Ahem. Steve Litchfield here. Yes, me, of 3-Lib and The Phones Show and All About Symbian notoriety. Matt Radford has been called away and it seems I’m next in line of succession here at All About iPhone to assemble this week’s best writing in mobile. My pleasure.
I wanted to emphasise a few things about All About iPhone before we get started though. Firstly, it’s not an iPhone news site – the plethora of cut and paste news sites around the world is already apparent. Here at All About iPhone, Matt, James and I provide (hopefully) thought-provoking insights, reviews and critiques, all relevant to the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s all original content – think of it as your Friday morning coffee break read (there are usually 2 or 3 new articles each week). And please consider adding it to your RSS feeds or even linking in from your blog.
Winter is upon us
And winter’s here, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Not really carnival weather, but the Carnival of the Mobilists marches on all year round! And so to business. Carnival 152 comes to you on the eve of Nokia World 2008, so it’s appropriate that over on AAS, Rafe Blandford and I have been looking at two of Nokia’s latest creations. With the touch-screen 5800 XpressMusic, Rafe remains cautiously optimistic, while with the candy bar N79, I’m disappointed that in some ways it’s less capable than some of its predecessors. And, with a slight element of humour, I’ve been playing with a touchscreen handheld with lighting fast OS, superlative qwerty keyboard and full office suite in its ROM. And you can pick one up for only a few tens of Euros or dollars…
Rick Joubert asks in a very interesting piece why the South African online publishing industry has not made any significant inroads into the mobile web? It’s not just South Africa, too, I suspect. Maybe the likes of the BBC and CNN have everything sewn up?
James Cooper presents a definitive collection of all the blog coverage about the recent Future of Mobile Conference in London – a great way of getting a taste of the conference if you didn’t attend in person – like him! I have to say, I heard lots of good things about this event, too…
Although the Skyfire browser is in production for several mobile platforms, Dennis Bournique has done a particularly great job of writing a full critical review of Skyfire for S60. It seems that, despite still being in beta, it’s the best for viewing web video, but that there are still some day to day usability problems that need addressing.
Carnival newcomer Chris Walters weighs in with his thoughts on the new Android-powered T-Mobile G1 and why, after buying it, he was back to his previous phone (a Nokia N82) within two weeks. Early days, I suspect for Android and the hardware it powers?
But, this being All About iPhone, you won’t be surprised to see that a number of iPhone-related posts were sent in. In my article of the week, David Chambers reckons that iPhones (and other smartphones, of course) have a lot to answer for, complaining that it’s not just the additional data bandwidth they’re taking up, but all that extra “pinging” from various applications checking their status, which takes up a lot of capacity. He proposes Femtocells as one possible solution.
Jose Colucci also has the iPhone in mind, looking at its progress in the world of enterprise, i.e. big companies. It seems that its time has not yet come (more remote controls are needed, for one thing) but that its knock-on effects are making a difference, even in companies that haven’t embraced it yet.
I wouldn’t normally included a humble game review in a Carnival, but our very own James Burland has been blown away by Fastlane Street Racing on the iPhone and so was I. More than simply a great game, this level of fluidity is easily up at dedicated console levels, confirming the iPhone’s status as a superlative games handheld. It’s not often that a piece of hardware from one ‘genre’ encroaches on another so fully. Food for thought.
On the subject of games, and hiding behind her traditional cloak of anonymity, ‘Tzer2‘ has been criticising the way Nokia’s N-Gage Arena handles high scores around the world. What incentive is there to play on if you’re currently only 3,546th in the world and as likely to make the top 10 for a game as be hit by a meteorite on your way to work?
Perhaps a shorter carnival than usual, reflecting the shorter days in the UK and USA now that December’s upon us and that Christmas is nearly here – so much to do! I hope you enjoyed it though, see you next time!
Steve Litchfield, on behalf of Matt, James and the team at All About iPhone.