The N97 is Nokia’s attempt to stand tall in an unfamiliar, hostile world populated by the iPhone, Pre and Android the only way it knows how: by throwing the kitchen sink at them. If this is it, they’re doomed.
From London’s Guardian, we get this surprising report: Nokia, (recent) full owner of Symbian, is making an Android touchscreen phone, set for unveiling at a conference in September. This rumour! It’s strange!
Nokia’s E72 is just like the E71, but improved in lots of little ways: Same solid feel, but with tweaks like a less crowded d-pad that’s an optical trackpad too. Now if Nokia can just sell it for $US99 too.
After “leaking” a promotional video over the weekend Nokia have officially unveiled the E72 – their new QWERTY smartphone followup to the fantastic E71- at the Connection 09 event in Singapore.
Even if it’s packaged as yet another Guitar Hero clone, it’s always nice to see multitouch appear where it wasn’t meant to. The Nokia 5800 is the latest device to cave to multi-finger temptations.
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]
Our hands-on with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic ‘Tube’ was pretty conclusive: the 5800 is a solid, capable but somewhat underwhelming music phone. For a first attempt at a full touch interface, though, the adapted S60 operating system is actually pretty good. Slashphone has unearthed a mountain of demo footage displaying the different functions of the OS, so you can make your own judgment, but as with our hands-on video, you’ll just have to try to ignore the damning, repeatedly unregistered touches that keep happening whenever the screen isn’t pre-rendered.
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. [Mobile Royale via Symbian Freak]
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. [Windows Live]
