Sometimes I think that convergence has gone too far and that modern smartphones are just too complex for their own good. And then I think 'Nah, manufacturers and networks just need to seed devices with bloggers and power users like you and I to help with testing before unleashing devices on the general public'. Witness the reported withdrawal of the Nokia N97 from Vodafone and Sony Ericsson Satio from the Carphone Warehouse after high returns and plenty of issues. Ah, life on the bleeding edge, it's not for the faint-hearted or for the great unwashed...
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Canalys stats are another important data point for the smartphone industry, they usually bring out something of interest.
Here on our Ovi Gaming site, Ewan takes a look at the latest incarnation of Zingmagic's Enigma, for S60 5th Edition smartphones, straight from the Ovi Store.
The calculator genre has been a popular one in all handheld and phone ecosystems over the years. Here I look at TouchCalc Lite, a recent addition to the genre explicitly for S60 5th Edition phones, finding that an austere interface hides an evaluation engine which is surprisingly powerful.
Following up from user feedback, the team behind Nokia Messaging for Social Networks has released a second beta of the application.
In All About Symbian Insight 104 (AAS Podcast 168), Rafe and Steve start with a quick look ahead to Mobile World Congress and then round up a number of small news items, including multiple firmware updates (N97 mini, X6, 5730, E52), details of a new version of the Ovi Store client, information on Greystripe and the Ovi Store and the lowdown on 1.
It’s been making it’s way around the various territories in the last few days, and now we’re happy to say that we have the updated firmware running on the Nokia X6 here at AAS (link to our review).
Following on from Strategy Analytics and Tomi's stats for smartphone sales in the whole of 2009, summarised here by me last week, we now have confirmation, courtesy of the USA-based IDC, of the very latest Q4 2009 smartphone world unit sales: again, Nokia lead the market with 38% for its S60-based smartphones, while RIM's Blackberrys are in second place with 20%.
While you can argue about what the numbers actually mean, it’s nice to see that the main players in mobile browser are all feeding back changes to the WebKit open-source project.
For those of you who use FourSquare (a geo-location social network and game all rolled into one), you might be interested to know that you can check-in to the game via a third party service, Waze.
What do you get when you decide to shoot a UK music video using only phones? Specifically, Nokia's N95 8GB, N86 and 5800? Well, rubbish, in the case of the third one just mentioned, but the N95 and N86 in the hands of a couple of hundred fans, shooting around the band (Noisettes), should provide something interesting, the full story is told in the brief documentary embedded below.