TamsS60 – the S60 Blog

T-Mobile’s recent leak clearly showed a 5230 – but it was designated as “Nuron” for strange reasons nobody really understands.

tmonews.net now clarifies the obvious:

Not much to add here…

Coming from Austria, yours truly has a healthy dislike of government agencies – wherever the government gets involved, idiocy and bloat usually follow suite.

Travelers and gadget heads in the USA will soon enjoy even more of the above-mentioned. PCWorld reports the following:

Buying your next laptop computer or smartphone online could suddenly get a lot more expensive if a little-known U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to tighten rules around the shipment of small, battery-powered devices by air goes through, says an industry group opposing the move.

Airline passengers would be affected too, as rules banning spare lithium-ion batteries in checked-in luggage would also be extended to alkaline and nickel metal-hydride batteries, argues George Kerchner, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Portable Rechargeable Battery Association.

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For air travelers, this means that you are no longer allowed to put batteries or accumulators into checked luggage – which is just insane. More on that can be had at the URL above.

P.S. This is a non-political blog. However, I think that the Terrorists have already won their “war” with us – air travel is such a hassle nowadays that many evaluate taking the train more and more. One can always circumvent security measures if one really wants to.

WebKit is the browser engine used by almost every mobile device – except for Microsoft and RIM’s current devices. It thus is interesting to see which mobile company does all the work…

neugierig.org performed an analysis and ended up with the chart below:

Not much to add here…

We’ve heard about an upcoming firmware update for the Nokia X6 for some time – it has now dropped for good.

AllAboutSymbian got their hands onto the update, and claim major improvements:

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While there are still UI flaws and problems in implementation, the X6 can now be the music player it advertised itself as. I think I’d be happy to change my recommendation now to a “buy” for anyone considering the X6. I’ll have a more in-depth look at the X6’s v12 firmware by the end of the week, but for now, congratulations Nokia. You fixed the bugs. Now you can get on with some polishing.

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As we didn’t see enough customers with an X6 at Tamoggemon’s, we are not in a position to state much regarding the device as of this writing. However, AAS is reputable – so better get that upgrade ASAP!

When it comes to monetizing applications on the iPhone, ad-financing is among the most popular methods. On Ovi, this was not possible so far.

A company called GreyStripe plans to change just that. The full press release goes as follows:

Date: 2010-02-02

Greystripe Expands its Rich Media Mobile Advertising Network to Nokia’s Ovi Store Apps

February 2, 2010 –Today Greystripe, the leading mobile rich media- advertising network, announced ad network support for Nokia’s Ovi App Store.Although Greystripe has supported hundreds of millions of Java downloads, this is the first time they will be supporting apps in the Ovi store. Greystripe is beginning to migrate 1,200 Gamejump.com Java titles into the Ovi App Store.With this announcement, Greystripe now supports the top three smartphone marketplaces: the iPhone App Store, the Android Marketplace, and Nokia’s Ovi App Store.

The Ovi Store is designed to be an evolving media service that consolidates Nokia’s existing services into a one-stop-shop for free and paid content.In May of last year, the Ovi Store by Nokia launched globally to an estimated 50 million Nokia device owners across more than 50 Nokia devices.Application developers distribute their media, applications, and games through the Ovi Store, and Nokia tracks over one million downloads a day.With hundreds of millions of downloads to date, today’s announcement represents the launch of Greystripe?s support of the Java/Symbian platform, this time through the Ovi Store.

Currently Greystripe supports over 1,400 Java handset models, in addition to iPhone and Android.Greystripe continues to expand its Java/Symbian app downloads, which account for approximately 250,000 app downloads on the network per day.Since Symbian is still a popular platform globally, this announcement is significant for brands that want to reach a wider audience by advertising on the Java/Symbian network, such as Navy and JC Penny.

Greystripe has created an automated and completely self service web-based portal for developers to ad enable their Java/Symbian apps.Using Greystripe’s proprietary technology, developers can upload all of their fully developed mobile app ports, each file supporting an individual phone model, while the ad client is automatically merged with their application. Developers offer their apps for free to consumers and monetize using Greystripe?s ad network by displaying pre- and post-roll full-screen ads.

“We are excited to be able to offer the most complete set of mobile in-app ad platforms to our brand advertisers,” said Michael Chang, CEO for Greystripe. “This announcement reinforces one of our main objectives as a network, to reach the broadest audience possible, in addition to our iPhone and Android users.”

“Greystripe’s advertising solution makes it super easy for us to ad enable fully completed and ported mobile apps and then load them into Ovi for broad distribution,” said Dmitriy Surchenov, Business Development Manager at United Fun Traders Ltd., developer of Farm Frenzy.

Free ad-supported apps are now available for download through ovi.nokia.com.

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As of now, nobody knows whether this type of monetization pays for developers – stay tuned for further info as we get it!

Nokia’s 5230 is quickly becoming “the device the 5530 should have been” – it’s advertised like crazy all over the world, and starts to make up an ever-increasing number of sales in the Ovi Store.

tmonews.com now has picked up the slide below, which was posted to PPCgeeks:

Not much to add here…

Amazon has just sent out a few invites to developers who indicated “interest” in the Kindle – it offered a further form, offering you to “apply for a place” in the Kindle developer test program.

Amazon has now posted an FAQ for Kindle developers – the most relevant questions are below:

# What APIs are available to me in the KDK?
The KDK is comprised of two sets of APIs:

* Java version 1.4 Personal Basis Profile (PBP) APIs for mobile devices.
PBP JavaDocs can be found at http://java.sun.com/javame/reference/apis/jsr217/.
* Kindle custom APIs which complement the PBP APIs and provide UI components, JSON and XML parsers, HTTP and HTTPS networking, secure storage, and other features. Other APIs like audio and dictionary access will be available in a future release of the KDK.
KDK JavaDocs can be found at http://kdk-javadocs.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html.

# I’ve already built a Java Micro Edition (J2ME) application. Can I port it to Kindle?
Yes. You should be able to modify existing Java applets and J2ME software to run on Kindle.

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As of now, Tamoggemon has not been accepted – stay tuned!

Just in case anyone ogf you needs a refresher – THIS is the Nokia Mystic:

The Netherlands-based AllAboutPhones now reports that the device will be called C6, will have a QWERTY keyboard, will cost 200 Euros and will have a 5MP camera.

However, it is not confirmed whether it will look like the picture above…

Nostalgia always is popular – as there isn’t too much to cover right now, why not feast our eyes on a classic Symbian device.

The picture below hits us via the German PDA pundit Oliver W Leibenguth, who is famous for his insane collection of handhelds. It shows the P800, which was the first UIQ smartphone from Sony Ericsson:

It was really, really strange – it had a “pass-through” hardware keyboard which pressed onto the touchscreen:

Hit the link above for further images…

Aargh – staying on top of all the releases from Nokia’s is not always an easy task. Nevertheless, the two offerings below are too interesting to just let them slip:

Nokia Custom Dictonary
First of all, we have Custom Dictionary. It allows you to modify the “stored word list” of the T9 interpreter on a select few Nokia phones with S60:

Nokia Diagnostics
The next app could also be useful for some – it can be compared to Microsoft DIAG for DOS, and can perform basic system analysis of your phone:

File this straight into the “weird crap” folder: Nokia has just erected a huge interactive arrow in London.

Individuals passing by can (or, rather, could) send messages to it – which were then displayed prominently:

One beer to whoever had the idea – it really IS strange, after all…

All those of you who regularly log into their Sony Ericsson developer back-end will likely already have found out about this – either way, just to keep you all up to date…

Sony Ericsson is currently doing something similar to what Nokia did with Ovi – they try to bind all their services under one account in order to increase “perceived value”. However, Nokia didn’t dare to include publish.Ovi – which Sony Ericsson just did:

Your Developer World Account

Sony Ericsson MyAccount provides a single log-in to a range of Sony Ericsson services. We have migrated Developer World accounts to Sony Ericsson MyAccount so that you are ready to benefit from present services like Sony Ericsson Sync and also new services as they become available.

Instead of using your Developer World username, you need to use your Email address (as registered with Developer World and used for this Email) as your username. Please use the Forgot Password link if you experience problems logging in.

Anybody have any issues?

When the Symbian Foundation was first announced, it faced a simple issue: the licensing of existing code could not be changed immediately, ad many parts were owned by third parties which – obviously – were not too happy about having their code in front of millions of possible competitors.

However, they are now done:

Now the platform is free for anyone to use and to contribute to. It is not only a sophisticated software platform, It is also the focal point of a community. And a lot of the foundation’s effort going forward will be to ensure the community grows and is supported in bringing great innovations to the platform and future devices.

Symbian has furthermore released the video below with further information:

Finally, hit the URL below to find out more:
http://blog.symbian.org/2010/02/04/symbian-is-open/

As usual, our friends at BrightHand’s have just released their mindshare stats.

The top-ten is below – as always, the position in brackets refers to last month’s place:

1. HTC HD2 (1)
2. Samsung Moment, Android (3)
3. Nokia N900 (2)
4. BlackBerry Curve 8530 (new)
5. Nokia E63 (9)
6. BlackBerry Bold 9700 (6)
7. Motorola Droid, Android (4)
8. BlackBerry Bold 9000 (returning)
9. Nokia E71 and E71x (returning)
10. Samsung Omnia II (10)

We’ve covered Symbian’s stupid little countdown in the past. They have now followed it up with a Twitter message:

A Yahoo News article based on AP content contains further info, and a really really embarrassing error:

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Lee Williams, executive director of the London-based foundation, said it has now completed the largest-ever conversion of proprietary software to “open source,” which means the source code, or blueprint for the software, is available to anyone. However, software associated with some phone features has yet to be released.

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The open-source version of the software is known as Symbian 3, and supersedes previous versions like Series 60 and Series 40.

Either way, it shouldn’t take much longer…