Here's a great and very thorough movie from Rita demonstrating how she uses S60 in her work.

meritoe61 made a nice video of his favorite app, the Nokia Wellness Diary. Very nice scenery from Poland by the way!

¡Ay, caramba!

Recently I've been having all sorts of fun with push email flying into and out of my handset on a more or less constant basis.

The new software update to my N95 that added Flash Lite 3.0 (sweet!) has opened up the whole of YouTube to my ever so inquisitive viewing, and my Slingbox has been keeping it real by sending episodes of "must see TV" that I must see - direct to my mobile with Slingplayer Mobile for S60.

Add that to Yahoo! Go, posting pictures to my VOX site, wayyy too much Facebook shenanigans, a passion for podcasts, a possible addiction to Wikipedia, the worlds greatest mobile browser and, well, you get the picture.

This is all well and good and has never raised the question of an impending intervention or a 12-step data dependency cure as long as I was in my home market where the all-you-can-eat data plan was in its full glory.

until...

As you might expect, I went on a business trip to a trade show where my responsibility was to demo much of the aforementioned capabilities. Problem was, the trade show was in Barcelona..... And I sometimes used my own SIM card to show off all this stuff..... For 10 hours a day..... For four days in a row.....

I used a bit of data.

OK, maybe a lot of data.

Oh, and did I mention my all-you-can-eat data plan was no longer all-you-can-eat when I crossed the border?

The good news (for me) is that I don't pay my own mobile bill.
The bad news (for me) was that my boss called.

Ouch.

Rafe from All About Symbian shows with help from with Echo the dog how to enhance your walkies with the ViewRanger app.

Nokius also has made a great video of the Nokia Step Counter available from the Nokia Beta Labs.

Steve here shows us how to shoot video on the Nokia N95 and how to edit with the phone's video editor. He's also telling how to upload the video to a video blog and all this directly from you S60 phone!

Pizero is featuring the Profimail app. He is telling us about the handy auto-update feature in ProfiMail to have Push email on his S60 phone.

Bogdangaliceanu from Nokia Mobile Blog shows Handy Taskman. Handy Taskman basically lets you control your phone in for example, switch to, close, kill any application or close them all in one click or find and start a desired application by typing the first letters of its name. Check out how this is done from Bogdan’s movie.

Gletham from symbianone.com has made a nice presentation of the Nokia Internet Radio application on His N95 8GB and throws in a couple of quick multitasking tips as well.

When traveling on business you don’t have that much time of to do shopping, see the sights and all that, but sometimes you just might find a couple of hours to play tourist. Being a huge sneaker freak, I of course always head towards the sneaker stores. The problem for me is that when I’m in a strange city and have only a couple of hours to spend on shopping, I usually do not have a clue where to head for the coolest sneakers, especially if I haven’t had the time to familiarize myself with the city beforehand.

Now, what would be handier than an app that would tell me where to go! I would get a list of shoe shops, what kind of shoes they are selling (sneakers, high heels etc) and a map to locate the store.

Any other good travel apps you'd recommend besides WorldMate? Or even better, has someone already created the prefect sneaker-locator? Managed to find a decent pair of All Stars this time anyway though.

Got an S60 tip or an application experience you'd like to share? We would like to hear about your S60 tips and stories of your favorite apps. By submitting your video to our Show your S60 smarts video contest group on YouTube, you'll have a chance to win a brand new S60 device or a Bluetooth headset and Handango gift vouchers. It doesn’t matter if someone has already posted a video on the same topic – creativity is what counts! The contest is open until 20th May.

Our team created two "example" videos. One is featuring Dan Shugrue, the man behind the S60 Ambassadors program, and his favorite app, the Nokia Sports Tracker and the other Mikko Röntynen from S60 technology marketing telling his S60 browser tips.

The competition has two categories:
1. Share your S60 insight! Show your favorite S60 tip and tell us why it is so handy that all of us should learn to use our S60 devices in this way. Tag: myfavoritetrick

2. Show your favorite S60 application! Share your favorite S60 application or an internet service you can use with your S60 device and tell us how and why it makes your life so good that we should all go and download the application now! Tag: myfavoriteapp

How it works?

1. Check out more information and official rules.
2. Create your S60 tip or favorite app video. The video should show an S60 device. A list of all S60 devices from www.s60.com/phones.
3. Become a member of YouTube, if your are not yet.
4. Upload your video to your YouTube account and tag it with either “myfavoriteapp” or “myfavoritetrick” depending on the category you want to enter your video to. Allow the possibility to comment, rate, embed and syndicate your video. The spoken words of the video should be in English.
5. Go to www.youtube.com/group/showyours60smarts, and click Join group.
6. Click Add video link & select your video to enter it.

PS. added this pic of our wappu champagne & strawberry cake at work.

In this case, the smart programmers are a team from the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria, who developed the software and Bluetooth hardware that made this truck go. After we saw the video of their ShakerRacer demo (and showed it in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress), we got in touch with Andreas Jakl and Stephan Selinger from Hagenberg to see if they could help us build some vehicles of our own. They were willing to help, and worked with Juha Komulainen and others in our Nokia Demolab team to modify a truck in time for the Web 2.0 event. We built the truck, and they provided the Bluetooth control module and mobile Python program that turned the N95 into an RC controller.

We're now planning to build at least two more trucks for use in future events, including the upcoming S60 Summit in May. In the meantime, we shipped the truck from last week's demo to our office in Boston, so we can show it off the Nokians here (and play a bit more on our own).

if you're inspired by this to work on your own remote control projects, you can find the ShakerRacer source code (open source) and hardware instructions online for your experimentation and enjoyment. if you build something cool, please let us know!

--Oren

This is a great example of the open source innovation that Python for S60 enables. As you see, it is a useful tool for prototyping applications and experimenting with new development ideas. Oren has kindly promised to blog more about this. If you have any questions about the car, please feel free to ask by leaving your comments here!

This enables, for example, a weather widget can access the user’s current location via the phone's built-in GPS to provide immediate local weather data. Or a flight tracker widget can easily fetch a travel itinerary from an airline’s website, save it to the phone's calendar application, and set a reminder. A few hours prior to departure, the widget will automatically check the flight's status by retrieving the flight details from the calendar.

Read the more from the press release.

Yesterday Nokia launched yet another new S60 device, the Nokia 5320 XpressMusic. The device is S60 3rd edition Feature Pack 2 device and comes with features such as dedicated XpressMusic keys, a 3.5mm audio jack, up to 24 hours of playback time, an audio chip for hi-fi sound quality, extendable memory up to 8GB, HS-USB for fast music transfer and HSDPA for fast access to data. In addition the innovative new voice-controlled Say and Play feature will allow you to merely say the name of a favorite artist or song to automatically play it. We’ll see the Nokia 5320 XpressMusic shipping in the third quarter of 2008 with an estimated retail price of 220 EUR before taxes and subsidies. Find out more from www.s60.com .

The funny thing was to see how the conductors behaved when checking the tickets.
I had the text message with the reservation details readily open on my phone.

On the way to Tampere, the conductor took my phone and without any hesitation entered the reservation code into his ticket machine and handed a receipt and my phone back to me. All done in 20 seconds!

On the way back to Helsinki, the same episode took five times longer. First, the conductor seemed to be afraid even taking my phone. Next, he needed to grab his reading glasses from the pocket - not that easy task when holding a phone and ticket machine. Then the display backlight went off (I have it on for 40 sec), and again he could not read the text. He did not know how to turn it on again, so he gave the phone back to me. Finally, slowly, he keyed in the reservation code into the ticket machine and I got the phone and a receipt – and a safe trip back home.

Some notes: SMS is a handy way to deliver tickets; the staff at Finnish State Railways has varying attitudes to new technologies; a quick way to zoom in and out text in the phone would be beneficial; the e-ticket layout could be easier to read; and taking a train is a comfortable way to travel. And I wonder how the reservation codes are actually generated and whether it sometimes could be possible to skip the phase of manually keying in complex numbers from a device to another.

Charles here, from the S60 marketing team, based out of Irving, Texas (in the heart of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex). Been here 10 years - love the summers - don't have the hat.

Have you all (y'all) seen this yet? (wait til I bust an "all y'all" out - it's the present imperfect plural of y'all) ;-)

In a survey conducted by Jupiter Research, it says that two-thirds of US adults don't care about listening to music on their mobiles. The overview says that evidently the cost per download and the difficulties in getting the music onto the device were to blame for this sorry state of affairs. Also causally mentioned was the proliferation of existing mp3 players.

One (surprising?) stat that was in the report was that only 5% of U.S. mobile subscribers sideload tunes from their computer.

Wow.
again, for effect,

...WOW!

Maybe I'm the oddball here, but I am an inveterate sideloader. Always have been, probably always will be. Not sure I trust people who don't (kidding - they're ok, for non-sideloaders anyway)

So the point is, what is it about the whole experience that's to blame? Is it because they are "adults"? Is it that they've never used S60 for music?

What's the good, the bad and the ugly about the S60 experience for music? How do you think it is different from WM or UIQ, Apple, etc.? Is the experience different in your eyes...and ears...and wallets?

Talk amongst yourselves...