Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

In the past month or so there are a few mobile news interested me but I did not get the chance to write about it. So I just listed them here just in case one day I want to find the links.

1. Nokia’s free remote device access service

Nokia offered a free remote device access service. For now it focuses on S60 3rd Edition devices. Matt Croydon has a nice review with screenshots.

2. Nokia’s S60 Widget

Powered by Web Run-Time, you can write widgets for S60 devices using standards-based Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, AJAX (JavaScript). Here is an audiocast on this topic.

Microsoft is working on similar stuff - Windows Gadgets on Windows Mobile handsets.

3. Microsoft Deepfish

Microsoft Deepfish offers you full desktop browser experience on your Windows Mobile phone. I did not get the chance to download it and try it myself. MobilityToday has a video review.

Is iPhone the first one offers this kind of full mobile browser experience? No. It is the S60 Browser. The best feature of S60 Browser is not only full web experience, but also a paragraph of text will always perfectly fit in full screen width when you zoom in to it. So you do not have to pan it left and right to read it. From the MobilityToday video, it seems that it is not the case for Deepfish. But I did use it myself so I am not 100% sure.

The Adobe PDF Reader is painful to use on my E61 because it is almost impossible to fit a block of text to the screen width. This tiny little thing ruins the entire user experience.

4. Palm goes Linux

No. It is not the PalmSource - ACCESS Linux Platform. It is the Palm hardware company, which was saved by Treo handsets from HandSpring. The Palm - HandSpring - PalmOne - PalmSource - Palm story is much simpler than AT&T - … - AT&T Wireless - Cingular - at&t one.

Anyway, Palm officially announced that it will deliver a new mobile Linux platform combined with Palm OS Garnet technology on new products later this year.

Nokia just launched Nokia Forum Wiki.

Via AllAboutSymbian, we also have Sony Ericsson Developer Wiki and the Symbian Developer Wiki.

I did a 20-minutes google search and found out there are more out there:

Adobe Labs Flash Lite Wiki
Channel9 Windows Mobile Developers Wiki
HowardForums Wiki

And more from device manufacturers:
xda-developers wiki: HTC devices
Motorola Q Wiki

Wow. I am totally amazed by my findings

I thought today I can download the smart2go client and give it a try. Apparently that site is overloaded and gives a MaxTransientObjectsExceeded error.

But I happened to find some smart2go slides on Flickr. Here are two of them:

Yet another free map/navigation application for mobile phones. It is from Nokia, but it supports both Symbian and Windows Mobile devices.

The platform allows for mapping and routing in over 150 countries and has support for full turn-by-turn satellite navigation in over 30 countries. The application allows people to view where they are on a map, search for points-of-interests (POI) around them and create routes to get them there free of charge. Nokia plans to start offering the smart2go application for free, on Saturday, February 10th, for selected Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile 5.0 devices initially and has plans to roll out support for most of the major mobile OS platforms including Nokia S60, Series 40, PocketPC, Linux and other Windows Mobile devices.

Nokia Smart2go Mapping and Navigation Free

In today’s Nokia Forum news letter, Nokia introduced a new language option for S60: Open C:

Last week Nokia announced the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 that includes Open C, a collection of POSIX and C libraries that will make it easier for developers from various disciplines to create mobile applications and services. This SDK is based on S60 Developer Platform 3rd Edition and Symbian OS 9.1 and includes documentation, API references, an emulator, and a collection of POSIX and C Libraries for mobile application development.

It is definitely good news for mobile developers. Although it is the most popular smart phone OS, Symbian is “infamous” for its “crippled C++ support”. Symbian’s C++ is so different from standard C++ that it is very painful for a beginner to do even basic stuff like string handling.

The good news is that you have more options. All Symbian phones have Java support and can be considered high-end Java devices. More languages are supported either from open source projects or commercial products: Python, Ruby, ActionScript (Flash Lite), Visual Basic (AppForge) and more. In 2004 I wrote a post about porting .NET Compact Framework to Symbian, Palm OS and Mobile Linux. Today it has became a reality on Symbian platform.

Mobile world is very exciting, huh?