blog post on the Buzz Widgets

The Nokia E63 hits v200

2009-07-04T06:45:57+01:00

Just a short note to say that, as expected, the E71's cheaper sister, the E63, has also gotten itself a firmware update, this time to v200 firmware update (via Nokia Software Updater), adding in Ovi Contacts. Screens and comment over at The Symbian Blog.

Nokia Should Lock Up Ovi Store Developers In A Warehouse

2009-07-03T11:15:36+01:00

Over on the Lazarus like Mobile Industry Review, the other Ewan in mobile has posted an ambitious yet simple plan to save the Ovi Store from itself. Simply put, Nokia would create three enclaves of coders (in London, San Francisco and Paris) and give them a monthly stipend of £3,500 and as much coca cola and pizza as they can eat. As long as they code one application every eight weeks, the proposed 100 developers per warehouse get to stay. Total cost? Roughly £2.34 per handset. That's quite high, but this is a fascinating idea that should be taken seriously.

The market isn't on Ovi... What should Nokia do about it?...

2. If you’re serious — and I mean properly serious — about the Ovi Store, set aside $30m. Rent one warehouse in London, one in New York, one in San Francisco and one in Paris.

Each warehouse will hold 100 developers. Open to anyone. You just have to prove you’re talented and you’ve got a good idea for developing for Nokia.

Each developer is paid £3,500 per month on contract to cover their basic costs. They invoice the warehouse and take care of their own tax. In order to secure their place, they join on a 30-day trial. During this trial they need to develop one free application and submit it to the Ovi Store. The application must meet a reasonable criteria set by the warehouse council. i.e. it’s got to add value, some how. After submitting the first app, developers then adopt a 2 month rolling contract — with the provision being they have to create a new (paid of unpaid) application every two months.

Ewan's plan, with some back of a fag packet costings, justifications and illustrations of how poor he believes the Ovi Store is, can be found on MIR 3.0.

Any colour smartphone you like, not just black

2009-07-03T09:11:10+01:00

With the Symbian Foundation set to provide an open source smartphone OS, hardware partners with off the shelf components, and a huge amount of software ready to be placed into a smartphone, is the time right for the smaller companies to come back to Symbian? Ewan considers the potential rise of the boutique range of smartphones in 2010. Read on...

When you look at something that has been made by hand, compared to something made by a machine bolting together components, there is always an aesthetic difference... and the feeling of something being worthwhile. But a pair of shoes is (mostly) still a pair of shoes, and the functionality remains the same.

Once in a while you'll see us reporting on a press release that Symbian have paired up with a manufacturer of a component, be it a chip, screen, graphics technology, and suchlike. To the man in the street these aren't huge deals, but they are subtly changing how smartphones are made and constructed.

I hate to do this, but if you look back at the Psion Series 5 (which ran, in essence Symbian OS v1 through v5), the entire device, right down to the chips, were custom designed for the machine; this took time and money. And a lot of development. In the first Symbian smartphones, you could see the same custom trends.

But now, with components available for all areas of the smartphone off the shelf, and many of them having code 'hooks' inside Symbian OS, there is less of a need for these customised examples. You just line up the boxes, circuit boards, peripherals and cases from your local fabrication plant, chuck in the free OS from the Symbian Foundation, and away you go.

Go on, you try and name them!

Of course it's not that easy, but in relative terms, building a smartphone is far easier than it was seven or eight years ago. While the technology that is available and is expected to be in a phone has ballooned through a mix of Moore's Law and attempts to find the next best thing, there is an air of standardisation about the baseline requirements.

One of the complaints about Symbian is that it is 'dominated by Nokia', and the raw numbers do bear that out (but hey, HTC dominate Windows Mobile, this isn't a black and white argument). This wasn't always the case, and if you cast your mind back to the early days of S60, when it was Series 60, alongside Nokia there were a number of projects from other manufacturers... I'm thinking of manufacturers like Motorola, Samsung, Panasonic, Sendo and Sony Ericsson.

Phones could look like anything in the future.

Symbian OS did not have huge sales in those days, and the devices from the smaller manufacturers struggled to get market recognition and share, and ultimately they did not sell enough to recoup the investment and ongoing costs of many of the companies. Given that we now have a much more mature market that more easily accepts smartphones, and a certain simplification of the manufacturing and design process thanks to the Symbian Foundation and the various partners, is the time right again for a range of smaller manufacturers to return to Symbian and start a boutique industry of smartphone design?

With a more open community to help support the device, off the shelf components and a number of factories, predominantly in the Far East, offering relatively low production costs, I wonder if the eco-system is now at the point where the mass-market-produced devices have opened up a space where a small group of people could head out and make run of smartphones, say 100-200,000 units, aimed at a niche market, and make a small but efficient business?

Isn't that essentially what Sendo were doing, just a few years too early? When you look back at the buzz around the Sendo X1 in terms of specifications it was miles ahead of the then front runners, the Nokia 7650, 3650 and 6600, with a candybar design, standard number keypad, stereo sound, heavily customisable home screen, and improved camera (with a flash!). Plans were put in place for the X2, with a strong focus on music, some six months before the Sony Walkman range of phones was announced. Unfortunately Sendo went into receivership before the X2 hit the streets.

Gone, forgotten but ready for a revivial?

Would the story of Sendo be any different if it happened today? I think so, for all the reasons above. And one other area. Marketing the device to the power-users would be much easier as the internet, blogs and news sites could be leveraged. Sendo did this with the X1 and X2 but the impact today would be far greater in terms of eyeballs and impact. And the internet could have provided an easy route for people to buy the device no matter where they are in the world – the need for acceptance by a carrier is diminished when you are talking to people happy to spend a few hundred pounds on unlocked smartphones for their own use.

The Symbian Foundation still needs to make everything available, and that's going to take a little bit longer, maybe a year, but that's enough time for the other elements required to be put in place by the partners. Hopefully we'll see a lot more manufacturers start up in the smartphone world and look at Symbian as the basis for their device. And what a wonderful world that would be.

-- Ewan Spence. July 2009.

AAS Podcast 138: Interview with Lee Williams, Symbian Foundation

2009-07-02T19:50:00+01:00

In All About Symbian Podcast 138, Rafe talks to Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation. The interview covers a wide range of topics, including the Symbian Foundation's planned application arena, the universal web runtime, the forthcoming Symbian Exchange and Exposition, Qt and the Symbian Foundation, the challenges of openness and open governance, and more.

Symbian Foundation - one year / six months / three months on...
Symbian Exchange and Exposition
The universal web runtime as a meta platform and Symbian's potential role
Challenges of open governance in the mobile industry
Qt and the Symbian Foundation
Symbian's competitiveness with other mobile platforms in various areas
The forthcoming application arena (has been touted as Symbian's 'app store', but this is a misleading label), with a brief mention of Symbian Signed changes
What handset does an Executive Director use?

Nokia E71 and E66 v300.21.012 firmware update now available

2009-07-02T15:35:40+01:00

An updated firmware, version 300.21.012, is now available for both the Nokia E71 and E66 (previous version was 210.xx.xxx). This is a major firmware update for the Nokia E71 and E66, it includes updates to Mail for Exchange software and email wizard, adds Internet Radio and social networking bookmark widgets, and improves overall performance. The new firmware can be downloaded and installed via Nokia Software Updater.

Firmware updates become available for different device variants (e.g. operator branded handsets) and markets at different times. I've successfully checked for and installed the update with a EURO1 variant. As neither the E71 nor the E66 support UDP (user data preservation) you will need to back up your device before installing the firmware update.

Update details

Mail for Exchange version 2.09 and Nokia Messaging 5.1 are included in the firmware. This Mail for Exchange version can also be downloaded from the Nokia website, however this version does not support sub-folders (which is only available for Mail for Exchange on some S60 3.2 devices - currently Nokia E75, E55, N86, and 6710). Nokia Messaging can also be downloaded from the Nokia website.

The email set up wizard has been improved and there's additional help for users in deciding what type of email they should be setting up:

The E71 now includes Internet Radio and a number of widget-powered shortcuts to popular social media and social networking websites:

The standard My Nokia application has been added to the E71 (in the help folder).

There also seem to have been some general performance improvements, most notably when opening the Installation folder.

Its likely that there have also been a significant number of bug fixes and stability improvements.

Please do share anything else you may notice in the comments thread.

YouTube S60 client gets minor update to 2.2.6

2009-07-02T12:39:19+01:00

Yep, it's another update to Google native S60 YouTube client, to v2.2.6, though note that this seems to be more about increasing compatibility - there are no performance improvements, you still can't log in to YouTube and it still doesn't work full-screen on the Nokia 5800. Ah well, at least it shows the development team is active! You can grab v2.2.6 via m.google.com on your phone.

Ovi Contacts updated, now supports touch/S60 5th Edition

2009-07-02T12:16:02+01:00

Ovi Contacts, originally Nokia Chat, integrates the standard S60 contact list with a proprietary instant messaging and presence/status system. It has just had an update that brings it close to formal release status and includes much wider compatibilty, including support for the Nokia N97 and 5800 XpressMusic. The next step, presumably, is to start building this into more phones (the Nokia 5630 XpressMusic, Nokia 5730 XpressMusic and Nokia 6720 classic) already have it. Data-phobes should note that Ovi Contacts requires an online connection and will consume a small amount of bandwidth. Maps lookups are integrated into Ovi Maps.

Ovi Maps 3.0 is now officially released (but you need a PC)

2009-07-02T10:58:31+01:00

It's official. After months of beta testing, Nokia has released Ovi Maps (née Nokia Maps) 3.0 to the world for most (but not all) S60 3rd Edition FP1, FP2 and S60 5th Edition phones. The download is a 20MB Windows installer, so you do have to own a PC, but there's a little note on the Ovi Maps download page saying that Mac support is 'coming soon'. I certainly hope so. See also Rafe's preview of this release, here on AAS.

Thankfully, Ricky Cadden has extracted the two SIS files that S60 5th and 3rd Edition FP2 device owners need, so head here to download these if you haven't got easy access to a Windows PC etc.

A tale of three smartphones: Rescuing a dead battery

2009-07-02T10:46:37+01:00

Faced with a dead Nokia N86 that refused to charge, I didn't panic - armed with the luxury of some of other devices to hand, I was able to get the N86 and its battery revived and working properly. And, in the process, learned that all Nokia's batteries are electrically interchangeable. Maybe these concept will save the day when your precious S60 phone appears to have died? At the very least, add this to your 'Things to try' check list!

Read on

The Nokia E51 hits v400

2009-07-02T09:46:57+01:00

Nokia has also released v400.34.011 firmware for the diminutive E51, bringing "improvements and increased stability in Mail for Exchange and SMS reception". It also "improves stability and usability for VoIP and WLAN" and "robustness improvements when pressing the Home key". 'Stability improvements' and 'Robustness improvements' are of course Nokia speak for fixing bugs(!), but we're not complaining. Do note that the E51 is old enough not to have User Data Preservation, so do a full backup to memory card before using Nokia Software Update and then restore again afterwards. And make a note of any critical email or application settings - you know the drill.

The Phones Show 84 with Symbian interview and N86 review

2009-07-01T10:12:07+01:00

The Phones Show 84 is now public (embedded below too), with a reprise commentary on the Nokia E75, a hands-on review of the Nokia N86 8MP and a interview with the Symbian Foundation's Executive Director Lee Williams, asking him some of your questions, on the subjects of robot duck overlords, LTE, touchscreens, open source OS and, of course, which phone does he personally use(!)

RSS options for The Phones Show: Standard QVGA version: / High res VGA version:

The Nokia N96 also gets a big bump - to v30.033 firmware

2009-07-01T08:53:27+01:00

Not as sexy as the N97's update, no doubt, but the Nokia N96 has always underperformed and I'm hoping that v30.033 firmware, also released today, will help the beleaguered flagship-of-2008 come up to par. v30 is a 6MB over-the-air update and installed smoothly on my N96. The previous firmware version was v20, by the way. Some brief comments below.

Ovi Store isn't included, which is a surprise (though it is in Download!, of course). Neither is Ovi Chat, which again I'd expected, this having made it into v30 firmware on the N79. Initial impressions are that v30 firmware is faster and leaner, perhaps not surprisingly. So we're talking bug fixes and optimisations. Maybe 9 months too late, but hey... at least those who bought the N96 and have been regretting it can feel a little better about their phone now.

The usual caveats apply, in terms of backing up (though the User Data Preservation worked fine here) and in terms of network-branded devices having to wait a while before this firmware gets 'approved' by their network.

Now that Nokia seem to be cranking out firmware updates at a regular pace, I'd like to see them get a v31 out too, with more of the Ovi integration we've seen on the N96's sister devices.

The Nokia N97 firmware v11 goes live

2009-07-01T08:22:52+01:00

For many people anyway, e.g. here at N97 enthusiast Gerry Moth's. See also his Twitter feed for his comments through the day. Rafe and Tzer2 both have N97s here at AAS and I'll try to get some comments out of them through the day!