All About Symbian - Links of Interest News

Symbian aim for 'Satisfaction'

2009-11-06T09:28:22+01:00

The third party community support site, GetSatisfaction, is fairly well known. It transpires that there's now an official (as in manned by Symbian employees) Symbian sub-community here, hopefully worth bookmarking should you 'need to ask that awkward question'.... Early days, of course, so the numbers are small but I'm sure it will grow.

From Symbian's blog:

"Expect Symbian enthusiasts, volunteers and employees alike to help you find solutions to problems you may be experiencing with your handsets in a friendly and courteous fashion. I for one would love to see those people out there who are keen to help our support community grow and prosper, so anyone keen to help us answer questions would be more than welcome to. If you feel you have extensive knowledge and passion for our platform or one of our devices and would like play a more active and official role in the site as it grows, so please feel free to send us a tweet to our @symbian account and we will be in touch."

The Nokia N97 v20 firmware Q&A

2009-11-05T11:33:11+01:00

On Tuesday evening, I took part in a Nokia first - bloggers from round the world were invited to a (virtual) meet with the people behind a device's firmware, in this case Frank Zillikens, the Lead Firmware Developer, and Catalin Gheorghiu, a member of the technical team responsible for the recent firmware upgrade, both for the huge v20 update for the Nokia N97. Clinton Jeff, also attending, has taken the time to produce a nice summary of the questions and answers. Note that more questions were actually asked and that Nokia said they'd get back to us with answers in due course.

EyeMags, easy mobile content creation, adds S60 Touch support

2009-11-04T09:00:00+01:00

EyeMags, a service for generating personal content applications for mobile phones, has today added support for S60 5th Edition phones such as the Nokia 5800, Nokia N97 and Sony Ericsson Satio. EyeMags, using a web-based creator, allows anyone to create their own cross platform (JME, iPhone and Symbian) 'snackable' mobile content application containing a mixture of text and pictures. Read on for further details.

Shown below is an example EyeMag, Seven Wonders of the World, one of 9,000 currently available, which combines images and text to give a quick visual guide to 'wonders of the world' in various categories, from the traditional to the modern. Essentially, EyeMags takes content and puts a Web Runtime 'wrapper' around it. From within any EyeMag you can share the content (via e-mail, Twitter and more) or download further EyeMags.

EyeMags aims to create 'snackable' or 'casual-consumable' content and, by making the creation process as simple as possible, aims to lower the barriers for creating such mobile content. They are not intended to be full blown, feature rich, applications. As such, they may appear relatively basic, but that misses the point.

'Snackable' content is making up an increasing proportion of app store content. This is partly the result of the improvement in distribution channels that app store provide, but is also a reflection of the 'race to zero' pricing trend, which has forced some developers to create simpler applications. While there is plenty of room for improvement in the EyeMags service, and automation means there is little flexibility, the service is providing a potentially mass market solution on the leading edge of mobile content trends.

A key feature of the EyeMags service is its support for multiple platforms, including Nokia phones (enabled by WRT) and the Apple iPhone (enabled by HTML 5 - a good example of how HTML 5 can be used to create offline applications) - and feature phones (enabled by JME technology). Clearly there are significant cost-and-time advantages to a service that allows you to create mobile content for a number of mobile platforms at the same time, especially when the service already emphasises ease of use.

From the press release:

"EyeMags (eyemags.com), a personal content application generator for all mobile phones, announces today that they can provide full support for S60 Touch phones including the Nokia N97, Nokia N97 Mini, Nokia 5800, Nokia 5230, Nokia 5530 and Sony Ericsson Satio phones. Content applications are built by the server using WRT widget technology.

Following our successful launch of the iPhone App Creation tool last week, further work with the top end Smartphone market sees us launch support for these latest Nokia and Sony Ericsson Smartphones. Both these technologies build on top of the mobile Java (J2ME) applications used for all other devices.

Now non-developers can build their own content applications for most phones from low end to the top end Smartphones and make them available to the public immediately using the EyeMags technology. EyeMags believe this is a world first and expect significant uptake of their service. The advantage for publishers is that these applications are automatically available for all other phone types at the same time."

EyeMags can be side-loaded via a PC or can be downloaded directly from the mobile site, as shown below.

EyeMags Creation

Anybody can create EyeMags through the EyeMags website. Each EyeMag is made up of ten pages, each of which can contain a mixture of text and images. You upload your images, via the web browser, and enter text into a form on the web page and the website does the rest for you.

The EyeMags site will automatically create a download page and a version of each of the phones that the EyeMags service supports.

More information is available at www.eyemags.com.

Symbian UI concept video from SEE 2009

2009-11-03T16:10:15+01:00

At last week's Symbian Exchange and Exposition, Lee Williams (Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation) showed, during the keynote, a concept video of what a future Symbian UI might look like. The video shows a typical use case: accepting an invite to a party via Facebook and, the next day, attending the party. There's a glimpse of a new look homescreen, complete with social web integration, navigation and mapping features enhanced by augmented reality functionality. Read on to view the video and my comments.

The video

To be clear, this is a concept video of a future Symbian UI. This is not the UI for Symbian^4 (although big UI changes are currently planned for this release). However, many of the ideas and principles that appear in the video will likely feature in the future implementations of the Symbian platform.

"An artist's concept of the future of the Symbian UI, also shown in Lee Williams' keynote at SEE 2009 on 27 October 2009. This concept is not part of the Symbian UI Roadmap, but we hope some of the cool features and effects will make it into our reference UI and/or delivered handsets."

Notable features

The hardware has a send, end, home and back keys. A 'soft' toolbar running along the bottom of the screen at all times (replacing the tradition two softkey layout) indicates that the UI is optimised for one-handed usage.

The toolbar changes dependent on the context of the task being carried out (e.g. in navigation mode it switches to 'car', 'walk' and 'transit'. The individual icons contain information, for example, the messaging icon, in the image below, shows that there are three new/unread messages.

Additional commands are accessed via a drop down menu at the top of the screen. The status bar area is also notably smaller than at the present time.

When combined with the bottom toolbar (above), this UI concept would allow for a flatter hierarchy of commands (i.e. no longer has all commands hanging off an Options menu).

A long press (tap and hold) to bring up a context sensitive pop-up menu for further actions. Additionally, the screen is faded out to show the currently active action more prominently.

A widget based homescreen with slide-in, variable sized, and gesture-to-full-screen support.

Seamless integration between different application and web services. For example, the mash up of native mapping functionality with Facebook event information.

Kinetic scrolling within a layered window, suggestive of a more advanced graphics framework and a more fluid UX / UI.

These last three items suggest a move away from an application-based paradigm (application launcher / grids) to a task-based paradigm (homescreen).

Features arriving in Symbian^2, Symbian^3 and Symbian^4

Although this is a concept video, many of the features will arrive in upcoming Symbian updates. In the Symbian Developer Forums Scott Weiss, Chair of the Symbian Foundation's UI Council, offers the following commentary:

Kinetic scrolling (in Symbian^2)

Location-based services (in Symbian^2)

Different widget sizes (coming in Symbian^3)

Animations and transitions (coming with NGA in Symbian^3)

Compass and accelerator integration (coming in Symbian^3)

Menu at the top of the screen (inspirational idea)

Toolbar at the bottom of the screen, replacing soft keys (inspirational idea)

Augmented reality integration (inspirational idea)

The Symbian Foundation is looking for your comments on the UI concept - you can add comments to the YouTube video or post on the Symbian Developer Forums.

Rafe Blandford

microUSB marches on, Symbian theme, Horizon app store launches

2009-11-03T13:18:09+01:00

It's.... another compendium of interesting links that I really wanted to flag up for attention here. Firstly, the ITU (the telecoms bit of the UN) has joined the American CTIA in agreeing on microUSB as the cable standard for phones for the future. Note that most Symbian-powered phones already use this. Secondly, there's a new, official Symbian Foundation theme (screenshot and d/l link below), which I'm determined to try out. Finally, Symbian's Horizon app-recommendation programme has gone live and is worth bookmarking.

Here's the Symbian Foundation theme download. Screenshot below:

Nokia's Savander on Ovi and the USA

2009-11-02T19:37:45+01:00

There's a great and interesting interview here with Nokia's Niklas Savander by the USA's 'CNET', talking about Ovi, app stores and Nokia's lack of penetration in the USA market. Well worth a read and helps understand where Nokia is coming from.

Google Mobile Search adds voice, and multi-language too

2009-11-02T17:30:01+01:00

Google's S60 'portal' search utility, 'Google Mobile App' just got itself an update to v2.03(8), bringing voice searching - and it works rather impressively. Bring up the S60 3rd Edition utility in the usual way (e.g. by pressing 'C' on the homescreen) and then press and hold the green call key to speak your search string. Some screenshots, videos and links below.

You can get Google Mobile App for yourself by going to m.google.com in Web on your phone - the version for S60 5th Edition (with no 'C' key, among other aspects) comes up as 'Not compatible' but you can persevere as long as you're happy to get to the utility another way.

Once a search match is found, you're shown any results, optionally sorted by distance from your current location, in the usual way.

Google India has done a demonstration video, embedded here. Of note is the complexity of phrases which can be used and also the multi-language abilities - apparently Mandarin (Chinese) is now supported. Comments welcome if you've got the time to try this out fully!

From Google's announcement, on the subject of Mandarin support:

Up until now voice search has only been available in English, but the new version of Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 devices works for Mandarin speakers, too. We're really proud of the work we've done with Mandarin speech recognition, both because it's the most spoken language in the world, and because of the engineering challenge. To get Mandarin speech recognition to work, we had to learn a lot about this fascinating language — the differences between traditional and simplified Chinese, its tonal characteristics, automatic segmentation of text into words, pinyin representations of Chinese characters, sandhi rules, the different accents and languages in China, unicode representations of Chinese character sets...the list goes on and on.

Mandarin speakers can now search by voice for complex queries like 清华大学附近的水煮鱼 (which translates to "water-boiled fish near Tsinghua University"). Although this only works on the Nokia S60 at the moment, we're working on adding support for Mandarin speech recognition to our products on other mobile platforms, such as Android and iPhone. And bear in mind that this is a first version of our system in Mandarin, and it might not be as polished as our English version. For example, if you have a strong southern Chinese accent, it might not work as well as for people with a Beijing accent. However, our system will improve over time, so please give it a try!

(hat tip to Clinton Jeff for the YouTube link for the second video clip)

The non-invasive DIY way to fix N97 LED flash flare

2009-11-02T12:48:45+01:00

I'd been seeing comments about improving N97 camera flash flare (refracted through camera glass scratches) by using a marker pen, but hadn't quite got my head around exactly what to do. Luckily, I came across this helpful video on YouTube (embedded below) - the marker pen has to be applied to the sidewall between the flash silo and the start of the camera glass. See especially the photo at the end of the video.

NB. this is still probably a last resort - first option should be to get the Nokia-re-designed camera glass/back cover at a proper Nokia Care Point 8-)

Still, hopefully this will help someone else...

Q3 global phone marketshare figures out

2009-10-30T17:46:52+01:00

As expected, the global phone market has continued to contract, year on year, in the current economic climate, according to BusinessWire and Strategy Analytics, though Q3 did show a shorter term rise. There's no breakdown in smartphone numbers as yet, though these are due any day now. Highlight stats from this data are that Nokia's overall market share is down a smidgen, while Samsung's is on the rise. It's still worth noting that Nokia out sold the next three manufacturers in the table though, combined.

(Apple, in case you were wondering, are lumped under 'Others' and shipped 7.5 million phones in the quarter for a market share of 2.5%.)

Farewell N-Gage - Nokia to shutter gaming service

2009-10-30T17:46:18+01:00

In a low key announcement, via the N-Gage blog, comes the news that Nokia plans to shutter its N-Gage gaming service. Nokia say they will 'no longer publish new games for the N-Gage platform'; instead games will be provided via its Ovi Store service. Current N-Gage games can be purchased until September 2010 and the N-Gage website and Arena service (online elements) will be available throughout 2010.

The closure of the N-Gage service is a blow to Nokia's service ambitions. However it is also fair to say that N-Gage really pre-dated the Ovi strategy. As a result, in both vision and execution, it did not fit fully fit into the Ovi service portfolio, especially after the launch of Ovi Store earlier this year.

Clearly Nokia will look to push its gaming strategy forward under the Ovi Store umbrella, but it is a long way from both dedicated gaming unit (N-Gage first generation) and a gaming focused platform and community (N-Gage second generation). N-Gage was never able to move beyond a niche community. Its ease of distribution advantages has been overtaken by the rise of App Stores; similarly online service elements are now relatively common. Furthermore the lack of graphic acceleration hardware in recent Nokia S60 phones have left N-Gage games looking lacklustre, in eye-candy terms, when compared to the iPhone and other mobile gaming platforms.

Key points

Nokia will no longer publish new games via the N-Gage service. Instead games will be made available via the Ovi Store. Nokia term this an 'evolution of their mobile gaming service', but there's no getting away from the fact that represents a failure of the N-Gage service.
N-Gage games can be purchased until September 2010. Other parts of the N-Gage service, including N-Gage Arena, will be availale throughout 2010.
The N-Gage application will continue to ship on some older devices. However new devices will not ship with the N-Gage application.
All current N-Gage will continue to work. The online (Arena) elements will continue to work throughout 2010. However, subsequently, the online elements of N-Gage games will no longer work.
Nokia's future gaming strategy will be based on Ovi Store distribution.

Nokia are 'actively working on offering more community elements through Ovi' and will 'encourage developers to use community features in their applications'. This suggests Nokia will, in the future, offer common community / online elements, perhaps based on N-Gage technology, to developers publishing their games through the Ovi Store.

More details and comment shortly.

Further information, including a list of frequently asked questions, is available on the N-Gage blog.

N97 v20 out? Check. Now works with Mac? Check

2009-10-30T17:05:17+01:00

With the Nokia N97 v20 firmware now out for a couple of days and fixing the underlying Sync system issues, I'd been on refresh on Nokia's Mac software site every few hours. It seems that the N97 has now been added to the compatibility list for iSync and that you can now do full iCal and Address Book syncing to the Apple Mac. Go download! I'll be testing this out thoroughly over the next few days...

Symbian Freak points out that support has also been added for the 5530 XpressMusic and the E52.

Your Friday reading links

2009-10-30T13:21:02+01:00

In case you're after some weekend reading, have a scout through these links: Rita el-Khoury waxes lyrical about how she gradually fell in love with the (white) Nokia N86; Jay has written up the WOM-invited blogger interview with Nokia's Ovi Maps/Good Things team; away from Symbian but very definitely of competing interest, is the qwerty-driven Motorola 'Droid', here's BGR's exclusive and lengthy preview; and finally, Ewan MacLeod has started up a (free) weekly mobile industry newsletter, subscribe away!

The Phones Show 93 and Phones Show Chat 10

2009-10-29T09:03:13+01:00

Just a quick note that The Phones Show 93 and The Phones Show Chat 10 are both now live, with plenty of Nokia/Symbian content that you might be interested in. In particular, you might like to note my 'top 5' choices in the former... See also the RSS feeds for the MP4/video and MP3/audio shows.

Ovi Store Re-downloads go official

2009-10-28T16:56:48+01:00

Nokia's Ovi Store re-download policy just got a whole lot clearer, with an official post on the matter - essentially, you can re-download purchased apps provided you're logged in with the same user name and on the same physical phone as was used for the purchase. It's a touch more restrictive than we're used to on other platforms, but hey, at least it's now officially possible. Oh, and you'll need the very latest version of the Ovi Store client - v1.5 (387) or higher. If you have to switch devices, presumably you'll still be calling Nokia's support people though... Video and more below. And comments welcome, how well does this new system work for you?

Purchases made in the past are also apparently honoured, regardless of the device used. See below.

Here's the official video launching the re-download feature:

From the press release:

"With this latest Store release, we’ve added a simple way for you to restore content that you purchased and downloaded through Store to your device. We take very seriously the fulfillment of content that is acquired through the Store, and while we can’t prevent certain events that may cause damage or the loss of content, we can make it easier for you to re-acquire it. Please watch this short tutorial below to learn more about how to redownload previously purchased content.

As the tutorial explains, if you use the Store through our mobile client application, you’ll be required to upgrade to the newest version on S60 devices—look for version 1.5(387) or higher—and on Series 40 devices—look for version 1.6.1 or higher—to take advantage of redownloading. The latest version of Ovi store for S60 devices is rolling out now. If you receive a prompt to update your client, please accept it!

If you shop the Store through our mobile web site at store.ovi.com on your Nokia mobile browser, the feature is enabled today. And regardless of how you shop the Store, we will honor purchases made before this new version, so if you purchased the BlockGO game in August and it didn’t download properly, give it another shot by visiting the My Stuff section of the store.

We hope content redownloading will improve the way you use and enjoy content acquired through the Store by providing a simple, easy, and no-hassle way to make you and your content whole again.

We also updated our search experience, making it easier to access what you’re looking for across our entire content catalog. We highly value your feedback, so let us know what you think."

emTube evolves into Open Video Hub

2009-10-28T11:00:33+01:00

Do you remember emTube, one of the first YouTube video clients for S60? Well, it's back (after a fashion), in the form of Open Video Hub, available* for S60 3rd Edition and 5th Edition and with additional support for Daily Motion and Metacafe videos. It's also now Open Source, which is great news. The only catch is that, currently, Open Video Hub needs (*)signing for a user's phone - see the screenshots, press release snippet and links below.

"BLStream, an inspired leader in emerging visual technologies, usability and entertainment on portable devices, announces the release of its first Open Source project, Open Video Hub - a Symbian-based online video player. With support for most popular video sites, powerful and easy-to-use interface, and extensible architecture with additional support for video upload, Open Video Hub enables Symbian-based phones to play, download, store and share videos. Together with source codes, all previously developed plugins were made public, including YouTube, Daily Motion and Metacafe.

Additional features include accelerometer support for auto rotation of video, local caching for offline playback and support for other
video servers, with SDK available for 3rd party developers. More information to be found at www.openvideohub.com, as well as at Symbian Exchange & Exposition in London, October 27-28th, 2009, where the product will be showcased by BLStream's representatives."

Link: Open Video Hub web site for information and downloads

Required additional link: Symbian Signed Online