Nokia has just announced their ground breaking 41 Megapixel camera with a phone built in. The device can take amazing 41 (effective 38) Megapixel still shots and a 1080p video recording capability. If you think your 12 Megapixel N8 is amazing, now is the time to stop thinking on those lines because this beast has a xenon flash as well.
Samsung sends a reminder to Samsung app-developers today reminding them the termination date of Symbian developer support. Samsung will no more support Symbian app development on their handsets for obvious reasons. They are pushing hard with their BADA platform on some of their phones and Android on rest of their smart-phone family. The termination includes closure of Symbian Lab.dev on 29th December, Symbian forum gets closed on 30th December and Symbian content will be removed on 31st December.
Nokia has been known for its innovation and in trying out things, they don’t hesitate. Launch of Nokia 7705 has come in a big way and the swivel keyboard, small size and cool design makes it very attractive. How usable is the phone itself, we cant say till we get to use it.
Fans, please note. This handset is coming exclusive on Verizon, at least for now.
The feature set in addition to the design has nothing special but its not disappointing as well. Following are a few highlights:
2.4 inch QVGA screen
Full QWERTY keyboard for great text and email experience.
The big ring that works as the alert light in multicolor.
3.0 Mega pixel auto focus camera
Good old 3G network support
Historically, Nokia has been launching unique and creatively designed handsets. Some of them were totally flop and other did not lose it at least. I’ve been a big fan of a few of them as well.
The first weird looking nokia I saw was Nokia 5510. That was probably the first ever QWERTY nokia that was ugly to look at but great for sending SMS. Then came smarter phones and probably first series 60 Nokia was quite weird looking, especially the keypad. See for yourself, its Nokia 3650:
Typing on Nokia 3650 was a nightmare. Rest of it was heaven.
On the same platform, Symbian Series 60, Nokia launched their gaming consoles named N-Gage and N-Gage QD but the series then got discontinued. They were pretty decent as a gaming device and even other usage, but as a phone they looked quite odd: You may come up with a few more examples as well but the most Bizarre looking phone I’ve ever seen is Nokia 7600. Its ugly to look at, boring to carry and a nightmare to use.
Finally to close this article, I cant help sharing this advertisement of the new Nokia. Enjoy!
For all the S60 lovers out there, this is a shocking news that S60.com is gone, gone forever. This is not as shocking as it sounds because it is an obvious aftermath of Nokia’s takeover of Symbian platform. Nokia has the largest installation base of Symbian S60 and it has eventually taken it over earliest this year.
This necessarily means, Nokia has more control over S60 now and things are moving very fast on Symbian front. The next generation OS code-named Symbian ^2 is already cooking in the labs and will start beta testing later this month. Retail stores will have devices with Symbian ^2 as early as beginning 2010. That’s not far. More interestingly, a few devices like Nokia’s N97 are already capable of running Symbian ^2 and may be simply upgraded to the new OS if Nokia plans to do so. A firmware update, and there you go Symbian ^2
Further plans list existence of Symbian ^3 that will contain ScreenPlay technology for UI design and will be available in commercial products by end of 2010 and two to three quarters after that we’ll have Symbian ^4. Things are really moving fast at Symbian labs. Following video shows ScreenPlay technology found in future Symbian OS.
I’m really surprised and excited at the same time to see this mobile based open micro-framework for mobile phone development named Rhodes. Rhomobile has launched this open framework that claims to allow developers to write an app once and port it easily run on iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows mobile and even Android.
The platform allows users to write code in Ruby and is available here for download. I did’nt get much time to explore this but you can simply read the tutorial or can watch following video to get yourself oriented with this very promising tool. I’ll share my findings as soon as I find some time to work on it.
Last but not least. There’s a Rhodes app development contest going on on their site that can win you $10,000. I wish you luck. Happy coding !