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?”

What gives Sony Ericsson?

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.

[Photo below via All About Symbian]
[Press Release]

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…

[Via: Nokia Beta Labs]

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:

[Via: All About Symbian]

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.

There’s a special edition of the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N97 mini, which looks even more like the Samsung Giorgio Armani Windows Mobile 6.5 phone. It’s the RAOUL-branded device and it’s available in just 1000 units in Singapore. The price is S$1138 (about $815) and that money buys you the brown-ish N97 mini emblazoned with RAOUL’s signature stripes on an additional backcover and accessorised with a calf-skin leather pouch and matching leather dangler. Plus, the phone ships with the Fashion Asia widget pre-installed, and it also comes encased in leather-wrapped RAOUL box. In addition, if you order by October 29th, you’ll also get a S$50 Nokia and S$50 RAOUL vouchers… Additional details are available from Nokia Singapore’s website from where you can also push the button, if you desire so.

[Via: Engadget Mobile]

Following on recently available pre-orders, the fabled Sony Ericsson Idou has just landed on British shores as the Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) Satio! The touchscreen Sony Ericsson Satio is the Swedish-Japanese phone maker’s first Symbian S60 5th Edition smartphone and it oozes high-end sex appeal. We had a chance to put hands-on the Satio back when it was known as the Sony Ericsson Idou, and it’s one helluva device – especially since it runs the so-old-it-hurts Sybmain platform.

Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) UK is the only carrier to offer the Sony Ericsson Satio at the moment, but Orange has the Satio tagged as “coming soon.” Underneath that high-resolution 3.5-inch touchscreen lies all the high-end smartphone bits that we’d expect to see from a 12.1-megapixel cameraphone monster – DNLA-compatible WiFi, GPS, and 3G data. The glossy-black finish highlights the 12.1-megapixel camera (with Xenon flash) while the 3.5-inch touchscreen plays video with aplomb. Did we mention it sports a 12.1-megapixel camera? Yeah, it’s awesome.

Vodafone is offering the Satio for free when purchased with qualifying 2-year contract. Have at it!

If you’re not lucky enough to live on the British side of the pond, keep yourself busy with our Satio hands-on gallery.

[Via: TechRadar]

Adobe has been working to bring full Flash support to smartphones since last year, and it looks like things are finally coming to a head. Adobe has announced that its Adobe Flash 10.1 platform will soon be ready to stream video and interactive online content to a smartphone near you! Unless, that is, the smartphone sitting next to you happens to be an iPhone. In that case, move along, Adobe has yet to announce any Flash support on the iPhone. If you’re using a Windows Mobile, BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM), Symbian, webOS or Android smartphone, then you’ll be happy to hear that Adobe will soon release their Adobe Flash 10.1 browser-based runtime. Windows Mobile and webOS users have it best – they’ll probably get a public beta of Flash 10.1 before year’s end!

The Flash 10.1 runtime is the first real fruit borne of Adobe’s Open Screen Project, an initiative to optimized Flash technology for the small screen. To make Flash 10.1 smartphone-friendly, Adobe boffins have been hard at working streamlining the software. Adobe also taps into a smartphone’s GPU (graphics processing unit) to help lighten the processing load on a the CPU, which allows it to run faster and draw less power. How much does all that optimization help? Adobe says software rendering on Flash 10.1 is 87% faster, with mobile phone memory consumption reduced by 55%. That’s impressive.

To prove that Flash 10.1 is intended for smartphones, Adobe baked in support for multi-touch inputs, gesture controls, accelerometer inputs. There’s also support for the HTTP streaming protocol that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has been championing as their video-streaming technology of choice.

And, speaking of Apple, the iPhone is still conspicuously missing from the Flash party. Apple says that Flash is still too resource intensive for their iPhone. Apple has clearly gone to great lengths to keep the iPhone OS and iPhone apps as lag free as possible, and Flash technology might screw that all up. But, there may be more to the story than meets the eye – Apple may be trying to block Flash-based apps from bypassing the AppStore. Flash apps don’t need to be installed on the iPhone, so Apple doesn’t control (gasp!) that aspect of the iPhone experience. We’re sure Steve Jobs has a problem with that.

Adobe will follow the late-2009 launch of the Flash 10.1 public beta with another public beta release for Android and Symbian platforms in early 2010. We should start to see handsets packing Flash 10.1 in the first half of 2010.

[Via: Adobe]

The first capacitive touchscreen-equipped Nokia (NYSE: NOK) smartphone, X6, is at the FCC. As you can see from the image above, Nokia’s or FCC’s engineers prepared the device for thorough testing. I’m not sure I know which part does what, but I do know that 3.2-inch screen won’t work with a stylus. Then there’s 32GB of flash memory, solid camera and so on. We’ve no doubts the Finnish giant will push this baby toward the U.S. market to hopefully get some people in love with S60. We’ll see how that works…

[Via: Engadget Mobile]

HeroCraft has a new game for Symbian S60 5th Edition device owners. It’s called “Stolen In 60 Seconds” and according to HeroCraft’s words, it combines genres of strategy and puzzle, revealing “all dark corners of the criminal world.” In other words, you’ll lead a thief whose goal is, well, to steal things from other people.

Key game features include:

• A combination of the stepwise planning of a burglary and the real-time action
• A dozen thieves tools
• The increasing complication of quests
• About two dozen original operations

Sounds exciting? You can get more details about the game from HeroCraft’s website. While there you can also check out their other games, most of which now work on touch-enabled S60 smartphones.