TamsS60 – the Symbian Blog

So far, developers of mobile devices have not felt the need to especially advertise the third-party extendability of their products in their Point-of-Sales demos. However, Apple’s iPhone 3G demo explicitly features third-party apps in Austria – read on for a few images and a Tam-Hanna-made translation:

	“Web applications directly on your Phone”
(this now shows a few applications in the iTunes app store. Note that all of them are free)
	(Now, Super Monkey Ball is selected)
(The icon now shows up in the launcher’s screen. Amusingly, the payment process and the application’s price have not been shown)
	(The game starts up and the screen begins to tilt)
(The device is shown toppling around as the game runs)

AFAIK, this is the first time ever that a mobile phone manufacturer explicitly advertises the expandability and third-party application availability of its platform. Palm once planned something similar, but never aired the TV spots…looks like another first for Apple!

P.S. Want to know more about Apple? Visit our sister site TamsIJungle!

Sorry for the delay with this post – the original review has been lost in a laptop theft…

The Nokia N78 is the first device that actually puts S60V3 FP2 into end-user compatible hardware. So far, so good – but how does the new OS actually fare in everyday use?

The phone’s home screen is very similar to the one found on other S60V3 devices:

The launcher also hasn’t been modified – except for funky transitions:

S60V3 FP2 automatically adds a menu entry to each running application’s menu. The task list has also been redesigned – it is now horizontally arranged:

Nokia also added a small search program:

A Text-To-Speech feature has also been added. It can read incoming messages in passable quality:

As in every other review, here’s our Resco Viewer-generated memory info:

The camera application turned out to be especially annoying, as it slowly rotates the screen when invoked. This costs an extra second or two..if you then consider the time the auto-focus takes, getting snap shots is almost impossible:

In the end, S60V3 FP2 doesn’t do the already-flaky N78 any good. The transitions are exceptionally slow and annoying, and are the first thing that one should disable after purchasing the device. The rest of the package isn’t bad…if software would N78’s biggest problem, this reviewer would be very happy..

Mobile-Review can be considered one o0f the best news services when it comes to quick reviews of Nokia and Sony Ericsson reviews (the latter turn out a bit biased sometimes). Eldar’s team has once again fulfilled our expectations and brings along a “preview” of the N79 and the N85.

As usual, the boys have integrated quite a bit of interesting insider information into their review – for example, did you know that the two boxen were originally planned to be below 400€?

Anyways, get the full scoop here:
http://www.mobile-review.com/articles/2008/nokia-n85-n79-en.shtml

CNET Asia reports that Samsung will launch an S60 Touch handset next year:

Mahmood Kalantar, regional director of Symbian S60 in Asia Pacific, said at the launch of the INNOV8 in Vietnam that his company is “working on a touchscreen Symbian OS” and we can expect to see it in a Samsung mobile phone in 2009.

As of now, nobody knows how the box will look and how much it will cost. However, the boys at Symbian-Freak’s have posted a few pretty impressive mock-ups…hit this link to find out more!

The Tamoggemon Publishing network has traditionally had a very strong connection to the Palm OS – we thus were the first to report about the Symbian port of StyleTap last year.

We are now proud to show the first-ever screenshot of StyleTap running on an unspecified E-Series device running S60V3 FP1:

The program will implement a “virtual mouse cursor” similar to the one found on the Windows Mobile Smartphone port of StyleTap: I have never considered this too good an option, and wonder why the company doesn’t use Palm’s one-handed navigation system instead.

As our informant has requested confidentiality, we currently can not offer further information…

The image below shows a back Nokia E90 Communicator owned by a random dude who walked past me on a Viennese road today:

Our random informant claimed that the device was purchased at a T-Mobile Austria store a few days ago – it bears the T-Mobile branding, which is visible when clicking on the thumbnail in order to obtain the full image.

A big thank-you to the unnamed passer-by!

Our partners at Proporta’s have just informed me that there’s a very nice discount available for their new Alu-Crystal cases (TamsS60 review of such a case is here)!

Should anyone of you own a Nokia N95 or a Nokia N95-8, please refer to the discount codes below to get 50% off the list price:

If you want to get 50% off N95 8GB alu-crystal cases use the promocode -
N958GB and use N95USERS for the N95 alu-crystal cases discount.

P.S. The cases cost approx. 15$ with this code – if you don’t currently have a case on your phone, using this opportunity definitely is a great idea!

Many developers consider North America the biggest market for third-party applications: if a platform doesn’t do well in North America, developing for it doesn’t pay out.

Nokia’s S60 hasn’t fared well in the USA: the lack of powerful CDMA handsets have alienated more than 50% of the population. The only carrier selling S60 devices is AT&T – and their choice can be described as lackluster at best.

Current Analysis’s research director now stated that Nokia’s strategy is completely different and is based on class rather than mass. Instead of selling thousands and thousands of boxen to carriers at minimal profits, Nokia seems to feel like selling its machines unlocked to select customers who are willing to pay 500-800$ OTC.

While this attitude may not be particularly social, it makes sense from Nokia’s point of view. Carriers are notorious for their unwillingness to let manufacturers do their thing uninfluenced – things like VoIP have never been too popular.

IMHO, developers will also benefit from this policy. 99% of all customers (number is a WAG by /me) who get a phone from el carrier will never ever think about installing an app. Hell, it came from big el, so lets use it and not think ’bout it.

People who paid a few hundred USD, on the other hand, feel like maximizing their return on investment…and if it involves a few bucks here and there, so be it.

More can be found at TelephonyOnline!

Apparently, analysts seem to be especially interested in S60 devices currently – hit the links below for further information:

Nokia N79/N85
Many would give a lot of money for knowing where the boys at Mobile-Review get their devices from – don’t ask how they did it, but they got their hands onto an N79 and an N85.

As of now, the review hasn’t been translated from Russian – nevertheless, symbian-freak has a few automatic translations…

Samsung G810
The team at AllAboutSymbian’s have decided to deploy a new analyst onto their latest Samsung-branded victim – Andy Galpin turned out to be an excellent analyst with a very deep insight into the market.

The G810 fared pretty well – further information can be had at the URL below:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Samsung_G8101.php

LG’s KT610 has always been an oddball device to some extent – it was similar to Nokia’s E90 communicator, but was smaller and…generally different. The boys at GSMArena now managed to get a sample, and bring the first review ever!

Unfortunately, LG decided to adopt a few boneheaded ideas from Asus – namely the idea that small screens are better than big ones. The external screen of the device is said to be useless, the internal screen isn’t that big either.

The device’s build quality is said to be very good, as is the internal screen’s quality, sound quality and the keyboard. Unfortunately, the device’s camera and software aren’t too good, and lacks WiFi.

Get the full scoop here!

On desktop PC’s, the brand of the hardware used has become mostly irrelevant when it comes down to application compatibility – if a device runs Windows XP, it can run Windows XP software. One might also expect that this is true of mobile OS’ses – unfortunately, this is completely wrong.

So far, Palm OS developers were the only ones who had to bog themselves down with a huge load of testing hardware due to each manufacturer rolling his own API – unfortunately, this seems to be true for Symbian, too.

SymbianOne’s Richard Bloor took a bunch of S60 phones from Samsung and tortured them with a bunch of S60 apps that he likes: the resulsts are less than satisfying. While “office” applications usually worked fine (unless the developer constrained the SIS file to Nokia devices), hardware access (camera, network positioning) already turned out to be problematic.

Push finally came to shove as system applications were tortured – Nuance’s TTS application refused to run, developer tools and the Python runtime followed suit.

From my personal point of view, Nokia/Symbian must address these issues ASAP. Forcing developers to pick specific hardware for development (as some Carbide tools didn’t run on non-Nokia hardware) is a very bone-headed idea that does little excerpt drive up development costs – I would be more than happy to see this issue gone!

Providing ads to mobile web sites gives you loads of data about mobile web browsers. Intelligent companies like AdMob make parts of this data available to the press to gain free PR (here you go) by helping the press do its job.

Anyways, this month’s “Mobile Metrics Report” was especially interesting, as it looked at worldwide browser market shares for mobile web browsers. The chart below is from the report linked above:

Classic smartphone web browsers surprisingly make up a minuscule of requests: Palm’s Blazer and Apple’s mobile Safari (which is a much better browser) both have 2% market share, Microsoft’s Pocket Internet Explorer and RIM’s browser both don’t exceed the 4% mark.

Nokia’s browsers (S40 and S60) and OpenWave (a classic dumbphone browser) both have about 30% of the market each, with Access’s Netfront (deployed on smartphones and embedded) coming in as a distant third with 12%. Amusingly, Sony’s CLIE handhelds make up for 4% of these 12%, which gives them a total market share of about 0.5%.

The real lesson which can be learned here is that smartphones and their users are an almost-ignorable minority when it comes to mobile web usage. We may be the most vocal bunch, but our numbers diminish compared to the millions of “dumbphone” users populating the mobile internet (and likely having a data contract). As each and every phone that has a web browser also is Java capable nowadays, the implications that this has on the size of the J2ME market are obvious: it is huge.

What do you think?

A big thank-you goes out to AdMob for providing the data!

T-Mobile’s exclusive time with the Nokia 6650 seems to end soon – the image below comes from NokiaUSA.com. Obviously, the flip phone it on its way to AT&T, where it will replace the aging and rather unpopular/obscure N75:

As of this writing, neither the 6650 nor the N75 are available for purchase from AT&T’s web site. People wishing to know more about the 6650 can hit the links below:
Presentation at T-Mobile’s
6650 – physical
6650 – software

Now that the three boxen have hit the road, the hands-on reports come rolling in. The folks at Engadget’s now took their turn, and didn’t really like what they saw.

The N85 scored the best – its OLED screen was described to be amazing. The N79’s screen, on the other hand, was said to be totally rotten. As for the N96 – it didn’t get too much love due to its rather big physical size.

Click the link below for a gallery containing 48 shots of the three new boxen:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/26/nokia-n79-n85-and-n96-hands-on/

Nokia’s phones seem to be insanely popular with (Chinese) device pirates. The N79 actually was clones before it was released to the public…if that isn’t a testament to popularity, what is .

However, clones now start to become a real threat for US and European handset buyers – the image below shows the so-called “CECT N95 (8GB Style) PDA Cell Phone Mobile Phone”:

The device is a 1:1 knock-off of Nokia’s famous N95-8 – but has significantly worse specs. For example, its camera has a resolution of just 1.3MP (the original has a 5MP one). S60 isn’t available either…

Shady online retailers sell this box for about 200$ – buyer, beware…