tehkSEVEN Blog

Congratulations to Symbian!

The Symbian Foundation has successfully shifted Symbian from being a closed sourced platform to now an open sourced platform, “It is a significant milestone,” Lee Williams explains from Symbian Blog. The Symbian Foundation has done a brilliant job on getting the Symbian OS open, as they “have done so 4 to 5 months ahead of scheduled,” a plan that alot of people in the industry said could not happen. Symbian now delivers free source codes “Tens and tens of millions of lines of codes developed over 8 to 10 years” have all been migrated to open sourced “given away to the world for free, for development, for advanced evolution” which was planned aggressively. The Symbian Foundation presents more codes than any other platforms.

There will be plenty of features coming up like “latest graphics architecture (3d and 2d), social mobile framework and most interestingly the upcoming Qt which will enable developers easily manage and create applications,” it will also feature the latest 4G, which is the next generation high speed data connection.

Quotes from contributors:

Peter Ropke, Senior Vice President, Devices R&D, Nokia:
“Nokia congratulates the Symbian Foundation on the completion of its platform migration to full open source well ahead of schedule – a significant milestone for the Symbian platform, the foundation and the entire mobile industry”

Toshio Miki, Associate Senior Vice President, Managing Director of Communication Device Development Department, NTT DOCOMO:
“NTT DOCOMO congratulates the Symbian Foundation and respectfully acknowledges its significant effort to accomplish this great step of making the Symbian platform fully open to the public well ahead of schedule”

Yong-suk Moon, Managing Director, Vice President, Samsung Electronics Research Institute, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.:
“Samsung welcomes the successful opening of Symbian platform. We expect further development and growth of Symbian Foundation as mobile industry keep evolving dynamically.”

Mats Svardh, Director of Terminal Products and Technology, Vodafone:
“Vodafone are pleased to see the Symbian Foundation making great progress with open sourcing its platform under the EPL.”

The Apple iPad was quite a disappointment for most tech enthusiasts out there. The promise of multi-tasking, camera capabilities, and overall “netbook”-esque features kind of fluttered away when Steve Jobs demonstrated that the iPod was really nothing more than a glorified iPhone – minus the call feature. One of the things the Apple iPad is missing is flash support. However, this is intentional as Jobs has called Adobe, the owner of Macromedia Flash and Adobe Photoshop, “lazy” for continuously pushing for Flash when HTML 5 is the future. The relationship between Google and Apple has also gone a bit sour after the release of the Google Nexus One. Apparently, the word “Android” has become a 4-letter word in the world of Apple. According to the developers, applications with the word “Android” will most likely not get approved during the AppStore approval process. Wow..

All this and more in this episode of Phoneage. All of the news, videos, and download links can be found in the sidebar of the YouTube video. Stay tuned for Wednesday’s episode!

Welcome to TTM’s new series – Applications of the Month. Once a month, he will upload a video spotlighting a cool new applications he likes. This is the first episode where 2 free applications are spotlighted. These are both fantastic speech-to-text applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The applications are called “Dragon Search” and “Dragon Dictation.” Both applications are made by the developers “Nuance” and can be downloaded on the iTunes app store. For downloads links of these applications, please refer to the sidebar of the video located here.

The Google Nexus One gets a firmware update that adds OS wide multi touch to the device. Multi touch works in various applications in the phone, not just the web browser. So now Nexus One owners can pinch and zoom in photos and Google Maps, just like the Apple iPhone. It is notable that the zooming does not seem as fluid or “organic” compared to the iPhone. However, it is more than satisfactory, and can easily be improved over time. Various devices have also been recently hacked; such as the Nokia 5700 to run Blackberry OS 4.6 from the Blackberry Pearl Flip, and the Sony Xperia X1 to run Android 2.0.1. Last, but not least, would be the Nokia N900 “hacked” to programing a group of poll dancing robots! For more information, please check out the video – all of the news sources and video links will be the video’s description.

See you guys on Monday!

The wonderful people of WomWorld have sent us a Nokia Booklet 3G to review and to play with for 2 weeks. We decided to create an impressions video, but if you’ve seen our other videos, you would know that this ain’t gonna be your run of the mill tech-impressions video. We hit the streets of downtown Toronto, Canada to ask random people what they thought of the Booklet 3G. All of the participants got to play around with the Booklet, and were given the specifications and the predicted pricing.
 

Steve Jobs has just announced the rumoured Apple iTablet/ iSlate to be called the Apple iPad. The Apple iPad has been the center of rumours and now it has finally been unveiled in San Fransisco. It is said to be “much more than a laptop” and that the engineers say “it is the most advanced piece of technology they have ever worked on”.

It runs on Iphone OS 3.2 and you will get the same services as an iPhone. You will have the App store, iTunes and a new addition the iBooks.
The pricing is very low, and Apple’s strategy is to give the iPad to many consumers as it can. It starts off at $499 in the US excluding 3G.

Pretty interesting right? The OS is a revamped version of the Iphone, you will get more of a natural feel when you pinch-to-zoom and especially when browsing the photos.

Quick specs:
* Multitouch
* 10 hours of battery life
* Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
* 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
* 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip

There has been a lot of hype in the mobile world lately, especially with the Apple iPad finally revealing itself and Symbian planning a UI overhaul for next year. Not to mention, Samsung is going to release its own platform (Bada). However, Symbian has never released anything shocking or mysterious until now.

“Did you see the single numebr tweeted by Symbian yesterday? Prefixed by the tag #symbiancountdown, the number 108 was released to the world. With no explanation. So we’ve put our thinking caps on, wondering what this Symbian Countdown could be. Is your favourite theory in here?”

AllaboutSymbian
What could it be? They also have their own website, http://countdown.symbian.org/.
Right now the number is 36.

The Nokia N97 firmware V21.0.045 is now available via Nokia Software Updater. It is about 133mb in size, and Australia was one of the first countries to receive the update at 7:00pm. Unfortunately, some UK users reported the update is still not available yet. The v21.0.045 update is a minor update that contains under-the-hood fixes and improvements.

Here is my unofficial changelog:

-Homescreen loads faster
-Auto-rotation is much more snappy
-Overall the device is faster
-Kinetic scrolling has improved in some places but other areas, kinetic scrolling has degraded
-Not much visible improvements in the music app so far as well as the video player
- Photo viewing and flicking through photos is quicker
-No visible changes in the Settings
-Applications in general load quicker
-Web browser loads pages more quicker

Here are some bugs that are still present on the phone:

-Kinetic scrolling has degraded in places like the *Calender app or Settings*
-Music Application still has a bug *Playing a music and sliding out the keyboard then pressing the down button is supposed to turn down the volume but instead it restarts the music, same applies for the up button*

The free Ovi Maps does not come with v21.0.045 so you’ll have to download that via the Software Updater application on your phone. Skype is still not included with the firmware.

This is what I’ve come up in photoshop, so some stuff may be inaccurate. Anyway this is my Symbian^4 concept.

At the top which is the status bar shows the battery/signal indicators and below it is the weather widget embedded to the status bar which can be changeable between any widgets. On the left side of the status bar is the time and date. and below the status bar is where the feeds/ operator options/ task switcher are placed.

The left icon is the feeds icon-this is where you can quickly view the latest news on which you’ve subscribed and you can also view the latest updates available for your phone plus upcoming calender entries. When you press the icon, a drop down menu will appear and when you press on one icon and a pop up window will appear with the recent updates.

We have the widgets area where irregular shaped widgets can be placed. Then we have the keypad icon and three dots which represent the three changeable homescreens. Finally we have the shortcuts bar, which you can change at your choice and when you flick upwards from the bar it will slide up the menu and the shortcuts bar will disappear above.

And there you have it!

Tuesday afternoon, the McGraw-Hill CEO appeared on a CNBC financial network where he leaked information on the Apple Tablet OS. He stated the Apple Tablet OS is a modified iPhone OS. :

“You know, they will make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite awhile, and the tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system, and so it will be transferable”