Civ for Symbian
It had to happen: Civ for Symbian! Should we be very pleased or concerned for eyesight and sanity?
iPod inside your Symbian phone
Those Symbian fanboys (and we are newcomers to this not-so-small group) posted how to put an iPod inside your smartphone (almost).
Why not more websites made for mobile?
Very few major web sites have a mobile version suitable for PDAs or smartphones. Among them are:
- Instapundit
The technical knowledge is there, and designing according to webstandards, using CSS to separate presentation from content, allows for avariety of different presentations. And the mobile internet is growingvery quickly. We wonder, then, why it’s not more common, even necessary,to have mobile-optimized versions of sites.
Update: There’s now a WAP version of USA Today.
2006, we’re on top of it
Both Any Budd and Cameron Moll have made their web design predictions for 2006. Rather bland I must say, or perhaps that’s because there was nothing new and surprising to us. This new Deepend home site uses transparency, PNGs, rounded corners and is published for mobile.
Plus, we believe Mr Moll is wrong about the Fisher Price look being out: it’s barely begun to penetrate.
Wireless fabric keyboard
I’m in the market for a bluetooth QWERTY keyboard for my Nokia 6630. I’d settled on ThinkOutside’s Stowaway Universal Bluetooth Keyboard, which seems to be the overall favorite. Then I saw the VKB Embedded Virtual Keyboard (made in Israel, I’m proud to say, though their own website is as usual terrible). And now a third amazing option: Eleksen’s wireless fabric keyboard. For me the key is simply how well these actually work for fast typing. From what I read, the VKB only works very slowly for now—the wow factor is better than the actual usability. Now awaiting a product review for the Eleksen. Allaboutsymbian?
Update: positive review at the unwired, and here’s what I wanted to know: But it’s also definitely not as good as a real keyboard with plastic keys. The reason for this is that “touch typing” to a large extent involves the tactile feedback you get when pressing the keys – you don’t get really get this when you’re using the cloth keyboard. Yes, you do feel something when you press the keys, but it’s nowhere near comparable to the key travel you experience on a “normal” keyboard. I’d underestimated the importance of this until I tried typing on this keyboard, writes jenneth.info on an earlier version.
Gesture-based games using camera phones
A team at Georgia Tech has devised mobile phone games in which you play using movement gestures, not by pressing buttons. How is this possible? By using the camera on the back of the phone! By using computer vision techniques like motion blur detection and optical flow it is possible to detect up to 6 degrees of freedom, they write.
Hat tip: I found this via Pasta and Vinegar, the only blogger so far to write anything about the Serious Games Summit Europe 2005
Nokia 6630, VW Beetle of smartphones?
With its rounded bottom, a design previously ridiculed in earlier more bulky incarnations, the Nokia 6630 will, I predict, become a design classic emblematic of these mid-noughties. OK I’m biased ‘cos I have one but the phone is being featured all over the web as the representative smartphone. As I come across such images I’ll add them to the following list:
Opera 8.5 for S60 should zoom out too
Opera’s new version 8.5 of its browser for Symbian 60 has some nice new features but it lacks what I wanted most: to be able to zoom not in but out. I want to be able to see a page in its entirety, then zoom back in once a part of it has caught my eye. “Nokia N90 users will in addition have the ability zoom down to 20% to take advantage of the higher screen resolution,” Opera reports, but I want it on my 6630 too, and I don’t care if the resolution’s low as I’ll only be reading headers anyway while zoomed out.
