Do you develop mobile apps for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian or webOS? Well, we want to hear from you! We’ve partnered up with “Under The Radar” to find cool mobile apps that will blow our minds. We’re asking any and all mobile app developers to submit their app for the “FAST PITCH” mobile app talent search, where your app will vie for a chance to be showcased in front of an audience of global dealmakers and start-ups. Even if we don’t pick your app for the talent search, you’ll get some serious recognition for your app (and possibly prizes, like handsets).
Interested? Here’s what you need to know:
You must be able to attend Under the Radar (in Mountain View on Nov 19)
If you’re selected as a finalist, you’ll get a free conference pass
Your app has to be live and available for download
We welcome any and all apps for iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian, etc
Your app must be unique and new – no tip calculators or sudoku apps, please
You must be able to pitch your app in 2 min (and 4 slides) on stage
We’re going to make it simple for you to submit your app for consideration in the “Under The Radar” FAST PITCH mobile app talent search. Interested mobile devs need only leave a comment or tweet @IntoMobile with a quick one-liner pitch for your mobile app – Twitter is limited to 140 characters, so choose accordingly. Please make sure to include a link to your app’s download page (or homepage) and your Twitter handle with your submission.
Your app will be judged for its “uniqueness” and the all important “awesomeness” metric. We’ll be accepting mobile app submissions through Friday, Nov. 6 Monday, Nov. 9 (deadline extended). The 6 lucky finalists will be contacted directly through email and/or Twitter.
Waking up and receiving good news doesn’t happen often enough, so when I opened my crusty teared eyes at 10 in the morning (Helsinki time) and got this press release in the mail, I hit the roof. Opera, the Norwegian company we all love, makers of the Opera desktop browser, Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile, and Opera Mini, one of my favorite mobile applications of all time, has released Opera Mobile 10 Beta for Symbian.
At this point you’re expect a full on review/preview of the application, but I would be wasting my breathe trying to say something genuinely new. It’s literally Opera Mini 5 Beta, but written in Symbian code rather than J2ME code. It’s noticeably more responsive than Opera Mini 5 Beta, the copy and paste actually works now, best of all it is possible to copy and paste text from the browser to another application. Opera Turbo support is included, but disabled by default. Turbo is the same technology that powers Opera Mini. You type in a URL, Opera intercepts that request, feeds it to a server sitting somewhere next to a moose in Northern Europe, renders the page, compresses it, and then spits it back to your mobile phone. I’d be lying if I said a website rendered with Opera Mobile 10 Beta consumed the same information as the same website rendered in Opera Mini 5 Beta; the J2ME client wins hands down at using the least amount of data necessary to display a website.
Things of note: this works on both touch (S60 5th Edition) and non touch (S60 Everything Else Edition) devices, and with the ability of Opera Link you’ll be able to sync bookmarks and passwords between the desktop version of Opera and the mobile version.
Check out the demo video below:
Oh and if you want to download it yourself, just type m.opera.com/mobile into your mobile browser.
Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has just released Google Mobile App 2.03 for Symbian devices and it now includes voice search! The iPhone, Android and BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) have had this for a while if I’m not mistaken, so this feature is welcome for us Nokia (NYSE: NOK) users. Just launch the application, hold the green call key, and say your query. I tested it by saying “five hundred thousand Vietnamese dong in euros” and it worked beautifully, but then again I’m sitting alone in my dead silent flat. Does this work for you outdoors?
To download the app just go to m.google.com in your mobile browser.
Update: An official blog post from Google detailing the new application, along with a video that has been produced for UK audiences, has been published.
Two major companies are joining the Nokia (NYSE: NOK)-led Symbian Foundation. They are Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) and Fujitsu (OTCPK: FJTSY), both of which will get a seat at Foundation’s board of directors.
Qualcomm joined through its subsidiary Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), which will “optimize open source software for use with Qualcomm technology.” Does this means the company is looking to somehow link BREW and Symbian. Hmmm, interesting point. We’ll see…
Fujitsu, which is an old guard Symbian heavyweight with more than 40 million Symbian phones sold in Japan, will also try to find its interest by working with other members of the organization. As far as I can tell, they’ve managed to profit from the “old Symbian” and now that the platform is free, they should be able to repeat the success while saving few bucks on licensing along the way.
And that’s all we got for you in this story. You can check out the two official pressreleases if you care for corporate quotes.
As expected, the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Surge 6790 has arrived on Rogers (NYSE: RCI) for the rabid texters out there. An unexpected bonus is a cheaper price point than the originally anticipated: a mere $29.99 on three-year contract. This is one of the cheapest new smartphones you’ll find out there, though the form factor might seem awkward to a lot of folks. Still, it’s packing a 2 megapixel camera, GPS, microSD memory card slot, and a 2.4″ QVGA display. It’s not in Rogers’ online store just yet, but it should be up soon.
Steve O’Hear is in London this week for the 2009 Symbian Exchange and Exposition and had a brief sit down with Anders Westin, Head of Software Relations, Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE). Several questions were asked, mainly concerning Sony Ericsson’s current portfolio which spans every single smartphone operating system under the sun, including, hopefully, Android 2.0 on the XPERIA X3, but the kicker was Steve asking Anders why the Sony Ericsson Satio had such a piss poor battery. The Satio, for those unfamiliar with the device, has a 3.5 inch touch screen, runs Symbian S60 5th Edition and has a 12 megapixel camera. It eats batteries for breakfast. Sony Ericsson has been shipping the Satio with a 1000 mAh battery, and when Steve brought this up to up with Anders, he seemed a bit shocked. “Don’t you mean 1350mAh?” he said, lifting the battery cover off his device to reveal a 35% larger 1350 mAh battery, to which Steve, and many customers around the world, replied “ummm no. what the fuck?”
China has their own 3G standard. First thing you may be asking yourself is why? China has always done their own thing, and by developing an alternative to WCDMA they save themselves the burden of having to pay for WCDMA royalties. Every decision in today’s mobile world, and I mean every single bloody decision from the materials used to make the body of a device, to whether the instruction manual inside the package comes printed in color or black and white, comes down to money. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) feels that with China’s population of 1.3 billion people, playing their game and making devices that work on their network would be beneficial to their bottom line.
Politics out of the way, does anything make the 6788 special? Well it has two 8s in the product name, which is a big thing in China. Some Chinese, a fair bit actually, are still superstitious and believe that the number 8 will bring them good luck. When picking a mobile phone number, they want to make sure it has as many 8s as possible, and they’ll even pay to have a phone number with a lot of 8s. Specification wise you have a massive 2.8 inch screen that is sadly QVGA (320 x 240) resolution, a 5 megapixel camera, and it’s powered by S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. The 6788 will star shipping in December on China Mobile (NYSE: CHL), price unknown. Looks like Colin Giles, Nokia Senior Vice President for Greater China, Japan and Korea, kept his promise.
Remember Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Here and Now project we covered some time ago? It has been updated recently to include movies and restaurants to the mix. This means that now (and here ) you will also be able to check out movie listings in theaters around, as well as good places to eat — all from a comfort of your Nokia (or other manufacturer’s) Symbian S60 smartphone.
In addition to the feature upgrade, the latest version of Here and Now also fixes some of the known bugs reported by the users. The download link remains the same…
SEE 2009 is coming up, Symbian’s yearly exposition. I went to the previous two, but I’m not going to attend the one this year. It’s more of a business to business event, and while it would be awesome to see my UK friends, I’m in bootstrapping mode for a project you’ll hear about in Q1 2010. That aside, the CEO of Symbian, Lee Williams, drops some quotes in his interview with Om Malik that make the edges of my lips curl slightly upwards to form a grin. You just have to hear the stuff that comes out of his mouth when he talks about Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Android:
A couple of University of Waterloo students have put together a company called Allerta which will be making a cool little smartphone accessory that will keep you apprised of e-mail, SMS, and call alerts via Bluetooth while masquerading as a normal watch. I was a little dubious about these concept renderings of the product (they look like something even I could cook up in Pov-Ray), but after seeing this picture from a year ago posted in the comments, outlining some of the features and use cases, inPulse started to look a lot more real. Considering the university is right next door to RIM, it’s no surprise that the inPulse will work with BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM), but hopefully it will work other smartphones as advertised back in 2008; Android and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) (Symbian) phones were explicitly mentioned. After a quick call, I was told more information would be made available this week, so stay tuned.
P.S.: Shoutout to Ronen for spotting the Flickr link.
Do you develop mobile apps for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian or webOS? Well, we want to hear from you! We’ve partnered up with “Under The Radar” to find cool mobile apps that will blow our minds. We’re asking any and all mobile app developers to submit their app for the “FAST PITCH” mobile app talent search, where your app will vie for a chance to be showcased in front of an audience of global dealmakers and start-ups. Even if we don’t pick your app for the talent search, you’ll get some serious recognition for your app (and possibly prizes, like handsets).
As 
) you will also be able to check out movie listings in theaters around, as well as good places to eat — all from a comfort of your Nokia (or other manufacturer’s) Symbian S60 smartphone.
