TechNews.AM - Technology News

BelleChat is an IRC client for Symbian^3 devices (running Anna or Belle). The app's UI follows the Nokia Belle style guide, giving a visual pleasing and coherent user interface that matches the native apps.

In All About Symbian Insight number 213, we start with the news of a fix for Nokia Maps Suite 2.0 installation and details of latest beta of Nokia Transport.

In all the fuss over Apple's (effectively bought in) Siri and Samsung's (effectively bought in) S-voice, Symbian owners eager for a little voice recognition action shouldn't forget about Vlingo, free for our OS and recently updated to v2.

I'm not the only crazy N86 fan, it seems - the much respected Alvin Wong has been running a two week experiment using this three year old T9-based phone (the last great N95-style dual-slide smartphone) as his only device.

In the second episode of season three of the 361 Degrees podcast we examine the consumer cloud, talking about what services we use, why we use them, and our main priorities and concerns.

You all know I'm a fan of the Web doing the job of an application - remember 'There's a bookmark for that', from 2010? Over the last couple of years I've dipped into YouTube's mobile-optimised web site, m.

Up on Nokia's official YouTube channel is a short promo video for the upcoming Symbian Nokia Belle FP1, highlighting a few of its highlights (I'll refrain from being picky and pointing out that some of things mentioned are (ahem) already available, even for generic Belle devices).

I'm rather disappointed that Nokia's latest set of sample 808 PureView photos completely miss the point of its own device.

With the world of Symbian seemingly shrinking around us, in terms of 'sales marketshare' at least, because of lack of presence in shops around the world, and with mainstream application development only including Symbian rarely, the question of 'where, if anywhere, should I go, after my N8?' is certainly a valid one.

Now this is patently silly. And yet curiously cute and quirky at the same time. WPEmu puts an obviously fake and yet partly working Windows Phone front end onto a Symbian device, as shown below.

iBomber Defence is the latest tower defence game for Symbian, and being my favourite genre of game, I jumped at the chance to review it.

I keep an eye on YouTube user topolino70 because he's put out some astonishing Nokia cameraphone video footage in the past, and guess what? He just got himself a loan Nokia 808 PureView.

Nokia has now finally fixed the Maps Suite 2.0 installer available in the Nokia Store - for the last three months, the Store client has been prompting everybody that an update is available (screenshot below), yet, once installed, the same update notification pops up again the next day.

Good to see Nokia porting some of their newer Maps Suite back to fill out the mapping and navigation options on older devices, with today's new v2.

Americans don't normally go in for unsubsidised smartphones, mainly because data plans are so expensive in the USA that even handset costs get lost in the noise.

As more smartphones are designed with non-replaceable batteries, the potential of getting through a day of heavy use by carrying a spare battery is going away.

We've seen iPhone wallpapers and themes before, but this one's special in that it has had PiZero's full care and attention lavished on it.

Another day, another Nokia 808 video spot, embedded below - you can almost physically feel the anticipation, can't you?(!) This time it's Nokia Brazil, showing off the amazing zoom by the simple device of showing an image at full zoom and then double tapping to zoom out and reveal the full photo, causing your jaw to drop each time in the process.

I've done other top lists here, based on functionality and innovation, but never one based on pure cosmetics and elegance.

Never mind the variety of Twitter clients for Symbian, it seems that all you really need is the Web browser on Symbian phones these days.