Recent News Headlines - Links of Interest
Looking ahead to SEE 2009 (the annual Symbian smartphone show)
Yes, another year has passed and the annual Symbian bash is upon us. But with a slight twist, with the Symbian Foundation now well established and with the whole ecosystem, like much of the rest of the mobile industry, definitely in something of a state of flux. SEE (Symbian Exchange and Exposition) 2009 is free to attend and easy to get to. But what's on offer this year, what should you look out for? Steve Litchfield provides a few pointers...
Nokia #5 in the Top Global Brands
Business Week have released their latest "Top 100 Global Brands" and not surprisingly telecommunications and IT companies are riding high in the list. Nokia is in fifth place and the highest placed non-US company, just behind IBM (#2) and Microsoft (#3), while Google has climbed up to #7 while Apple pops in to #20.
The Ovi Store client now available for N86, E52 and E55
You may have noticed that the newer S60 3rd Edition FP2 phones, the ones that ship with the new v7 version of Nokia's Webkit-based Web browser, had been left high and dry regarding a client for Nokia's Ovi Store - trying to install the existing client resulted in an unusably slow experience. There's a new, Web v7-compatible client now though, v1.05(313) - you can get it from going to store.ovi.com in Web on your device - it's a 620k download. In use, the new Ovi Store client is faster than I've seen on any previous device. Anyway, that's one less thing for the Ovi Store people to fix up! (via Ovi Applications)
Nokia named as "world's most sustainable technology company"
Nokia has been named as the world's most sustainable technology company according to the 2009/10 edition of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Already rated for several years as the leader within the Europe and Communications categories, this year Nokia was also chosen as "World Technology Supersector Leader", making it number one across the entire global technology sector. See below for extracts from the press release.
Get photo-geeky with XpressEXIF
If you're a camera geek like me and wish there was a way to view the EXIF information for photos on your S60 5th Edition phone, well now there is. XpressEXIF does need a little fiddling around, plus Python, and there are a few caveats, but SymbianWorld brings us a walkthrough showing that viewing EXIF data is possible with this utility.
A toast to Dr David Potter on his retirement
Standing down today and retiring from his role as Chairman of Psion Teklogic is the spiritual Grandfather of Symbian OS, Dr David Potter. He founded Psion in 1980 with £70,000 of his own money, and over the next twenty years grew it to be one of the leading mobile computing companies, and in the process laid the Foundations for the current smartphone with the spinning out of Psion Computers as Symbian in 1999.
Ovi Suite 2.0 beta gets updated
PC owners might want to check out the latest beta of Ovi Suite 2, now apparently getting closer to final release. This latest beta has better support for photo sync between desktop and phone, plus many other minor fixes. It's a 90MB download from here if you want to keep bang up to date.
Over the Air event schedule released
Next week Imperial College London will be hosting the second "Over The Air" event, where developers, programmers, companies and other interested parties will gather to hear about the latest innovations in smartphone technology during Friday, and then work through the night and into Saturday to hack together new applications using those ideas. it's a mix of Scrapheap Challenge and cutting edge mobile development. The draft schedule has just been announced, and free tickets are still available.
Symbian says can keep half of smartphone market
There's an interesting piece over on Reuters today, interviewing Symbian's David Wood and summarising the current smartphone market rather well. David is (understandably) optimistic that Symbian can hang onto its 50% market share in the coming years. Worth a five minute read.
Nokia Braille Reader - no, really
A little bit of lateral thinking by the Nokia Beta Labs team sees Braille Reader coming to touchscreen S60 5th Edition phones, making the most of both touch and haptic feedback. I'm not qualified to comment on its usefulness, but see below for the launch video.
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