SevenClick! Mobile Technology Evangelists

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

This PIM (personal information manager), developed for Symbian UIQ 3 smartphones, will be released by the first quarter of 2008.

DreamSpring, the company that has developed it, is currently recruiting beta testers to check out its features:

• Integration with DreamConnect 3 contact manager
• User’s activities: To-dos, appointments, events, categories, etc.

DreamLife has an intuitive GUI, described by DreamSpring in their press release as follows:

“DreamLife makes viewing and editing your activities a breeze, with unique 2-pane editing allowing you to see your day in context as you add and edit new activities. As a first to Symbian smartphones, DreamLife allows you to drag and drop activities in the edit view, giving an intuitive, visual method for planning your day.”

More information at DreamLife website

Via Simon Judge blog we find a complete and interesting summary about the SmartPhone Show 2007.

Carbide.C++, Symbian signed, Red Five Labs Net60 and some new guides and books are some of the issues he writes.

Link Mobile Phone Development

Samsung and Symbian today announced the Samsung i550,Samsung’s first smartphone including GPS navigator, at the Smartphone Show in London.

It is based on Symbian 9.2 and S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack, and it includes support for HSDPA 3.6 Mbps, 128 MB RAM, a 3.2 megapixel camera with video editing functionality, 150 MB of user memory and FM radio.

Via akihabaranews