The coolest things for the coolest phones
Nokia has recently kicked its newborn mail service, Mail on Ovi, mewling out into the big bad world and it looks like an extremely elegant and simple service indeed. The Nokia blog, Nokia Conversations, has recently posted a nice little demo video of Mail on Ovi in action.
It’s currently still in its beta nappies, meaning it’s free to try from Nokia Beta Labs. Go get!
Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, pounds, sheets of Monopoly money or bottle caps. It’s game over for UIQ and here is the proof:
“There are no opportunities to create a new line of business in the current financial climate.”
Those are the words of soon to be singing for his supper UIQ CEO Johan Sandberg. The company which was (ahh, the past tense, how cruel language can be) owned mostly by Sony Ericsson and Motorola, has largely been kicked to the curb by the formation of the Symbian Foundation.
The real death-blow was been the introduction of Nokia’s touch-friendly mobile operating system, S60 5th Edition, which has prompted UIQ’s majority shareholders to run for the hills. There are currently 200 people employed at UIQ, though the company is yet to make a formal statement about its bankruptcy. Expect that sad transmission very soon *sniff*.
(Via Reuters)
A rather nasty bug has been discovered in Symbian S60 (versions 2.6 through to 3.1) in which a specially formatted SMS can knock out a phone’s ability to receive SMS or MMS messages.
The ‘Curse of Silence‘ as it has been called by German hacker Tobias Engel, exploits a bug in the S60 code for interpreting incoming SMS messages. If an SMS has been marked as “Internet Electronic Mail” and the sender address is longer than 32 characters the SMS client gets a bit confused and locks up - rendering the phone unable to process incoming messages. To undo the ‘curse’ a factory reset is required which a bit of a pain, to say the least.
Recent Nokia phones - e.g. the N85, N96, 6650 - using S60 Feature Pack 2 are immune to the problem, but owners of earlier handsets will just have to hope that they haven’t offended any geeks who know their mobile numbers.
We are big fans of Nokia’s Beta Labs here at Pocket Picks. The Symbian idea factory has been responsible for some of the most interesting apps and services for the S60 and S40 platforms, and all for free.
Now, in a move so meta it hurts, the Beta Labs has released a new version of its website and apps download area… in Beta.
The new site is linked to your Nokia account sign-in and features a blog, forum and rating system for the new apps.
Nokia has just let loose another mewling beta, and it’s your job to coddle it to toddlerhood where it will then be given a proper release. In its own words:
“Nokia Image Exchange is an experimental image gallery to make browsing and sharing images fun and easy. It aims to provide a seamless integration of a mobile image gallery application and a corresponding web-service. Image Exchange explores user experience when the mobile phone is enabled with an always-on data connection and utilizes existing contact information as a basis for social networking.”
Continue reading ‘Nokia launches Nokia Image Exchange beta’
Is “productization” even a word? For good or ill, it is now.
The Beta Labs boffins have been playing around with the default Series 60 calculator app in an attempt to make it more usable, more featureful and.. just generally less rubbish.
The result is Enhanced Calculator - based on the paradoxically less rubbish Series 40 calculator app. The app comes with a ’standard’ mode as well as a scientific calcultor (your basic COS, SIN and TAN stuff and all the other extra keys you have forgoten the purpose of since GCSE maths) and a loan calculator.
Now that the S60 version has been beta tested and found tobe a good thing, Nokia have realised that there isn’t much of an actual product there and have decided to archive the project and investigate how best to integrate it into future handsets.
Until then, they are keeping the most recent beta version available for download. Go and give it a try - it is a 200 times nicer than the regular S60 calculator, even if Calcium still has it beat on simplicity grounds.
When will companies learn that pouring money and effort in Digital Rights Managment (DRM) is a lot like pouring the same into a hole in the ground?
A handy little app called Tunebite doesn’t even attempt to crack the DRM encryption that one must assume Nokia paid good money for, instead opting to just hijack the PC’s audio output - ripping the tunes as they pass through your sound card.
It is a fairlly low-tech, brute force solution to what the DRM designers must have hoped was an intricate, elegant problem involving lots of heavy-duty maths.
It may be possible for Nokia to fix this - but it would involve installing software that seeks out Tunebite and kills it, or sticks a driver layer in that will interfere with such audio shenanigans. This would be both costly, difficult and rather invasive, not to mention prone to failure or subsequent workarounds.
Un-lucky, in other words. One can only imagine the promises that Nokia must have made to the music labels about protecting their intellectual property, and the rather heated phone calls that are now taking place…
Buddycloud attempts, as others before it, to combine social networking and IM with modern mobiles’ ability to pinpoint itself on a map.
We have seen a fair number of these apps and their achilles heel seems to be the buy-in required by all your friends before the service becomes useful. Buddycloud has the same basic problem, but deos at least integrate with Facebook, et al (for example to tag your location onto your Facebook status) so you can get some use out of it even while you are a Buddycloud Billy No-Mates and hopefully convince a few people at a time to enable the service to reach a critical mass.
Buddycloud runs on S60 3Rd edition phones and is clever enough to use cell tower triangulation in lieu of GPS when that is unavailable.
Nokia’s ongoing acquisition of Symbian Limited has come to an end with the company announcing its completion of the buyout yesterday. The news was somewhat overshadowed yesterday, given that it arrived shortly after Nokia decloaked its mouthwatering new flagship handset, the N97.
But the Symbian buyout has much further reaching long term consequences with the company set to deliver a much more open OS to developers in a bid to compete with upstarts such as Android and the iPhone.
Whether or not the difference will be felt significantly at the consumer end remains to be seen. With developers more spoilt for choice now than ever before for platforms to work on, Nokia’s OS might not be the go to platform it once was, regardless of whether or not it’s easier for developers to get their claws into it.
That said, if the N97 manages to regain precious mind share lost to the iPhone over the last 18 months or so, the Symbian OS might regain some of its developer sex appeal, particularly with the App Store becoming ever more over-subscribed.
Expect Nokia’s own take on an App Store-like delivery channel to be announced imminently.
While the suits have been strutting about, holding the shiny new Nokia N97 aloft like a newly-incarnated Dalai Lama the quietly unassuming gang over at Nokia’s Beta Labs have been content to push their spectacles back up the bridge of their collective nose and show us their latest offering with a satisfied smile - Nokia Maps 3.0 beta.
Maps has suffered a bit in comparison to Google Maps of late but this release does seem to bring a few new ideas to the party.
The addition of terrain maps seems like it would be useful although I do wonder what kind of 3G reception you are likely to get in the foothills of the Alps (Beta Labs example terrain of choice). Being able to see topological displays is a nice bonus though, especially if you like to go off road or take you phone on a country walk.
Pedestrian and driving directions have been improved with audio and vibration alerts now warning you of direction changes or other problems. A speed limit checker will alert you if you exceed the know local limit and Lane Assistance can indicate the best angle of approach to that tricky junction.
Ovi users can signup for the beta via that service instead of via Beta Labs and will gain the ability to synch favourite locations with the new maps.
