Games
Phone Gaming Just Got Upgraded: Quake 3 Arena Now Playable On Select S60 Handsets
Posted by Nick Broughall at 9:30 AM on November 28, 2008
Pretty much all anybody talks about when they talk about phone gaming these days is the iPhone. Sure, you might get the occasional reference to N-Gage, or Brickbreaker might get an update, but that's about it, right? Wrong. As of today, if you're the proud owner of a Nokia N95 8GB, N82 or E90 handset, you can now play Quake 3 Arena on your mobile, with full multiplayer.
Of course, playing a full-blown FPS with a phone's awkward, packed keypad isn't exactly appealing, so the ported game as full Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support. Just forget for a moment what playing a game with a full keyboard and mouse while watching your phone's tiny screen would be like for a second and consider that this is actually a triumph for modern handsets. The fact that we can play a game that required top-of-the-line hardware a decade ago on our mobile phones is newsworthy just in itself.
If you own one of the three compatible phones and want to get your Quake 3 Arena action on, click the link below and follow the instructions. Just remember though - you'll need to own a copy of the game for this to work.
[Symbian Freak via Decoder]

A small bunch of S60 Touch UI screens popped up today over at Mobile Royale, and they don't look half bad. The design has big on-screen buttons, clean design, and easy to read menus. The only item of concern is how narrow the header and footer bars are when the OS is in landscape mode. Seems like a breeding ground for repeated tapping. That said, I'm still excited to see the rest of S60 Touch. [

If the rumour mill is correct, Samsung is cooking up a new Symbian S60 slider dubbed the i8510 with some serious specs under the hood--including an 8 megapixel camera. The full list of specs are impressive, and would definitely pose a threat to the upcoming Nokia N96 if it is the real deal.
If you play in the Windows Live sandbox (Hotmail, Messenger, Live Contacts and Spaces) and use a Nokia S60 phone, your life just got easier. Available today in a whole buncha places it wasn't before, the Windows Live app for S60 syncs your Live contacts and Hotmail account with the phone's address book and mail client (not push though), and lets you do pretty much all the regular Messenger stuff from your phone, like send pictures or files. And it's all intemagrated. If you wind up installing, let us know how it goes. [
Samsung has presented their L870 Symbian-based smartphone at the S60 Summit 2008, which has started today in Barcelona. Some blogs are speculating that it includes Apple's Safari, even while neither Samsung's own press release, nor Apple or Nokia or anyone at the S60 organisation have said it is actually the Apple Safari running on Symbian 9.3. Update: Intomobile confirms that it's the latest
Nokia has committed to bring Microsoft Silverlight video services to its S60 devices. Further, Nokia will also add support for the video content to its S40-based handsets at later stages. Given the immense market penetration of Nokia's Symbian- based mobiles, this partnering will have a large effect on mobile content support, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Adobe is feeling a little sick right now. [
Just like
With Nokia's Web Run Time, due to be released in the next S60 operating system update, Nokia users can actually run slightly modified Apple Dashboard widgets right on their phone. The basis of this is that Nokia's widgets and Dashboard widgets both use the WebKit browser engine (the same fact that also allowed Nokias to use some of the iPhone webapps), so porting Dashboard widgets over is a pretty straightforward and manual process. No specific date on the Web Run Time rollout, but it could be as early as January, which is likely before the iPhone will get widgets. [