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Gameloft HD Games Screenshots

Dotsisx — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:05:11 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, we brought you the (old) news that Gameloft, one of the major games developers for mobile, have been releasing a handful of HD games for the Samsung i8910 HD. Unlike other Java games available for Symbian^1 devices from Nokia, like the N97 and the 5800XpressMusic, these games make use of the powerful processor on the i8910 to bring native Symbian coding with HD graphics.

Adam Fullerton, from iUnlock, has a Samsung i8910 HD in his hands and was kind enough to send us a few screenshots from some of these games that he bought. We’re now sharing them with you so you can judge by yourself the quality of the graphics.

Prince of Persia

Block Breaker Deluxe 2

Uno

What do you think of these screenshots? Is the quality of the graphics as good as you expected it to be? And if you have you tried any of these games before on your Samsung i8910 HD, could you share your experience regarding the gameplay?

Is Symbian’s User Interface In Trouble?

TheGuru — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:25:57 +0000

Last week, at SEE 09, Lee Williams delivered the keynote, talking about the future of the Symbian platform, among other things. You can watch the full video at the end of this post, if you want. During the keynote, the video directly below was shown as an artist’s rendering of what the future Symbian UI could/should look like. I caught all this from my friend Jay at MyNokiaBlog, and after watching both, I have to say that I agree with Jay completely.

It feels very much like Symbian is talking quite a bit about what things will look like in the future, but I’m not seeing much talk or action about how they intend to get there. As Jay rightly points out, other competitors are already out there with slick, super-simple operating systems.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t still love Symbian -- quite the opposite. However, in order to continue growing, it’s going to have to compete (in some form or fashion) with these other user-friendly interfaces, and let’s be honest -- while Symbian is, hands-down, one of the most powerful platforms on the planet, it’s clearly not the prettiest, even if you have a nice theme installed. Nor is it the easiest to use and understand.

What do you think? Does the Symbian Foundation have a clear path to prettying up and dumbing down their user interface, without sacrificing functionality?

Lee Williams’ SEE 09 Keynote

New Windows Live Messenger Lands On Ovi Store For Touchscreen Phones

TheGuru — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:30 +0000

Our friend Micky at NokiaUsers.net has found an updated Windows Live Messenger for S60 5th Edition-powered smartphones like the Nokia N97 and the upcoming X6. This new version is available for free on the Ovi Store, and can be easily installed to your memory card, to preserve space on the phone’s built-in storage. You can use this to log into your Windows Live account to chat with your friends, and even get a tab added to your Contacts application, so you can easily browse your buddy list.

Even better, the application seems to also add your Hotmail account to the phone’s built-in email application, so you can keep up with your email, which is definitely handy. Personally, I prefer to have a multi-protocol application such as Nimbuzz on my phone, but if you are heavy into Windows Live services, this could be a great option for you.

Download Windows Live Messenger for S60v5 from the Ovi Store here.

Friday Fun: Vodafone Symphonia

TheGuru — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:00:00 +0000

It’s friday, which means most of us have busted our backsides for 4 days straight, trying to make a living. As such, it’s entirely appropriate that we take a few minutes out of our day to sit back, relax, and have some fun. Today’s friday fun video is brought to you by our friends at Vodafone and found by the gang at Engadget.

The Vodafone Symphonia uses 1000 cellphones, all chiming in with their own ringtone or SMS notification, to compose Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. It’s definitely freakin cool -- I’ve had to watch it a few times over just to keep enjoying it.

If you’re like me, and wondering how in the world they did that, here’s the ‘making of’ video.

As always, thanks for reading, have a killer weekend, and enjoy the fun.

Rihanna And Nokia Team Up For The X6 Launch

TheGuru — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:30:09 +0000

Several years ago, a new singer came onto the scene with a rockin song called Pon De Replay. This chick was hot, too, and I later discovered that her name was Rihanna. My roommate and I, admittedly, used to dance to this song all the time, probably with our phones in our hands (not really). However, at some point, she chopped all her hair off, and, well, that was it.

However, yesterday, Nokia announced that Rihanna will release her latest album -- Rated R -- as part of their global X6 launch. The whole thing kicks off with a concert from Rihanna, where she’ll perform several tracks from the new album. The concert will be live-streamed on November 16th from an exclusive venue in London, and then the whole album, including a few bonus tracks, will be available through the Nokia Music Store.

The Nokia X6 was announced at Nokia World 2009 and is the company’s first capacitive touchscreen device. It also features a 5 megapixel autofocus camera, dual-LED flash, and 32GB of internal storage. The X6 is expected to launch globally with Rihanna’s concert, and will be available with quad-band GSM support, as well as tri-band 3G in three flavors (900/2100MHz, 850/1900MHz, or 900/1900/2100MHz). Pricing is set at EUR 450 (US$ 670) as a Comes With Music device.

Karate Champ Or Weakling, Punch-O-Meter Will Tell You

Wampyre — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:30:12 +0000

Punch-O-Meter is one of the many free applications from Fox Mobile Distribution GmbH available from the OVI Store. As the name suggests it supposedly measures your punches by having you holding your phone while throwing air punches.

The application is small in both download and install size and doesn’t surpass the 1 Mb limit and nothing much exciting is worth noting during the installation process, following the same usual installation routine.

Once fired up the developer’s logo shows up for about 2 seconds before the start screen of the application appears. Here you can choose to start the application by using the center D-pad or left softkey and up and down to highlight an option. The right softkey is used to go back to the menu and to exit the application.

When starting the application you get a blinking screen with the text “press start” and the application is started by pressing the center D-pad or the left softkey and the countdown of 5 seconds starts rolling down. Throw an air punch while holding the phone to let the application measure how strong your punch is.

Most of the punches that I threw in the beginning lead to bad results with thumbs down and mean words. It’s not easy to get the good results flying in this application.

However once you’ve learned to throw the punches at the right time in addition to the help of a little trick. Good results with thumbs ups and praising words will start to roll.

The application in itself doesn’t provide much value of usage and is just a fun way to get time to fly by or to irritate your friends. Precautions should be taken when using this application as one of the risks is that you’ll easily send your phone flying through the air if you don’t hold it tight enough. (For me it hasn’t happened, yet.) It is therefore the sole responsibility of the owner of the Symbian-powered handset or the person throwing the punch to make sure this don’t happen.

There is a simply trick to always get the good results and the secret lies in the help section of the application. I won’t reveal the trick here so it’ s up to those interested to find out. The application is available from the OVI Store with support for S60 3rd Edition handsets.

Did you get the good results or do you know of any similar applications?

Nokia N-Gage 2.0 Is Fail 2.0

Wampyre — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:11:52 +0000

When N-Gage first was released it came in the form of an exclusive handset the N-Gage Classic (aka Taco). Shortly after they released a quickfix in the form of the N-Gage QD. Unfortunately, this initial N-Gage launch was a well-documented failure, so Nokia put a lid on it for a few years, and then tried again.

Their newest attempt of bringing N-Gage back as a service was slightly successful, however with major issues which have been pointed out by TheGuru on why he quits N-Gage

Keeping an ultra low profiled announcement the N-Gage blog have posted news that Nokia longer will release games under the N-Gage branding, but rather focus on releasing games on OVI Store.

What that means is that the N-Gage service will be closed next year, whereas the N-Gage store will be closed September 2010. The most crucial point in this is the question regarding your purchased games, which is being answered as such.

“Your games are safe – all your purchased N-Gage games will continue to work on your N-Gage compatible mobile device and they’re yours to keep. However, community features of the games will not be functional after 2010.”

The answer is fair enough but doesn’t address how you are able to reactivate your purchased games if you’ve formatted your phone. As I’ve purchased half of all the released games it basically means that I’ve thrown the money right out of the window.

How is your reaction on the close down of the new N-Gage?

[Via OVI Gaming]

gReader Goes Public, Giveaway Winners Announced

Dotsisx — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:25:22 +0000

gReader, or the Google Reader client for Symbian by MojosMobile, has just been made available for all of you to enjoy and download. We’ve already given you an extensive preview of the application’s capabilities, as well as a detailed video walkthrough of one of the early beta versions. There’s nothing much we can add, other than we love the application, its UI and all of its functions, and we’re extremely excited to be finally able to share it with all of you.

You might recall that we also did a 10-license giveaway, even before the official launch. We received 36 comments in the official contest’s timeline and put those through a random number picker. Here is the result:

In other words, the winners are:

1. Ghaith
4. ZeDestructor
8. Green
17. Dean Macke
19. AatifSumar
25. Kit
27. Victor
28. Marcelo
32. taike_hk
35. drkn

We’ll be contacting the lucky 10 shortly to request their IMEI in order to provide their full license. For everyone else, you can still download a trial version of gReader here as well as purchase the full application for 7.95 EUR. Don’t forget to leave your comments below, and any feedback you have. As before the official release, we still continue to be very active and prominent in the development of the application and the direction it takes, so we’ll make sure your voice is heard.

Get Your Comic Book Fix With TouchComic

Dotsisx — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:41:20 +0000

I’ve already mentioned TouchComic on Symbian-Guru in our Update on Developer Challenge post, but I think that writing a dedicated post for it, especially since it has now moved leaps forward, is a must to highlight what a pleasure this application is to use.

You might recall that earlier this year, I specifically asked for a comic book reading application for Symbian as it seemed non-sense to me that no one had used this big beautiful touchscreen with great resolution to allow consumption of comics on the go. Apparently, Jamie Fuller had the same thought, and hence wrote TouchComic. Since the first version, TouchComic has evolved a lot, and now supports tons of cool features. It reads comic books in the known format of .cbz or .zip (containing compressed images in .png .jpg or .gif). You can place these comics anywhere you want on the memory card or internal memory and choose your comics folder from the application itself.

Going through each comic is dead simple, as you have on-screen buttons to move to the next page or the previous page. There’s also a fullscreen option, as well as a fit-to-width toggle so you can either enable or disable it. The newest 1.8 version also adds a nifty function to your camera button allowing you to open a magnifier when it’s lightly pressed. It works on the Nokia N97, and I’ve tried it on my 5530 XpressMusic and found it to work as well.

TouchComic also displays the page numbers on the top of the screen, and remembers which page you were on when you close and reopen it. It supports the accelerometer and switches from landscape to portrait, rescaling the image if the fit-to-width option is enabled. There are many other Settings options so you can go ahead and tailor it to your preferences. Here is a video demo of TouchComic running on my Nokia 5530 XpressMusic:

TouchComic is only available on Symbian^1 devices (S60 5th Edition), and I have tested it to see it works nicely on the Nokia N97, 5800 XpressMusic and 5530 XpressMusic. In order to install it, you have to first install Python 1.9.7 then get the latest version from TouchComic’s google code page.

Is comic book reading something you prefer to do in paper format, on a computer screen, or do you really like the option to do it from your mobile while commuting or in waiting rooms and such?

Opera Mobile 10 Goes Into Beta

Dotsisx — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:19:43 +0000

A while back, Opera released the first beta of Opera Mini 5 which brought quick dial bookmarks, multiple tab browsing, and a ton of amazing features to their stellar mobile browser. Unfortunately, Opera Mini is a Java application, and as such, is a bit on the slow side of things as well as consumes a bit more battery than native applications. This problem is now solved as Opera have just released the beta for their Opera Mobile 10, which is a native Symbian application.

Opera Mobile 10 features the same polished interface as Opera Mini 5, with the more responsive UI, and is compatible with S60 3rd Edition as well as S60 5th Edition. It also features useful options such as saving images, shortcuts, selecting text, Opera Turbo that reduces page sizes by 70%, multiple tabs browsing, fullscreen view and adaptive zoom that shows the full page on the screen then allows you to zoom in to the part you’d like to see. The screenshots above are taken from my E71 and highlight some of these options.

There are a lot of other features that you can read about on Opera’s website, as well as download the installation file. If you’re still doubtful, Opera have made a nice YouTube video presentation of Opera Mobile 10 running on a Nokia N97.

[Via: Fone Arena]

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