Nokia Maps is well known alongside Google Maps and Bing Maps though it’s been naturally exclusive to Nokia phones on the mobile scene. Starting today, the service is available to iOS devices (iPod Touch, iPad and the iPhone) and Android phones with HTML5-compatible browsers. This means that you’ll be able to use the browser-based Nokia Maps services (directions, searching for places, browsing maps) on your iOS or Android smartphone without the need to change camps.
As I personally can attest, Nokia Maps works great on an iPhone 4. It offers full multi-touch support and feels fluid. All services on it (positioning yourself on the map, searching for directions, etc.) work just fine. Read more »
The Angry Birds Seasons episode – Summer Pignic got its final level unlocked yesterday and if you’re already feeling sad to see it end you can watch this cool trailer made for the episode by creator RovioMobile.
The video shows the typical birds-vs-pigs battleground situation, a slingshot and the eggs being held hostage. It looks as though the pigs will prevail until the boomerang bird swoops in to save the eggs seconds before it’s too late. Read more »
The original Samsung Wave (which first showcased the SuperAMOLED wonder of a display) is arguably among the best equipped smartphones out there (outside the Android and iOS camps). It’s bound to get even hotter with the release of the Bada OS 2.0.1. It will surely take some time but while you wait, you can try the beta version right now.
The beta brings a set of new features, worth having, like the new UI look, the drag-down widgets screen, the Music and Social hubs, the revamped gallery with stacked albums, the 3D cover flow-like music player, the Dolphin browser 3.0. You might remember the beta landing on the Wave II just a couple of days ago. Read more »
Facebook is a fundamental part of every SNS-offering phone these days. It’s still the most popular social network out there and has by far the largest user base of about 750M people (July 2011). So we’re not really surprised that almost every premiere smartphone OS out there is trying to dig into the hype and offer as much as it can to its users.
Sony Ericsson recently introduced a new, deeper way of integrating Facebook in their recent Xperia smartphones (Arc, Neo, Pro, Play, Mini and Ray). They call it Facebook inside Xperia and we are about to see what it’s like. Read more »
Viber, the app that lets you call and text your contacts for free, is now available in the Android Market. It utilizes either your data plan or Wi-Fi connection to place calls and send messages, so instead of using your call minutes it uses your data plan megabytes. And now that the iOS-only restrction no longer applies it can unleash its full potential.
The app is absolutely free and automatically recognizes which users in your phonebook have the app installed, so you can call them free of charge. On Android it’s even supposed to be integrated in the phonebook so you can call without even opening the Viber app, but having tried it on a few handsets we didn’t get that integration. Read more »
The BlackBerry Tablet OS (that’s the PlayBook platform) just got an update to version 1.0.7. It brings an updated BlackBerry Bridge app, portrait mode in pictures app, pinch zooming in videos and extended language support.
The BlackBerry Bridge app is used to connect your BlackBerry smartphone to your PlayBook tablet wirelessly. What’s new with the app is that now you can save email attachments to either a removable SD card or the internal storage of the smartphone. Also you can also download .ZIP attachments to your smartphone for editing or viewing. Read more »
The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is a small feature phone with music-centric features and a thing for flashy colors. It also brings a fun, teenish design and touch of simplicity to the table which coupled with a good price tag could prove a winning formula.
It is, however, a sheep in wolf’s clothing in the aspect that it looks like the Android powered W8 but it is in fact a prettier Yendo – a dumb phone with no multitasking, a limited number of optimized apps and no flashy OS to flaunt in front of others. Still, it brings some notable improvements over the Yendo (the better looks aside) – it has a bigger 3″ display with a superior resolution of 240×400 pixels (over the 240×320 of the Yendo). Connectivity-wise it features Wi-Fi and finally in the multimedia department has e 3.15 MP fixed-focus camera instead of just a 2 MP one. Read more »
We came across some photos of a device which devilishly looks akin to the current iPhone 4 but runs on a test software and is said to be a prototype of the next, much anticipated iPhone 4S, 4GS, 5 or whatever Apple will call it. According to the person, who leaked this, the device features a 5 MP camera instead of an 8 MP one and runs iOS 4.0, but inside there’s the latest A5 dual-core processor as seen on the iPad 2.
A picture is usually worth a thousand words but in this case we see nothing truly new or interesting. The device has no visible changes to the exterior whilst the software is made for testing purposes and is also old news. Still rumors suggest this could be the N94 – a prototype iPhone 5 with the dual-core A5 processor, 5 MP camera and support for the T-Mobile USA network.
Update: Now that we’ve looked more carefully into the facts, it seems the most likely scenario is that this phone is a prototype or rather a test unit for the last year’s iPhone 4, similar to the one being sold on Ebay not long ago. The original source doesn’t suggest in any way there’s an A5 chip inside plus there’s this thing it runs on the original iOS 4.0. Obviously the fellows over at 9to5mac.com (our intermediary source) have been a little bit overexcited and have reported mainly their own speculations on the matter.
Two of the most important application stores in the mobile world celebrated important milestones these days. iPad and WP7 smartphone owners both have reasons to celebrate as the tablet App store and Windows market place now have 100,000 and 25,000 apps respectively.
Skype for Android got the video calling feature just two days ago but there were only four handset that could use it: the Samsung Nexus S, HTC Desire S and Sony Ericsson’s Xperia pro and Xperia neo devices.
Well thanks to some hardworking hackers the reach of the Skype video-calls has been greatly extended. You can now enable the feature on the Samsung Galaxy S II, Samsung Droid Charge, HTC EVO 3D, HTC Sensation and the HTC Thunderbolt plus potentially some other smartphones. Read more »
A popular joke has it that Microsoft’s default browser best feature is that it allows you to download a rival browser. But the fact is that IE is still the most popular browser worldwide and one that Microsoft is dead set on pushing to all of its devices – PCs, tablets and WP7 smartphones.
So the release of the second platform preview of Internet Explorer 10 should still be pretty good news. Meant mainly for developers those platform previews are hardly anything to download and use on your PC, but they are a good indication that a release is nearing. Who knows, maybe Microsoft will finally be able to arrest the fall of IE market share. Read more »
One of the most important parts of Windows Phone 7, its Facebook app, just got an update. Version 2.0 of Facebook finally brings some push notification magic to SNS addicts in the WP7 crowd.
Those are shown as toast notifications (or banners in the top of the device like a pop-up) and live tiles. You can set to be notified for a message, wall post, feed comment, when somebody tags you in a photo, comments on a photo of you, etc. So it’s now a fully functioning Facebook app, save for the missing Facebook chat feature. Read more »
The Opera browser has received yet another update – version 11.5. Bringing performance updates, widgets for the Speed Dial (like weather), as well as improvements to the Opera Link sync service.
The new “live” Speed Dial means that widgets can be placed where only webpages used to be. So now you can, for example, place a weather widget on a Speed Dial window and it will display weather information for a city of your choice with hourly updates. Read more »
Lawrence Hryb (or just Larry as most know him), the Director of programming for the Microsoft gaming network – Xbox Live, has just announced via Twitter that Angry Birds is available for WP7 users over at the Marketplace.
The game will sell for $2.99, which is a bit steep, but users will have the opportunity to test a few levels for free. Read more »
You may have never heard of Nokia Shorts, and no it’s not some dirty euphemism for underwear. It’s actually a creative contest for film-making for artists, armed with the world’s current camera-phone top dog the Nokia N8.
The winner is a chap, named James W Griffiths, who made a split-screen video showing us two different points of view of two people, living in different cities. He’s called it “Splitscreen: A love story”. The video is brilliantly thought out and you can tell the creator spent many hours, if not days waiting for the right shot Read more »
Nokia Lumia 925 comes into our office, flaunts its new design, display and software
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