We really liked Quartz by Elements Interactive when we reviewed it - we rated it "Highly Recommended."
While that's not available for free, Elements Interactive has just released a free holiday follow-up, Quartz X-mas, available here. This is becoming a bit of a tradition - last year they released a holiday themed Li-Nuggz. (Still available.)
If you don't want those (or have them already!) - Nokia also has released it's traditional Christmas game. Pity about the adverts.
Pretty good stuff. A mobile friendly version of the popular Google gmail service has launched, with the following features:
Check it out now at: http://m.gmail.com. The address works even on a normal computer, and if you have a g-mail account you can sign right in. (Look here if you haven't got one yet - 2674MB free!)
[via ]
We did expect the Nokia 6280 to arrive (it hasn't) - but we're extremely surprised that the L'Amour Collection (Nokia 7360, Nokia 7370, Nokia 7380) has come.
Quite nice, really. None of them is an Nokia N80, but they're still pretty nice phones.
The most attractive one (in our opinion), is the Nokia 7370, which has a svelte (88 x 43 x 23 mm, 73 cc 104g) figure, and a gorgeous (2" QVGA) screen. Pity about the other specifications (1.3MP camera, 10MB memory, with no memory card slot.) Maybe the floral etched trim and fabric faceplates will help?
Look out for them to appear before Christmas near you. (Only applicable for geographical locations where Nokia usually ships Europe/Asia phones; they are all GSM 900/1800/1900.)
And why are we so surprised? Well - Nokia delivered early. They were expected only in Q1 2006.
Everyone is really anxious about when the Nokia N80 is about to hit stores. Obviously, Nokia is being as tight lipped as usual, only committing to Q1 2006, (which is anytime from jan to march 2006) and as we all know their estimates sometimes go wrong.
However, JJSmith, commenting on the Nokia N80 page on GSMArena.com, has news - He picked up a brochure from the mobile retailer "The Phone House" in Portugal which stated that the N80 would be available in Feburary 2006.
He even has pictures.
DigiTimes reports that Microsoft wants to see Windows Mobile smart-phones on the market for under $300, to boost the company's share of the mobile-device operating system market. ODM handset makers are not optimistic about accomplishing this anytime soon.
The Register also suspects that this will be hard: "The difficulty is the inherent cost of feature-rich phones, and the need to get the sales volumes that will allow the economies of scale necessary to get the price down without sacrificing too many features. Nokia can do it, but it's questionable whether the much smaller Taiwanese firms, with far weaker brand recognition, can do so."
We're not quite sure why Microsoft really cares about the specific figures of their market share. Sure - Nokia has the lead - but the fact that Palm recently chose Windows Mobile rather than Symbian should have helped Microsoft focus a little - upon making Windows Mobile the only choice for all high-end smartphones; trying to increase volumes instead makes it seem as though they want more revenue from the product, (we wonder how much of that $300 dollars is taken up by the windows mobile operating system itself) or that they have self-esteem issues.
Maybe the revenue reason is the correct one, what with the losses from each Xbox 360 sold. They're probably regretting not selling the Xboxes on eBay - or maybe they are, which is why retail shops seem to be dry.
[via All About Symbian]
Sprint Nextel Corp. is expected to announce on Monday that it has begun selling a service which allows users of its mobile video phones to watch full-length movies, television shows, concerts and comedy specials.
Provided by vendor MSpot, the service offers unlimited shows and movies for a monthly flat fee of US $6.95, on top of regular service charges.
Given this price point - we wonder how much Vodafone is going to charge for a roughly equivalent service. US $6.95 is almost - tempting. Looks like the subscription model for Mobile TV is about to become mainstream.
[via ubergizmo]
So - del.icio.us has been bought by Yahoo, (yahoo blog / del.icio.us blog), and everyone has an opinion on tagging.
We'll just reference Stephen Green (who is nice and concise) - Let's say we have a system where people manually assign keywords to documents (tagging) and let's also say that people can run queries against this index of keywords. You can think of such a query as an attempt by the searcher to assign keywords to a document that he or she would like to get in response to the query. The problem is that the person who originally assigned a tag to the document and the searcher who "assigned a tag" to the document are going to be inconsistent, so the searcher won't pick quite the same tag.
This is true. However, it also misses the point. No one ever said that tagging was the answer for search engines (it's clearly not), or that it was superior to keyword searching within documents. However - pictures (what flickr uses tags for) are not documents, and neither are links (what del.icio.us uses tags for).
When considering links and pictures, tagging, and being able to search those tags, is alot more useful than having no tagging. Links and pictures include some metadata, but usually not nearly enough to find a particular one in a pile.
Even if people are internally inconsistent, having the ability to search for a particular photo by inputting something (dimly remembered text) is better than being forced to search by scrolling by date. That's why we think all photo albums should support tags.
Indeed, we think that in the future, certain tags should be added automatically. For pictures, having EXIF data include things like geographical location (by GPS or from cell networks) would be nice.
[Image Credit: Om Malik]
Isn't it nice to have friends who test prototype phones? The HP iPaq rw4500 prototype is pictured to the left - and while we know it's specifications: QVGA Display, 1.3MP camera, Windows Mobile 5.0, possibly WiFi - we don't know if it's going to see the light of day.
We do know that the Orange SPV C600 will be seeing lots of daylight though - and this review by coolsmartphone is one of the best yet.
It's a beast of a review, and worth a read. One thing which really struck me, though, are the UI "problems" this phone still seems to have - as compared to Symbian. We'll discuss this in a future article, probably. The phone looks awfully promising though, and unless you want 3G, (in which case the Nokia N80 is it!) this looks to be a pretty good smartphone to get - and it's tiny.
Pity about the conspicuous lack of WiFi, but that's just 'silly operator' mentality.
[via Slasphone]
