Every so often you find yourself in a situation where you wish "If only my phone could do this..." because it lacks the necessary hardware for a task. In a slightly tongue-in-cheek editorial, AAS takes a look at hardware features which are not available on modern mobile phones but perhaps should be. As always comments are very welcome in the thread below, especially your own suggestions for potentially useful phone features.
UK Publisher Tag Games has been working on a GTA styled mobile game for many months, and now Car Jack Streets is available for download. Given that the Tag founders were part of the original design team for the first Grand Theft Auto, it's no surprise that this is an addictive little mobile game, that makes best use of the smartphone environment. Ewan's full review can be found here.
You've got to love those you push the boundaries - here, Vaibhav has found that putting the 1200mAh BL-6F battery into the Nokia N96 does fit, with the battery cover only 'bulging a little'. A 25% boost in battery life in exchange for putting up with a little bulge? Hmmm.... tempting!
The latest branch of Nokia Music Store has gone live in Italy, if you head over to music.nokia.it you'll find instructions in Italian on how to use the service. Interestingly in this globalised age the press release for the launch emphasises the need for local music, giving a statistic that 54% of music bought in Italy is Italian. Full text of the release is below.
Totally non-Symbian but still a valid link-of-interest for many, Engadget have been evaluating the Blackberry Storm, very much a Nokia Eseries competitor, and have come up with a refreshingly honest critique of the sprung-screened Storm - I've played with one and agree that this is one technology the Symbian world should steer clear of. Comments welcome if you've tried one too... BGR has also released its Storm review on the same day - longer, but with some very pointed criticisms. Both worth a read.
Nokia have been awarded the Green Award 2008 Grand Prix with their 'Power of We' campaign. This was an internal campaign designed to encourage discussions around environmental issues affectingNokia . By promoting their environmental programme to the global workforce, the individuals in the company could start to make a positive change to the world.
Along with a couple of other invited guests, I was privileged to get full access to Nokia's testing labs at Farnborough this morning. Two teaser photos are below the break, but there's lots more to come, once I've digested and edited all the raw video and photos I took for All About Symbian. Watch this space!
Epocware have updated their security/reminder application Handy Safe Pro. Allowing you to store passwords, user names, pins and other paraphernalia (and manage them on your device or via an included PC application), this latest version has a recovery operation for accidental deletions, sub folders, and URLs now act as hyperlinks into the Web Browser.
Electronic Arts' football simulator FIFA 2009 is now available on the N-Gage platform. Just open your phone's N-Gage app, go to the Showroom section, select "Options" and then "Update Now" to see it. (It should also become available through the N-Gage website over the next day or two, if you prefer to install games through your computer.) This release is a bit of a surprise, as it had only just been announced a few weeks ago and hadn't even made it into N-Gage.com's upcoming games list. Obviously EA were working on this a long time before they announced it.
Yup, the infamous Carnival has reached 150, so congratulations all round. It's hosted at AAS favourites Mippin too, so double the reason for a link of interest here!
The retro tank game My Little Tank has now been released for Symbian S60 3rd Edition devices (sorry, no UIQ3 version this time). You can download the demo or purchase the full game from Astraware's website, the game costs $9.95 which is around 8 euros or 6.5 pounds.
With the Sony Ericsson C905 arriving for review in The Phones Show, I couldn't resist doing a quick head to head between it and the Samsung INNOV8 - and the Nokia N82, for good measure.], so that I could evaluate the differences between 8mp and 5mp in the real world. The C905 is undoubtedly the phone with the stills camera of highest specification at the moment - but how good is it? Is it worth overlooking the many other factors involved in choosing a camera-phone/smartphone?
Ah yes, there's always a tingle of excitement when someone shows off a whole new form factor, especially one which combines full width qwerty keyboard, wide screen and, in this case, touch PDA mode and dedicated gaming keypad as well. Presenting the iCEphone - maybe a form factor that would suit the future of Nokia's Communicator line? Comments welcome! (via Unwired view)
Rita El Khoury often seems to come up with discoveries that the rest of us overlook - in this case, it turns out that freeware star cCalc (a scientific calculator) has a big brother, cCalcPro, designed for the landscape screens of the Nokia E61 and E71. Here's Rita's write-up, with screenshots.
Geography enthusiasts rejoice! The long awaited quiz game from Herocraft - the makers of such great titles as Robo, Revival and Stolen in 60 Seconds - has finally arrived to keep the smart player happy for hours to come. Read on for the details.
For those happy to 'open sign' their utilities, note that Swim, the background sync tool for S60, has been updated to v0.41 and, notably, the scheduling problems of earlier versions are gone. In case you hadn't heard of Swim, it syncs your phone to Google or Ovi or GooSync, etc. automatically. And no, we still don't know why this functionality isn't part of S60 itself...
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TIP: Check out our feature article on recommended software for some of the best commercial software available for your phone.
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