Posts filed under Mobile Software

Nokia’s mobile OS, Symbian, has been showing its age recently and is in desperate need of a spruce up if it’s to compete with the plethora of new toucschreen interfaces from virtually every other mobile manufacturer.

In fact, now that Microsoft has completely rewritten Windows Mobile to rave critical acclaim, Symbian is now officially the most old-fashioned looking OS on the market!

So Nokia needed to do something, and quickly. The result is two new versions of Symbian: the Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 operating systems, two different generations of the OS that are being developed in parallel.

After the jump, we’ve got a video demo of Symbian^3, which will be released on new phones later this year.

Microsoft teased us at MWC 2010 last month with its new Windows Mobile 7 Series. Although we saw quite a few screenshots of the new mobile OS, the videos that were shown were frustratingly brief.

Today at last, our frustration can be relieved as Chris Pirillio has posted a 17 minute video of a hands on session he had with Windows Phone 7 Series, as demonstrated by a Microsoftie.

More details and the video after the jump.

Just two short weeks after Microsoft announced its new Windows Phone 7 Series mobile OS comes news of the first Windows Phone 7 Series, er, phone! Made by LG, the new WinPho phone is a slider with a 5 megapixel camera that looks almost identical to the LG InTouch GW620.

OK, so there are a few differences – the InTouch has an extra row of keys (a row of dedicated number keys at the top), for example, and uses Android – but externally, at least, the two are remarkably similar.

Check out the video of LG’s new WinPho phone after the jump.

Microsoft is nearly at the end of its launch of its brand new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7 Series. And I do mean brand new – absolutely everything about WinMo 7 is new, from the user interface right on down to the underlying code.

Even the name is new – out goes WinMo, in comes, er, WinPho!

And what a hugely welcome relief this is! The old Windows Mobile was creaking so badly, it was beyond repair. Thankfully, Microsoft realised this and have raised their game, producing a brand new mobile OS with a new user interface that’s at least as good as the other interfaces that are now on the market.

If only Nokia had done that with Symbian!

But that’s another story. The story of the day is what WinPho7 offers, how good it is – and why Microsoft might just have hobbled it before it’s even had a chance to succeed!

Spotify have confirmed they have no intention of developing a Spotify app on the Maemo platform. This is bad news for owners of the Nokia N900, and shows one of the dangers of choosing a phone with a limited market share.

As I’ve been saying for ages, only the most popular mobile phone platforms will attract developers, and the platforms with poor developer support will face a death spiral of decreasing demand as few companies develop their apps on it – which in turn feeds reduced demand as no-one wants a smartphone with no apps!

Nokia has released a new teaser video of its Maemo mobile operating system. Maemo is the software that powers the Nokia N900, which has just been released. I saw a preview of the N900 a few months ago, and was very impressed, particularly when comparing the N900 to the N97.

However, I was confused back then as to why Nokia was effectively competing with itself with two mobile operating systems (the N97 uses Symbian), and I’m even more confused with this video – it’s not a teaser for the N900, it’s a teaser for Maemo!

Check the video out for yourself after the jump – and see if you can make sense of it!

How much information have you got stored on your mobile phone? Think about it – your contacts, addresses, important and memorable texts, hundreds of photos and tunes, and now, of course, dozens of apps. Losing your phone is now more costly than buying a new one – your whole life’s stored on it.

Backing up your mobile data is therefore essential. But how do you do it?

Easy – you read the following guide on the top 5 ways to backup and safeguard your mobile data!

Remember the HTC Touch Dual, one of the first Windows Mobile smartphones that actually looked good? The keywords here are “Windows Mobile”, as it turns out you can also run Android on it, too – and not just any old Android, but a version of Android with HTC’s own shiny new Hero interface.

These pics show just such a weird chimera, with the HTC Touch Dual booting up under Linux and then the familiar HTC Hero interface bursting into life.

Impossible? No, not a bit of it. It’s one of the benefits of the openness of Android, the hackability of HTC’s phones, and the almost obsessive devotion to getting Android on virtually every device out there by the members of XDA-Developers.

Sure, it sounds geeky, but if you have an old HTC Touch and want to put some extra life into it, go ahead and install Android on it – jusrt don’t ask me how ;)

More pics and details after the jump.

One of the big questions surrounding the launch of Google’s first Android phone was just how well supported it would be by third party application developers. If today’s news is anything to go by, very well indeed should be the answer, as Visa have announced that they’re about to launch a brand new mobile payment service on the Android platform.

The new service will alert you to any payments that have been made on your Visa card, ensuring you know exactly what’s being spent on your card and when, which should be a great help in combating fraud. You’ll also be able to see the locations of ATMs that support your Visa card within your local area, and receive offers from merchants that are redeemable in stores close by.

Nokia labs have released the Nokia Location Tagger application, which automatically geotags your photos taken from GPS-equipped mobile phones, and embeds the latitude and longitude of where the pic was taken inside the EXIF fields of the JPEG file containing your pic. This neat trick, which, to be frank, should have been installed in all Nokia phones with GPS right from the beginning, means that you can now search for pictures not only by tag name or filename, but also by the location in which they were taken.