TamsS60 - the S60 Blog

The Sony Ericsson BeiBei has been claimed dead a few days ago - nevertheless, new spy shots are leaked on an almost daily basis.

The latest leak involves the infamous HowardForums - a user posted the following shot of two newly-acquired BeiBei devices:

As of now, it’s really difficult to decide whether these devices will ship or not. The hardware seems to be ready to go - the question is SE’s willingness to risk a deployment…

So far, Nokia’s N76 has been critically acclaimed for its horrible product quality - the paint job chips off literally days after unpacking the phone. Nokia nevertheless seems to believe in the product - JAMPB managed to gather up a gallery of shots showing an all-black version of the flip phone.

Here are a few - visit JAMPB for the full gallery:

P.S. In case anyone of you wonders: yes - a “black” version of the N76 has been released a few months ago. However, it isn’t all black, but has a few silver elements on the front…

So far, Opera for S60 has been an excellent browser - I really enjoyed using it on my Nokia N71.

However, the Opera team recently fired up a blog post announcing a beta of Opera 9.5 for Windows Mobile (available on July the 15th) - Symbian was not mentioned anywhere.

We have sent an inquiry to Opera yesterday - and while the company usually responds very fast, the silence that followed can be considered a very bad sign…

Do you think that Opera 9.5 will ever hit S60 and/or UIQ?

The Nokia E71 has been reviewed before - now, its smaller sibling aka E66 has hit an analyst’s desk. Alfredo Padilla from wirelessinfo managed to get his heads onto one of these boxen and put its through its paces.

The phone fared pretty well except for minor eekers - get the full scoop here:
http://www.wirelessinfo.com/content/Nokia-E66-Cell-Phone-Review.htm

Even though the world doesn’t look too good for UIQ at the moment(UIQ itself laying off employees); the following shot of the Sony Ericsson Paris has popped up on the internet:

I myself am not sure about what this means for end users as a recent rumor has stated that the device pictured above may never come to Europe and the USA.

On the other hand, developers have received white papers covering the devices; and FCC certification has been achieved - the device IMHO is in a more-less ready-to-drop state and doesn’t look too unattractive for average customers.

In the end, however, the release of the Paris is of little significance for UIQ developers. The ship has begun to sink - get off it asap!

via JAMPB

Many S60 developers blame the lack of sales on Nokia’s bad presence in the USA. Even though I am not 100% sure about this, I am nevertheless sure that they will be pleased to hear that symbian-freak has reported rapidly growing numbers of American forum members a few hours ago.

At TamsS60’s, the recent US situation is rather stable - our valued American readers make up for approximately 30% of our readership ever since April 2008. The March/April time frame brought a significant jump in attention and traffic from the USA - before that, US readers made up for just 20%.

Should anyone of you be interested, a weekly “poll” of reader nationalities can be conducted - if you feel like looking at these stats, please let us know via a free comment!

The Nokia N82 has a rather small QVGA screen. Traditionally, Nokia’s Nseries phones have had excellent screens…how well does the N82 fare?

Here is a series of comparison shots next to a Treo 680:

The next victim is hp’s baby ipaq. Its high-quality TFT is hard to beat:

Finally, we pitted the N82 against its distant predecessor(the N71). For me, the winner is clear(the N71):

Unfortunately, the N82 continues the negative trend that started with the Centro and the N81. Everything shown on the screen has an annoying reddish cast - people who are used to cold, blueish images will not be too happy with the N82.

Nokia has just announced that its Nokia N78 is now available to US customers.

Nokia’s press service claims that the N78 is:

Now available through select consumer electronics and wireless retailers, online retailers and at the Nokia Flagship Stores in Chicago and New York. The Nokia N78 retails for approximately USD 560. Specific information on retailers offering the Nokia N78 and other Nseries devices can be found at www.nseries.com.

In case anyone of you spots such a box, please send us a photo!

AllAboutSymbian’s Steve Litchfield has been a very reasonable and generally good analyst so far(I really enjoyed talking to him in London) - but he just shot the ball way out of the court.

While talking about the E71, he posted the following statement:
Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, there are still big cost penalties in using VGA. The physical displays cost a lot more, are more fragile, then there’s the cost of rejigging the rest of the device’s electronics to match, the extra cost of providing extra chips to support the display, the cost of having to rewrite large parts of the operating system to cope with all the pixel doubling/scaling and font reworking needed, and so on. At the end of the day, these costs will be passed on to you and you’ll pay a lot more for your phones.

Unfortunately, Steve has his facts totally wrong here. Nowadays, the prices for VGA displays are more-less on par with the prices for QVGA screens(according to a manager at Symbol’s). Furthermore, at least one Asus device contains a VGA screen, but runs it in QVGA “compatibility mode”.

In case you feel like chiming into a discussion(Steve it notably absent), use the link below:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/The_argument_for_QVGA-more_is_not_necessarily_better.php

People using an N8xx tablet should head over to Nokia’s for a small software update.

The latest version of OS 2008 seems to be a maintenance release and fixed the following:

* SSU (seamless software updating) which enables components of the operating system to be updated without having to flash/rewrite the entire operating system.
* Over-the-air (OTA) updates via Wi-Fi and WiMax connections
* Update of the email client to Modest with several enhancements to the user interface and additional support of several mobile-friendly email features.
* Addition of Chinese fonts to the system font list
* Miscellaneous bug fixes to OpenSSL
* Browser panning fixes
* A-GPS support for the N810 and N810WE
* Updates to the Wayfinder GPS application
* and more

The updates are available from the following URL’s after providing your serial number:
N800 N810

via BrightHand