SevenClick! Mobile Technology Evangelists

Nokia has released today this big news:

Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS(TM), S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform.

The Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation’s first day of operations.

The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

“Establishing the Foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia.

The Foundation’s platform will build on the leading open mobile software platform, with more than 200 million phones, across 235 models.

This is one of the biggest announcements in mobile phones field in years, mobile leades to unify a software, mainly to beat the iphone´s career. I think. iPhone keeps your chin up. :D

Link Nokia Press Release

From Vodafone Betavine, here it comes a brand new Last.FM client for S60 devices. For those of you who still don´t know Last.FM, it´s a social networking music service based on Internet radio. So if you want to join, why not enjoying such community (which claims over 21 million active users, according to Wikipedia) from the comfort of your Symbian smartphone? Just install it on your card, start Nokia´s internet radio player and then Blast.FM.

Via XatakaMovil
Links Betavine - Last.FM - Last.FM on Wikipedia - Blast.FM

RedFiveLabs have finally launched to the market Net60. What is Net60? In short, it’s a Symbian S60 port of Microsoft’s .Net Compact Framework 1.0.

Every people involved in Symbian based development during his career will probably agree that this is the toughest mobile development environments. The tool chain utilities have improved during the years, but it is still far away from other environments such as Windows Mobile or JME.

That’s why Net60 is specially interesting. Developers will be able to write and test C# code in Microsoft’s Visual Studio, eventually deploying the resulting application in Symbian based mobile phones.

Anyway, Net60 is only .Net Compact Framework 1.0 complaint. Current standard is 2.0 version, which is less error-prone and have important improvements to the 1.0 release. This is the main drawback of this software.

Link Net60 WebSite

Last March 31, Dolby Laboratories and Symbian Limited confirmed that Dolby Laboratories has joined the Symbian Platinum Partner Program, offering Dolby® Mobile for Symbian OSTM.

That is a great news, because this enables rich and vibrant surround sound to our handset.It offers now a more immersive audio experience to our movies, music, television programs, games or even ringtones on the go.

“Symbian OS is a robust, open mobile operating system which is widely used around the world by some of the leading handset vendors,” said Max Taylor, Marketing Director, Mobile Business, Dolby Laboratories. “Being part of the Platinum Partner Program allows Dolby to work closely with Symbian to ensure that consumers can quickly and easily enjoy the Dolby Mobile audio on Symbian smartphones.”

The first mobile phones featuring Dolby Mobile technology are already available in Japan.

Via SimplySymbian

SymbianFreak quotes ‘trusted source’ for announcing that a firmware update for Nokia N95 is about to come. This new release would include Flash Lite 3 and WebRunTime (support for widgets).

This will make available for N95 this new and promising mobile technologies. Nokia uses to forget older handsets in some way, thus releasing firmware updates only for newer ones. So, this release is really welcomed.

It should be available soon on Nokia Software Update, and then in the official Nokia Points and Nokia Service Points.

Of course, the new firmware improves general stability and performance of N95 as well as fixes some known bugs. SymbianFreak includes all the change log in his post.

Via XatakaMovil
Link SymbianFreak

Nokia has announced during Nokia World 2007 in Amsterdam the winners in the first “Open C Challenge”. The contest fostering developers to port applications with Nokia’s Open C to S60 mobile platform.

Sponsored by Forum Nokia, Orange and the Symbian Developer Network, the Open C Challenge asked for open source applications built for mobile of desktop that have been ported to Symbian making used of Open C environment.

The criteria for the contest emphasized the developer’s innovation, creativity and degree of difficulty in the porting process, as well as the quality and usability of the applications themselves.

The winners have been:

1. Sittiphol Phanvilai from Bangkok for his MobiTubia application. $10,000. 25,000 lines of code ported!!!
2. Pu Zhihua for LiveTraffi. $5,000.
3. TongRen for the MobiClass. $3,000.
4. Steve DeLaney for ViewRight. $2,000.

Via NewLC

The other day we talked about UK’s first large scale pilot of NFC (Near Field Communications) technology on mobile phones.

The trial of the O2 Wallet paves the way for the mass market use of mobile phones to pay for purchases, access events or even be used as Oyster cards for travel around London, simply by touching the phone to a reader.

The trial, which will involve over 500 people invited from the O2 customer base, takes place across selected sites throughout London and began yesterday running for six months until the end of May 2008. In that way, each trialist will be given a Nokia 6131 NFC handset installed with the O2 Wallet installed.

This Nokia mobile phone, presented in January in CES Las Vegas, includes Near Field Communications (NFC) technology to enable information sharing, service initiation and payment & ticketing capability with one tap of the device. Used in much the same way as existing contactless cards and keytags to allow access and make small payments, the addition of NFC technology to a full featured mobile device adds an entirely new level of capability by leveraging the phone’s computing power, wireless Internet access and user interface.

Its main characteristics are:

• Quad band
• Symbian Series 40 OS
• 2.2” QVGA TFT main display with up to 16.7 million true colors (240 x 320 pixels)
• External cover display 1.36” TFT screen (128 x 160 pixels)
• A built-in digital music player with microSD card support
• FM stereo radio
• 1.3 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom
• Bluetooth wireless technology
• MIDP 2.0
• Volume: 75 cc
• Weight: 104 g
• Dimensions: 92 x 47 x 20 mm

Nokia press release
Nokia 6131 NFC webpage

Up to now Nokia is maybe the vendor that has been betting harder on having a web server on your smartphone. Their targets were both publishing tiny personal web sites and developing on-device-running applications using Python, since it’s an scripting language pretty easier to use than Symbian. For this reason, a lot of S60 APIs are available for Python scripts.

But now it seems they are going to take it to the next level. Thanks to XatakaMovil, we have reached to a thread in Forum Nokia where a Nokia’s expert reveals that they will demonstrate and release what they call the PAMP stack at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas in January, 2008.

PAMP stands for Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP. That is, a LAMP port for S60 smartphones. Moreover, there will be PHP extension modules giving access to the core functionality of the device. This will allow to install any LAMP based system on your smartphone. In fact, they talk about installing a CMS such as Drupal.

Anyway, as Nokia’s guy admits, “a fair amount of memory is needed and it’s still pretty experimental stuff, but it runs quite nicely on E90″.

Via XatakaMovil
Link ForumNokia

Old Palm OS users now have reasons for celebrate. StyleTap, a Toronto-based company, announced the realease of StyleTap CrossPlatform for Symbian by the first quarter of 2008, though they have been showing the product on the recent Symbian Smartphone Show in London.

StyleTap CrossPlatform for Symbian OS is the newest member of the StyleTap CrossPlatform family of products, that already allows Palm OS applications to run on Windows Mobile and aims to support different OS.

The new CrossPlatform for Symbian will support both S60 and UIQ platforms.

Via AllAboutSymbian
Link StyleTap

From Smartphone Show that is taking place this week in London, we have new announcements about support of Office 2007 documents on Symbian.

The last file format modifications that came up with Office 2007 had provided smartphone users with a new problem: their applications didn’t support the new XML format.

But is about to change. Dataviz has announced a new realese: ‘Documents To Go Premium Edition 4.0′ for UIQ 3 by December 2007. Moreover, QuickOffice has also announced ‘Quickoffice Premier 5.0′ for S60 3rd Edition.

Both two offer full Office 2007 compatibility for creating, reading and editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents.

Via allaboutsymbian.com
Link Dataviz QuickOffice