Recent News Headlines - Software
Voice to everything - Vlingo reviewed
Available for quite a few S60 3rd Edition and S60 5th Edition phones, Vlingo promises web searching, email, text and Facebook status updates, all with voice-to-text speech recognition. But how well does it work in practice? Not perfectly, it has to be said, but it's close enough to make it worth trying out with your voice and in your own use case. Here's my Vlingo review.
AAS Insight 89 - N86 v20 firmware, Dopplr and OTA 09
In All About Symbian Insight 89 (AAS Podcast 151), Rafe and Steve talk about the recent release of version 20 firmware for the Nokia N86 8MP. Rafe and Ewan report back from Over the Air (OTA) where they listened to presentations on Symbian approach to evolving UI and Nokia's Qt strategy. There's also discussion about Nokia's acquisition of Dopplr. You can listen to AAS Insight 89 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Google Maps and Ovi Maps to solve the same problem
Yesterday's heads up from Google about a local search update left us scratching our heads. It was a redesign of the layout, as well as adding some category support, but fundamentally it was a tweak to the existing local search that's available in any city around the world by punching in http://www.google.com/m/local into your phone's web browser. Still, it got the blogs writing about the product again... read on for my thoughts!
Ovi Maps adds Good Things (user generated PoIs)
Nokia is continuing to evolve the desktop version of its Ovi Maps service: the latest 'release' sees the ability to add 'Good Things' (user generated Points of Interest - PoIs) to the map. The functionality is aimed at allowing you to share interesting locations with the world, be it the location of your favourite coffee shop of the venue for an upcoming gig. In order to see and to add your own Good Things you will need to upgrade to the latest version of the Ovi Maps browser plug-in (via Symbian-Guru). Read on for more.
Ovi Mail setup utility debuts
Nokia Beta Labs has today introduced an 'Ovi Mail Setup” application', allowing anyone to sign-up for an Ovi Mail account directly from a S60 device. The same utility is being built into the upcoming E72 and into the new N97 firmware. If you already have an Ovi account then it will provision Ovi Mail and configure the email client already on the device.
Symbian Foundation's presentation on Open Source and the User Experience
Rafe and I attended the Over the Air mobile developer conference this past weekend (expect to hear more about this on the next Insight Podcast) and a number of the presentation made are now online. Scott Weiss of the Symbian Foundation talked about "Open Source and the User Experience" which can now be found here.
The Samsung i8910 gets kinetic scrolling (in Web at least)
The latest Chinese i8910UZCII1 firmware for the Samsung i8910 (Omnia HD) adds kinetic scrolling to the built-in S60 web browser and takes the browser build number up to 7.2.13841. However, the Chinese firmware contains some other issues which break compatibility with European languages, Samsung's PC Suite and some other application. So how can this help you? ... read on to find out.
AAS Insight 88 - Nokia 5730, Ovi Developer Day, Vodafone 360
In All About Symbian Insight 88 (AAS Podcast 150), Rafe and Steve talk about the release dates for some upcoming devices and preview the Nokia 5730. Rafe reports back from the Ovi Developer Day and Steve shares news of the latest Nokia 5800 firmware and upcoming firmware for the N86. There's also discussion about the Ovi Store and Vodafone 360. You can listen to AAS Insight 88 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Playlist DJ review
Are there times when you don't want to keep picking which music to play? Wouldn't it be nice if a utility picked up on your mood and automatically chose music to fit it? Playlist DJ, reviewed here by Rafe, does just that, picking tunes from the music library in your S60 5th Edition smartphone and generally helping you through the day. Best of all, it's free for the next month or so while the developers build up their song databases, so why not give it a try?
Exclusive: Nokia's Ovi Store starts to roll out re-downloads
The Ovi Store team have just started to roll out the ability to re-download purchased content. Content is tightly linked to your Ovi account, which means you can re-download content either to the same device it was purchased on, or a different device (e.g. when you upgrade). Previously Ovi Store content could only be downloaded once, on original purchase, to a single device. Currently the re-download functionality is only available for selected content and there are some caveats. Read on in the full story for more details.
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