TamsS60 – the Symbian Blog

A small crowd of people ganged up at the Manhattan-based Nokia flagship store a few hours ago. The folks didn’t go there to party, but rather were invit6ed to the launch of a US version of Nokia’s E71 (it supports GSM@850/900/1800/1900 and @HSDPA 850/1900MhZ).

Even though Nokia’s PR agency inserted a hige list of supported email services in to their press release, there is a notable omission: BlackBerry Connect no longer is supported on the E-Series. A news service called MobileToday claims that Nokia removed the BlackBerry client from its devices in order to “force customers to choose” the platform of choice.

I have no idea why Nokia thinks this move may work out – but, hell gee, Nokia’s boneheadedness has become painfully obvious recently in a variety of childish stunts. People who have an existing BlackBerry infrastructure have invested a big amount of money into their email systems, and will DEFINITELY not switch just because of a nice device or two.

IMHO, this can quickly become a big fiasco for Nokia: businesses demand continuity. People bought overpriced IBM machines because they know that they could get spare parts, support and upgrades for a long time…cutting a long story short, their investment was safe. Thus, discontinuing a service could harm future enterprise sales significantly – what do you think?

P.S. I can recall Nokia and RIM folks proudly demoing their BlackBerry Connect app at last year’s Symbian Smartphone Show…nothing is forever .

The history of Sony Ericsson and UIQ could best be described with the words “what could’ve been”. In Austria, the M6×0 series was once selling like hot cakes: the company completely ignored the product and never ever dropped a successor.

The folks at JAMPB now managed to undig a promotional video of a device called M610i – it essentially was a small update of the UIQ-powered M610 that added WiFi support.

People who feel like looking at a 1min YouTube video: click this link for fun and profit…

The folks at symbian-freak’s have translated a 5800 hands-on report from a Asian web site and included a few photos.

The hardware is said to be “significantly better” than on the prototype handled a few months ago – the device is said to be similar to the N82, but lacks its excellent Xenon flash. A stylus is provided for tapping small objects on-screen.

Generally, the hardware has been described as being “almost finished” – the issue is said to be the software which is said to be “far away from the final phase”.

Nagel Clifford’s recent announcement of “closer cooperation with Google” has led to a few possible scenarios for Symbian.

An analyst company called J. Gold Associates has jumped on possibility three outlined in our editorial and took it a step further: they claim that S60 and Android will become one OS. Nokia immediately denied this, and there is a simple reason why it is now too late for this to happen:

Android developers already have finished apps

Both Google and the Symbian Foundation are painfully aware of the importance of third-party developers for the future of their platforms. Google’s developer championship has handed out thousands of dollars to people working on Android apps; S60 applications sell better every day according to our sponsors.

Unfortunately, the programming models behind Android and S60 are completely incompatible (cleanup stack, anyone?). Merging the two systems would require the management of two UI toolkits on top of a shared kernel: Access did so with their ALP and didn’t get too far.

Had Symbian gone oopen source a few months ago, a merger would have been possible. As it is now, the two systems are very likely to remain seperated…

The folks at AllAboutSymbian are excellent when it comes to posting news – unfortunately, most of their analysts seem to be professional analysts rather than developers who turned to the writing profession for fun (and profit). This explains why blurbs like their current article on 3d chips happen…

Cutting a long story short, the folks discuss the merits of external graphics processors used in some high-end Nokia devices. So far so good – unfortunately, the editorial contains the following bone-headed passages:

The reason 3D chips are useful is partly that they allow 3D games to have much higher quality graphics, but also because (for various technical reasons) they allow game developers to create 3D games more easily. A device with a 3D chip is easier to program 3D games for than the same device without it. It’s worth emphasising though that 3D chips don’t help at all with 2D games.

Wrong. First of all, 3D chips CAN help with 2d graphics. For example, many popular Palm Os media players use the 3D engines found in Taowave’s Zodiac handhelds to accelerate video and audio playback while saving power.

Unfortunately, there’s a serious downside to this option, which is that N-Gage developers would have to make two versions of each 3D game. If they only make one version of a 3D game, it would have to be a non-chip version because that’s the only one that would work on all N-Gage phones.

Wrong, part 2. Nowadays, most developers don’t code directly against the hardware anymore. They use a part of the S60 OS that’s called OpenGL: which is an API that handles 3D primitives(objects).

OpenGL ES is implemented on each and every N-Gage phone. Phones that lack a graphical accelerator use their main processor to “emulate” the 3D chip, whereas phones with an integrated 3D chip offload the work to it and thereby achieve higher performance.

The main work for the developer is to reduce things like drawing distance and/or the number of on-screen objects in order to achieve higher/playable frame rates on software emulated devices…which usually is a manageable task.

Any more questions?

Nokia and QualComm have just managed to reach an agreement in an ageold patent dispute that very likely hindered Nokia’s US plans considerably.

So far, the two companies have fought over patents regarding various aspects of CDMA wireless technology. CDMA systems have never seen wide deployment in Europe or Asia, but are very popular in the USA – and, to lesser extent – in Canada and Australia.

Supporting CDMA will allow Nokia to make further inroads into the highly attractive US market. American GSM networks have traditionally been smaller than their CDMA counterparts(even the iPhone couldn’t change much here): a device that sells well in the USA usually is CDMA-based.

As for the agreement itself: most of it remains confidential and thus cannot be analyzed. However, the agreement definitely includes Nokia paying royalties to Qualcomm – and more disturbingly, pass over patents. This will likely affect HTC: they also have their fair share of disputes with Qualcomm…

Finally, the full press release is below:

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) today announced that they have entered into a new agreement covering various standards including GSM, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, HSDPA, OFDM, WiMax, LTE and other technologies. The agreement will result in settlement of all litigation between the companies, including the withdrawal by Nokia of its complaint to the European Commission.

Under the terms of the new 15 year agreement, Nokia has been granted a license under all Qualcomm’s patents for use in Nokia’s mobile devices and Nokia Siemens Networks infrastructure equipment. Further, Nokia has agreed not to use any of its patents directly against Qualcomm, enabling Qualcomm to integrate Nokia’s technology into Qualcomm’s chipsets. The financial structure of the settlement includes an up-front payment and on-going royalties payable to Qualcomm. Nokia has agreed to assign ownership of a number of patents to Qualcomm, including patents declared as essential to WCDMA, GSM and OFDMA. The specific terms are confidential.

“We believe that this agreement is positive for the industry, enabling the market to benefit from innovation and new technologies,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia Corporation. “The positive financial impact of this agreement is within Nokia’s original expectations and fully reflects our leading intellectual property and market positions.”

“I’m very pleased that we have come to this important agreement.” said Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm. “The terms of the new license agreement, including the financial and other value provided to Qualcomm, reflect our strong intellectual property position across many current and future generation technologies. This agreement paves the way for enhanced opportunities between the companies in a number of areas.”
Contact info omitted

The image above speaks a clear language – the Tamoggemon Publishing team finally stands behind its threat and goes to the world of the Malus portabilii.

From now on, expect us to cover all things Apple-related. As we are funded entirely by our sponsors and are hosted in a country with intact press freedom for tech journalists, this means trouble for the Cupertinians… Big trouble!

The worm is now inside the fruit…keep an eye on our progress here:
http://tamsijungle.tamoggemon.com

Sony Ericsson’s two “last-effort” UIQ smartphones have been handled at TamsS60’s before – we can now report the (possibly first-ever) street sighting of such a device at a carrier.

A recently mailed-out brochure contained the G700 next to the aging P1i and a touchscreenless Samsung WMS:

The device is priced 49€ with a rather expensive 2yr contract; the designer chose to outline its touchscreen and its BlackBerry/Microsoft Exchange compatibility:

P.S. Think that you know Windows Mobile well? Look at the brochure page above for a blooper – if you can’t find it, head over to our sister site TamsWMS for the solution!

We covered the Samsung i8510 before – but it has now been announced officially by Samsung’s press department. The device is called INNOV8 and is the first 8 megapixel camera phone powered by S60.

The specs are essentially the ones we saw before – a load of images is available at symbian-freak’s.

Amusingly, Expansys Austria is accepting preorders for the box as of this writing. However, no carrier partners have been announced: let’s stay tuned to see if this thing ever hits the market…

After having looked at the size of the N78, it’s time to look at what’s inside the brick. Stay tuned for our classic “physical” review…

When looking at the front of the device, one immediately thinks about the iPhone. Indeed, the device’s front is almost completely plain except for a button or two. Unfortunately, the display as scratch-sensitive as the one found on Palm’s Treo 500 series…keeping the device in a normal neoprene bag for a few days leads to a few annoying scratches:

The keyboard looks very small at first glance. However, it becomes surprisingly comfortable after a few minutes of use – the slim keys make hitting multiple keys impossible. Unfortunately, the dedicated edit key is gone; the keyboard text is almost impossible to read while the backlight is off:

When the device is powered on, the 5way navigator blinks once every few seconds:

The back of the device contains the flash LED and the camera. Nokia saw no need to protect the lens – the intention of limiting the device’s life is painfully obvious:

Removing the back plate is a pretty painful procedure. Doing so reveals the battery and the SIM slot(the battery must be removed in order to access the SIM card). Making matters worse: the shakes around when installed:

The top of the device contains the 3.5″ headphone jack and the standard N-Series power button:

Looking at the left side reveals the memory card slot – trust me if I say that it is as crappy as the one found on the N82.

The right side contains the camera controls. I am very dissatisfied with the shutter button as it feels WAY too soft – pressing it often does nothing:

In the end, I am very sorry, but I do NOT like the N78’s build quality(it feels WAY too cheap). Cutting costs is OK on a consumer “blockbuster” device – but the N78 went at least one bridge too far. The innovative keyboard and design definitely are great – but the shabby build quality keeps me returning to my good old N71…

Dear Readers,
we have just updated the back-end software used to host our news services as it was outdated.

These updates serve to improve performance, security and reliability and thereby directly serve you all. We have performed tests and feel that all works o.k. – should you discover any bugs, please accept our apologies and email us at Tamog AT gmx DOT at so that we can fix the issue!

Best regards
Tam Hanna & the Tamoggemon team

pdadb is considered the best PDA database currently available on the market, having defeated the former #1 handhirn effortlessly. The folks recently began to add specifications oif unreleased devices to their database, which usually turned out to be very reliable.

Samsung’s latest VaporPhones are now in – click the links below for more!

Samsung SGH-L870 Specs
Samsung SGH-i8510 Primera 8GB Specs
Samsung SGH-i8510 Primera 16GB Specs

We’ve seen the Nokia N85 before (it’s the successor to the N81 we reviewed recently) – but didn’t know anything about system specs so far. Now, the user agent profile has been leaked: let’s see what there’s inside for us:

• Likely to run FP2
• QVGA screen
• Bluetooth
• 3MP camera(image size: 2048×1536)
• WiFi
• GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA/EGPRS/HSDPA

After the radical “binary break” introduced in S60v3, Nokia seems to have understood that breaking binary compatibility (and thereby burdening developers further) is not the wisest thing to do.

Screenshots leaked to symbian-freak’s now show a version of S60 Touch that looks almost as if it were S60v3 FPx with a touchscreen added.

Even though some of my colleagues are pissed off about the lack of “finger” usability, this actually has good reason: S60 Touch devices will probably be controllable via the 5way nav with just one hand like their current siblings.

A recent walk-through of the SE BeiBei
showed a device which was perfectly usable with one hand without even touching the stylus. Palm Treo users can sing a song about the merits of this technology.

Nokia’s S60 touch devices are aimed at a different part of the market than the iPhone. iPhones go to fashion sensitive people who love Apple (and switch their brain off in all things Cupertino) – S60 touch boxen go to prosumers and businesses. Their enemies are devices like a Treo or a HTC Touch: boxen which are judged by their merits and not their beauty.

In the end, I am very happy with Nokia’s strategy – developers will be able to benefit from the touchscreen with minimal enhancements, while still remaining capable to do 1hand-controllable apps with ease. Users can continue to use their old apps without updating.

What do you think?

Hutchison has originally been firmly entrenched into the Windows Mobile camp. However, their strategy shifted a few years ago – the carrier now focuses on S60-powered devices, laptop modems and 3G dumb phones.

Thus, I am not surprised by smstextnews’s report that the Nokia N96 will hit the UK branch of Three in September. It is said to drop on a 15GBP contract, the initial purchase price is not known.

Hutchison Austria confirmed the report above and stated that they will carry the device themselves “eventually in the next months”. They are not yet sure about when the device will hit the Austrian roads – this “depends on Nokia”…