It appears it's McAfee's turn to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the Symbian world. I quote from their press release: "By comparison, a mobile threat... could infect up to 200 million connected smartphones simultaneously because the majority of these devices do not currently have mobile security protection installed". What rubbish. Read on...
Nokia recently gathered their leading N-Gage developers in a workshop session on S60 v3 and Symbian OS 9.1 - the next generation platform, as they describe it. In attendence were Backbone, Digital Legends, Bonus.com, Barking Lizards, Ideaworks, Jadestone, Razorback, Torus, and Two Tribes. Full Press Release Follows...
Digital Restrictions Management in UIQ 3 is going to be provided by Discretix, UIQ have announced. Procviding support for the industry standard OMA DRM, Microsoft Windows Media v10 and CPRM, it promises "flexibility in meeting the evolving needs of mobile operators." Our emphasis. Full press release follows.
Thanks to Darla for spotting that Nokia has put up a Christmas gift for 6680 owners. Specifically, free downloads of either Sensor, Beach Race, Tunes Studio or Cirqx (qix). All they want in return is your phone number and email address, which seems fair enough.
Interesting reading over at OSNews.com, where they've interviewed marketing and programming people from Nokia about the creation of the next generation S60 web browser. Watch this space in the New Year for Ewan's AAS preview.
Steve Litchfield's discovered that Opera Mini's now alive and working and has been playing with it for a couple of days. Here's his review. Summary: it may change the way you browse on your smartphone - it will certainly chop your GPRS bill down to size...
AAS's own Arjen Broeze has come up with a utility to create Nokia 9500 or 9300 skins from scratch or by editing existing ones. It can also automatically generate all needed graphics from a single master image, install and activate skins without the need to reboot, and automatically install Desk and cover phone wallpapers. And we can't resist mentioning that this was all written in OPL. Nice one, Arjen!
Anyone caught out by bugs in PC Suite 6.7 might like to note that there's now a bug-fix available, see here, apparently fixing a clash between Windows XP SP1 and File manager. Anyone fancy being the guinea pig for this one?
Courtesy of Forum Nokia comes this little PDF How-to on making your video masterpieces available on the Web. The N70 and N90 produce VHS-quality footage, so why not share your clips?
Ewan goes in search of an Internet Relay Chat client that will work on all his Symbian smartphones and finds it in the free JmIRC. Here's the full review.
The url http://m.gmail.com/ shows that even the decision on the namespace is right - Google's Gmail service now has a web based mail interface for small screen devices. While POP3 access has always been available, it has never been 100% reliable. While you'll still need to watch the data charges from your carrier, it should be no problem for any mobile web browser to get your mail.
Thunderhawk, a web browser previously available on the Windows Mobile platform is now available for S60. Features include a unique split screen mode which divides the screen in two and allows for easier reading and page navigation and wider standard support. Thunderhawk enters an already competitive marketplace with both Opera and Netfront as contenders to replace your built in browser.
Steve Litchfield puts WMAPlus! through its paces and concludes that it's a welcome step towards Media Player compatibility, but that it needs serious work on its stability.
Mobile Email and how to recieve it is an area which a lot of companies are working on, with mobile data and email being seen as the best area for growth in 2006. Visto are now asserting that "Microsoft has infringed upon multiple patents Visto holds regarding proprietary technology that provides enterprises and consumers with mobile access to their email and other data," and have started legal proceedings against the Redmond based Microsoft, who see email as a central plank to their mobile platform. Three patents are specifically mentioned in the full press release which follows.The issue of mobile email is a very important issue, as can be seen by Visto's other announcement of a licencing deal with NTP.
3-Lib's grid of mobile/smartphone solutions is now fully interactive! You can apply your own weightings for any smartphone functions and the grid will recalculate scores as needed.
