Just in time to meet 'released in 2010', Nokia's all-singing, all-dancing Ovi Suite has moved out of beta and into production code, becoming available as a 73MB download via 'Check for updates' in your existing PC or Ovi Suite installations (screenshot below). The main improvements for v3.0(.0.284) are to the Music and Maps modules, but there are also facelifts for most aspects and the inevitable bug fixes.
Visiarc has announced its cooperation with Nokia Beta Labs to provide a way to make Mobile Documents, integrating an email client with a document handler, more visible to the target market and to receive more feedback to improve it. Also worthy of note is the release of a new Mobile Documents beta for Symbian^3 (version 0.9.19) which comes with two new enhancements.
I can’t resist pointing out another fabulous theme by PiZero I’ve just stumbled over. Called Digiflowers, it’s available for S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 handsets. It works in landscape and portrait mode, looks fantastic and adds an artistic flair to your home screen and desktop. Well worth checking out from pizero.net.
Just when you thought it was all over by completing the festive variant, Rovio go and release an update to Angry Birds for Symbian^3 handset owners. With two new level packs (Danger Above and Big Set Up), Golden Egg support and some tweaks to the UI, the fowl flyers are set to keep you frustrated into 2011.
Popping up at the start of the week was a significant alpha version of Gravity. Taking the popular social media client up to version 1.5a, it’s not quite polished and stable yet, so if you want to wait for the hardened version, then check back in January. But if you’re happy with a little bit of peril, then you’ll get a number of new features and improvements, including a portrait qwerty keyboard for touchscreen devices!
Mobbler, Symbian's Last.fm client, has a new beta version for Symbian^3 users. The new beta supports the new Scrobbling API and menu items for the radio stations recently discontinued by Last.fm have been removed. There is a long list of new features too, like Twitter sharing, artist biography pages, and improved lyrics pages. Also added is support for the new mix radio station created by Last.fm to replace discontinued stations. The Mobbler project is also asking people to install an error reporting agent (ErrRd.SIS) which will help the developers capture bugs in the new beta version.
Asri Al Baker from i-symbian.com and friend of All About Symbian has been at it again with his Web Run-Time Widgets! This time, he has broken away from the Google world and treated us to a launcher for Facebook Touch. For those who don't know, http://touch.facebook.com offers a variant of Facebook optmised for finger-driven mobile browsers. As said previously, there's nothing stopping users from just adding a bookmark to their browser, but these WRT Widgets offer the benefit of an identifiable icon in both the application menu and home screen shortcuts.
Anyone who is interested in testing the latest features of Pixelpipe Share Online should now direct their browser towards Nokia Beta Labs. Pixelpipe is the latest third party application to be invited into Nokia Beta Labs for users to get the latest bleeding edge features, and more importantly, provide useful feedback to the developers! To announce their invitation to Beta Labs, Pixepipe CEO Brett Butterfield has written a guest blog post, to introduce the social media sharing agent to the uninitiated.
Putting itself forward as the “real-time home screen” Hiplogic’s *Spark has left beta and the full version is officially launched today. With hooks into your own social networks on Facebook and Twitter, as well as news headlines from PA, Sky and CBS and a new daily deals module (powered by this month’s web darling, Groupon), *Spark certainly makes a strong case for itself. See below for plenty more, including comments, screens, links and an in-depth, exclusive video interview with Hiplogic's CEO, Mark Anderson.
Over on A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch is taking a closer look at one of the current key elements of the modern smartphone, the web browser. Pulling numbers from the Stat-Counter Service, he not only points out that the leading browser is Opera, but that Nokia’s web-kit effort is sitting nicely on 17% of the global market, compared to Opera and Safari on 22% and Blackberry on 19%. Android, by comparison, is on 11%. What does that mean for website designers?
Nokia’s Beta Labs have updated their “bots” to be compatible with the full range of Symbian^3 devices, alongside some bug fixes and changes to the existing version for the N97, N97 mini and C6-00. The Bots, which are widgets that sit on your homescreen, will firstly record your behaviour, and then present options which should be suitable for you at that moment in time – the Contacts bot will now show you your four most used contacts, not just on overall usage, but on how often you contact people from a certain location.
Marko Ahtisaari, SVP of industrial design at Nokia, was one of the guest speakers at this year's LeWeb Conference. He covered topics from dominant designs of smartphone user interface and collective intelligence with mobile devices. He outlined why he sees that there's plenty of work to be done in the world of mobile user experience, particularly in having mobile devices actually demand less of our attention. In his view, iOS is "beautifully elegant and fantastically constrained", while Symbian and Android actually share the same design pattern but differ greatly in their business models. Read on for a in-depth account of the speech and Q&A session.
Nokia Messaging 10.2 and Mail for Exchange have just been pushed out for Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic, 5530 and X6-00. These updates are over-the-air (OTA), and should be available via the Software Update application. Nokia Messaging provides push email to these handsets via Nokia's own push mail service from popular services like Ovi Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. Alongside the Nokia Messaging update, Mail for Exchange has been added to these handsets providing push email and PIM push synchronisation with corporate networks, and third party services like Nuevasync. Read on for screenshots and a brief comment.
Skype have just announced a new version of Skype for Symbian, with a revamped user interface and support for Symbian^3 devices. This new version (1.50 build 15) supports the SILK codec for higher quality calls. As part of the user interface update, Skype say they have improved support for larger screens, and made it easier to add contacts and photos, and make status updates. We have also noted the UI has new instant message notification pop-ups. Read on for screenshots and our initial test results.
Friend of All About Symbian, Asri Al Baker from i-symbian.com, has done it again. As mentioned in this week's Insight Podcast, he has just published two more WRT widgets for launching advanced mobile website versions of Google services. This time he has created launchers for GTalk, Google's instant messaging service, and Google Calendar. These come after Asri's other widgets for GMail and Google Reader (which we reported on here and here). The websites utilised by these launchers are the default views found on iOS and Android browsers, but are available to any mobile browser, if you know the right URL's. Read on for screenshots and more.
