Argh! It's another press release promoting another new application and service for your pocket computer. Many years ago the joke was, that of the ten thousand Palm OS applications available, six thousand of them were on-screen digital clocks - the more advanced ones had an alarm feature as well... Reading about yet another 'innovative product connecting your mobile phone's video to the web' might have pushed me over the edge.
Now this is pretty trivial, but bear with me. Am I so unusual in matching a phone's theme to its body colour and styling? Below the break I've illustrated the idea with the silver Nokia N82, but I'd welcome your comments and feedback. What other device/theme pairs work very well?
Since the dawn of time (ok, about 1995), developers have been looking to replace the default home screen of PDAs and smartphones. Epocware's new Handy Shell seems pretty comprehensive for S60 and so we asked Ewan to install it on his main device and run with it for a week... The result? A narrowly missed MegaApp. From configurability to stability, Handy Shell seems to do a lot to live up to its price tag.
Forum Nokia recently kicked off a series events to help educate developers about changes and editions in S60 5th Edition. For example, tomorrow, there are a pair of webinars: 9am London (11am Helsinki, 4pm Beijing) and 11am San Fransisco (2 pm New York) which focus on Touch UI development and APIs. With the first S60 5th Edition device announced and more on the way it makes sense to get informed now.
Take Nokia USA, 30 Nseries still and video finalists, plus pro director Spike Lee, and what do you get? An arty music video, entitled 'Humanity'. Ostensibly showing off what sort of footage you can grab on Nseries smartphones. Which is all very well, though if someone could explain to me what the song 'Love is not the enemy of life' means......
Just a quick link: Nokia Beta labs want feedback on their Communication Center product and are giving away Amazon gift vouchers for some of the respondents to their survey. (via the Guru)
These roundups are never 100% definitive, because there always seems to be at least one favourite service excluded (in this case, Ovi) and also because of the nature of the game - the goalposts are always moving. But still, there's a useful SyncML service review roundup over on Mobile Royale today, including several services that I'd never heard of - worth a read.
There's an interesting interview here today in which Richard Bloor talks to Antony Edwards, Vice President, Developer Product Marketing at Symbian, discussing how developers will be able to contribute to the Symbian Foundation, the challenge of software distribution and how the Symbian Foundation's developer program is shaping up.
Carnival of the Mobilists 145 is over at mjelly this week and well worth a look, with interesting mobile-related reading plus some splendidly bizzarre carnival imagery....
In part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 of this series, Steve Litchfield looked at specifics of camera performance in the phone world. Now AAS guest writer Dirk Snoyt takes up the theme of camera phone flash research and gets all technical on the theme of colours. If you'd like to suggest a topic for us to cover next in the series, please comment!
CommonTime recently announced an upgraded version of its mobile solution for Lotus Notes, today it announced support for all S60 3rd Edition devices. mSuite is a solution, similar to Mail for Exchange, which allows enterprise users to access Lotus Notes based email, contacts, calendar and tasks from a mobile device.
Next up in Ewan's series of Desert Island Desktops, taking a look at people's standby screens - this time, Alfie Dennen of Moblog (www.moblog.net) shares his home screen while Ewan applies his degree in mobile psychology to work out what makes Alfie tick...
Mobile Industry Review have just announced the winners of their 2008 Awards, and in the incredibly competitive Best Mobile Blogger category, the All About Symbian team have come out as winners. While Rafe, Steve and myself were named in the show, we couldn't have managed it without all our other contributors and readers throughout the year. This one really is for you all.
Myslopes.com has been launched as 'the first mobile skiing portal', with snow reports and weather forecasts on any mobile-web-connected phone. m.myslopes.com is the address to use and coverage is for the top-10 European ski-hosting countries.
Resco Photo Viewer has been evolving over the last three years and has paralleled the development of Nokia's own Nseries Gallery in some ways. Which makes it unnecessary for anyone with the latter, but a downright 'MegaApp' must-buy for anyone struggling along on the 'old' S60 Gallery. With a Nokia E90, Steve is hit more than most by a sluggish Gallery and has found the speed of the third party Resco Photo Viewer a revelation. And it's got other tricks up its sleeve too....
In All About Symbian Podcast 96 (Insight #43) Steve, after an E90 firmware update, asks why he can have a better experience than Nokia Software Updater. We also talk about about recent content on All About Symbian before moving on to some thoughts and reflections on S60 5th Edition with some special attention for backwards compatibility.
Sometimes technology is all about the spec sheet, sometimes it's something a little bit more artistic. Announced on Friday in London, and starting at midnight Sunday, the campaign based around the threat of Extremely Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis will be seeding clues around the web to physical items distributed around London. All these items, when viewed on a map, will reveal a picture. The team behind the project includes UK based Moblog, and they asked if All About Symbian would highlight the project... which we're more than happy to do.
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