I was working in the mobile phone industry just as smartphones were taking off. I saw the Palm Pilot rise and fall. I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then disappear. But the greatest tragedy of them all was Nokia and their Symbian Operating System. (Actually, Symbian's ownership and relationship with Nokia is complex. But let's gloss over that for now.) Symbian was, for its time, a brilliant OS. It ran 3D games smoothly, had terrific hardware support, a…
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More bad news for Android owners. A huge Russian malware operation is infecting Android apps in the the Google Play Store. The malware - hopefully now removed - hijacks your personal details, and sends premium rate text messages to drive profits for its owners. Nasty. This is the price we pay for Android's open access policy. iPhone users can smirk all they want - but I like being able to run anything I desire on my phone, rather than be restricted to the puritanical walled garden of…
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There's a delightful video doing the rounds of an Augmented Reality game for the iPhone. What better use of technology than to simulate the destruction of TIE Fighters? While undoubtedly cool, what amuses me about this game is why it has taken the gaming world so long to catch up with Symbian! Way back in 2003, I got my hands on the Siemens SX1. It was the first non-Nokia handset to be running Symbian. As well as "modern" features like GPS, web browsing, and apps - it also came with a…
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Samir has just released this little auto-rotate app for the N95. As you rotate your phone, the screen reorients itself. It's a brilliant idea and an excellent application... But it really calls into question Nokia's ability to react to the market.The N95 has always had an accelerometer (the device which tells it which way up it is) but it has only ever been used to stablise photos. What a waste!The N95 was released in March 2007 whereas the iPhone was released a few months later in June. …
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