Symbian in Motion

I tried to convince him to just give it to me but he went a different route. ;)

My loss is your gain! So how do you enter for a chance to win the US version of Nokia’s FP2 gem?

1. Hit this link
2. Fill out a 2-minute survey
3. Post a comment on BGR
4. Win! (hopefully)

Best of luck SiMo readers, make me proud. And hey, if the winner lives outside of the US we can even talk about swapping it for my Euro model. ;)

It’s no mystery that SkyeQuiKey is one of my favorite S60 apps - I’ve mentioned it plenty of times here on SiMo. Long story short, it’s a contact / application / game / bookmark / new message launcher that allows you to type directly from your Active Standby screen to pull up and launch your desired item. Thanks to a post from Stefan on Jaiku I’ve learned of a new SQK competitor that is currently available as a free beta. The following are my thoughts on T9nav as found in Stefan’s thread.

It’s a nice attempt at a competitor IMO but it has some big flaws… Here’s how they match up in my eyes:

T9nav Wins…

1. Less RAM consumption: ~265KB (T9nav) vs. ~965KB (SQK) [of course in modern S60 phones the impact is minuscule]
2. Ability to save a number to contacts: This is important and it’s basic functionality that SQK should have had from day 1.

T9nav Loses…

1. No history: SkyeQuiKey maintains a history. For example, because I visit my ESPN bookmark often, when I press 3 for “E” SQK places ESPN at the top of the list.
2. Slooooow to launch: Indexing media files was a horrible idea. Who launches a track but clicking on it in a menu? The first time I launch T9nav it takes over 2 minutes before my search results are shown. Fail. They should add settings to choose which categories should be indexed.
3. Slooooow to use: While keying in digits and navigating around, there are a lot of pauses and jumps.
4. Tabs: In one respect, separating categories into tabs is nice because the app indexes so many things. On the other hand, it eliminates the possibility of dpad shortcuts. I prefer shortcuts - ie: with SQK I can press left with a contact highlighted to open a new SMS to the contact or right to open a new email.

In my eyes, SQK wins by a long shot. It’s infinitely faster and much smarter. T9nav is five times better than digging through menus and apps, but SQK is 10 times better. The app is still in beta though so it is likely being actively developed. Looking forward to future versions…

To check out T9nav for yourself click here

Guess what? It works! :)

N78 updated, all data retained. Beyond the reported changes, the only other thing I’ve noticed is that the display can’t get quite as bright anymore. No worries though, well worth it just to confirm that it works with no loss of personal data. Sweet!

The recently announced and now available N78 has got it’s first OTA update (11.043), which includes many fixes to Bluetooth stability, music playback, optimized camera performance and navi-scroll sensitivity.

Finally it seems progress is being made with the S60 firmware upgrade and Nokia’s upgrade systems. S60 devices have had the ability to get OTA (over the air) updates for a while now, but so far we have yet to see any for the N95, N82, N81 etc…

To get the update you need to click Menu > Tools > Utilities > Device Manager. Select Options > Check for updates and follow the on-screen prompts. Remember that you can also use Wi-Fi to download the update. This update will NOT be available via the NUS application.

With the recent announcement of Diablo for the N810 and N800 which will also support OTA updates and a more seamless firmware update procedure (something many bloggers have been ranting about for some time) much like Apple’s iPod and Mac updates (seamless) it seems Nokia is finally making progress! This is another step forward for Nokia in making their products much more user friendly and easy to use and understand. If we can get more updates and frequent updates which fix and improve small little bugs and add enhancements to our handsets I’m all for it! This is how it should be done.

Nokia Europe [via Slashphone] [arjw]

Last week Charlie Schick, a blogger I’ve followed for quite a while, wrote a post entitled Product leaks just lead to trouble & headaches for all on the Nokia Conversations blog. It’s a great post and well worth a read if you haven’t caught it already.

While this topic related to a large number of historical events, it was prompted specifically by the E71 video walkthrough posted on Boy Genius Report. For obvious reasons, I felt the need to respond to Charlie’s post with a post of my own. The result is a somewhat lengthy post entitled The Business of Leaks which can be read on The Outsidr.

It wasn’t linked in Charlie’s follow up post - and I didn’t think it would be as The Outsidr is relatively new and hardly has much exposure at this point. If I was Charlie I wouldn’t have linked it either. I do hope Charlie read it though; I know someone from Nokia Conversations read it because I saw it pop up in the blog’s del.icio.us widget. I would love to see some of the points raised by my post discussed on the Nokia Conversations blog, specifically some comments relating to the US market. What do you guys think?