Nokia has updated the Symbian developers guidelines, which should be used by 3rd party developers when creating new Symbian apps. According to the company the new guidelines “should be seen as a style evolution, not a revolution”, but changes are quite significant nonetheless.

The first thing you can expect from future Symbian apps is to use a smaller status bar. So far quite a lot of space got wasted, but Nokia urges the developers to end this. The tab bars should also be updated so they are now easier to press (they should fill the entire row). Read more »

Stephen Elop may have said that Nokia will not be looking back at MeeGo even if the N9 becomes a success but that does not mean Nokia will be abandoning it altogether after launch.

This assurance comes from Nokia’s Head of Portfolio Management, Klas Ström, who tweeted that Nokia will continue to support the N9 for years and release several software updates for it. We hope Nokia doesn’t plan on launching a buggy device to be actually needing those updates badly but it is nice to know in case it does have a problem you won’t be left out in the cold. Read more »

Although the Americans weren’t exactly starved of good free online music services (Rdio, Grooveshark, Zune Pass, just to name a few) they were deprived of the fabulous Spotify that the Europeans know and love. But not for long. Spotify has just announced that they will be bringing their musical goodness to the good people of Unites States of America.

No launch dates have been mentioned so far but Spotify has started accepting invites on their website. The service is currently being tested in the US and should be available for use soon. Meanwhile you can continue rocking whatever service you have been using so far. Read more »

The popular iPad has reached yet another milestone where it has grabbed 1.03% of the global web browser market share as of June, 2011. This includes all the web browser, including desktop ones like Internet Explorer and Firefox. To put these figures into perspective, the eight year-old desktop Safari browser has a market share of 7.15% whereas the fifteen year-old Opera browser has a mere 1.11% market share as of April, 2011.

These figures are even higher in the US, where the iPad accounts for 2.1% whereas the iPhone and Android devices have 2.9% and 2.6% market share respectively. Read more »

Google Maps just keeps getting better, folks. The latest update of the popular service, version 5.7, brings a whole bunch of improvements, along with a shiny new feature for its users – Transit Navigation (Beta).

As the name of the brand new feature suggests, Read more »

Now here’s something you may have been expecting for some time. At a dedicated Facebook event today, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, announced some new Facebook features that are going to make their way in the already popular online social service (popular as in 750 million user base popular).

Now the powerful Facebook messaging system gets the option for video calls, group chats and some other new things. Read more »

Those iPhone 5 (or 4S) rumors just aren’t going to stop until Steve Jobs finally steps on stage and reveals the next best iOS smartphone. Today ‘s issue of Rumorland daily talks about the size and weight of the upcoming iPhone and speculates on the reason why it missed on its usual July refresh cycle.

Apparently, Apple is going to try and squeeze its next smartphone into an even slimmer shell that weighs less than the iPhone 4. However, this has resulted in a number of complications in the manufacturing process, which might be the reason why the iPhone 5 is late. Read more »

After leaking last week, the HTC Sensation first update will hardly surprise anyone now, but the news today is it’s now being officially pushed to the smartphone. If you have a European Sensation you can get the 27MB worth of bug-fixes and patches right away without the need for connecting your Sensation to a computer.

Unfortunately this is not the bootloader-unlocking update that most Sensation owners have been waiting for, nor is it the one that brings its Android version up to 2.3.4. Read more »

Yesterday the chip-maker Texas Instruments announced that their OMAP4 mobile chipset is the first to receive the Netflix HD certification. And before you rush to any conclusions, you should know this doesn’t mean that this will be the only chipset compatible with the app.

Instead, the certification comes to show that Netflix believes that OMAP4 is the best-optimized chipset for its service allowing streaming of up to 1080p 30fps multi-standard videos. Also, it offers similar performance with a lower load and thus less power consumption and improved multi-tasking. Read more »

There may not be many iPad users who have Bing as their search engine of choice right now, but this latest update to the Bing app might make quite a lot of people reconsider. The Microsoft search engine is yet to catch up with Google in terms of results accuracy, but it just leapfrogged its competitor in terms of usability on the Apple tablet.

So here’s the deal – from now on initiating a search with the Bing app for iPad is as simple as drawing a circle around the word(s) you want searched. There’s no need for holding, copying, pasting any more so the searches are also quite a lot faster. Read more »

Google really wants its Google+ social network project to succeed. So much so that the company will be rebranding its popular Picasa and Blogger services in order to help the promotion of the Facebook competitor.

Apparently Google will be trying to solidify its brand name by renaming Picasa “Google Photos” and Blogger “Google Blogs”. Rumor has it that other services might be affected too, though YouTube will remain as it is for the time being. Read more »

It appears that Mac OS won’t be the only Apple thing to get a major update in July. A really juicy rumor has it that the MacBook Air lineup refresh will be announced along with the Lion availability in a couple of weeks’ time.

Right now Apple’s most compact mobile computers are more of glorified netbooks than proper laptops with their low-grade CPUs. However if the rumors are to be believed those will get a significant update, including Intel i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge processors and a latest generation NAND flash storage. Read more »

The Tegra 2 platform was quite a success for NVIDIA, finding its way to a dozen of smartphones and tablets and it even became the standard hardware platform for Android Honeycomb. But the company is certainly not going to stop there. We already know that its successor, codenamed Kal-El, will come later this year with a quad-core CPU on board, but now we also got some details about the version after that, codenamed Wayne.

The 28nm NVIDIA Wayne will be commercially available as Tegra 4 and will actually come in two flavors. The less powerful one will sport “at least 24-core” CUDA-enabled GPU, which resembles contemporary GPU architecture and a quad-core CPU, clocked at least 1.5GHz. According to NVIDIA that should be enough to provide at least 10x the computing power of the currently available Tegra 2 chipset. Read more »

The LG Optimus 3D has just started selling in the UK and along with it are coming some exclusive 3D games for it, courtesy of Gameloft.

You will now be able to play popular titles such as Asphalt 6, N.O.V.A. 2 and Let’s Golf 2 in all their three dimensional glory on the Optimus 3D’s glasses-free 3D display. And that’s not all Read more »

When Nokia announced the N9 last month, they claimed it to be the fastest cameraphone on the market. But before Nokia came up with the N9, HTC had already called dibs on that title for their Sensation. Also, when Nokia did the cameraphone time comparison, they seemed to have left out the Sensation for some reason, so we never really found out which one is faster. Until now.

The guys over at stuff-review.com decided it was time to settle the matter once and for all so they took out their trusty stopwatch and timed the HTC Sensation to see how it compares with the figures of the N9 that Nokia published and guess what, the Sensation won. Read more »