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Week of November 25, 2001

Fujitsu Limited selects Symbian OS for 3G phones

Fujitsu and Symbian have announced that Fujitsu has signed an agreement to liscense the Symbian OS foe development of future 3G phones. Fujitsu adds another liscensee to Symbian's list and a big one at that. Symbian looks set to dominate the Asian mobile telco business.

Press Release:
Tokyo, Japan - November 28, 2001 - Symbian Co., Ltd. (President, Hiromi Nishi) today announced that Fujitsu Limited has signed a licensing agreement to develop its future 3G mobile phones based on Symbian OS.

“Symbian OS has already been licensed to mobile phone manufacturers representing over 70% of the mobile phone market. We are pleased to welcome Fujitsu Limited to the growing Symbian community, which is helping to establish Symbian OS as the standard operating system for advanced mobile phones,” said Hiromi Nishi, President of Symbian, Japan.

Symbian OS is an advanced, open operating system that allows manufacturers to market data-enabled mobile phones that can run compelling third party applications, content and services. Fujitsu Limited joins Japanese mobile phone manufacturers Kenwood, Panasonic, Sanyo and Sony who have licensed Symbian OS. Other licensees of Symbian OS include Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Psion and Siemens.

“Symbian’s technology will enable us to deliver a range of feature-rich mobile phones for next generation networks,” said Kazuyuki Tomita, general manager, 3G Mobile Phones Division, Fujitsu Limited. “The open Symbian OS enables us to deliver advanced devices that can take advantage of a wide range of third party multimedia and entertainment services for consumers.”

About Symbian
Symbian supplies an operating system to the world’s leading mobile phone manufacturers enabling them to create mobile phones which combine voice communications, wireless Internet access and computing functionality. Ericsson, Nokia and Psion are already shipping Symbian OS based devices. Other companies developing next generation mobile devices on the Symbian OS include Kenwood, Motorola, Panasonic, Sanyo, Siemens and Sony. Symbian's website can be found at www.symbian.com/

About Fujitsu Limited
Fujitsu limited is a leading provider of Internet-focused information technology solutions for the global marketplace. Its pace-setting technologies, best-in-class computing and telecommunications platforms, and worldwide corps of systems and services experts make it uniquely positioned to unleash the infinite possibilities of the Internet to help its customers succeed. Headquartered in Tokyo, Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 5.48 trillion yen for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2001. Internet: www.fujitsu.com/

Posted by Rafe on 01/12/2001 |

Matsushita to trial Nokia's Series 60 platform

Matsushita is to trial Nokia's Seroes 60 platform as used my the recently announced Nokia 7650. It looks like we may see more Symbian smartphones in the very near future and Nokia look set to announce other interested parties soon.

Press Release:
November 27, 2001 - Matsushita, the leading Japanese mobile handset manufacturer, and Nokia today announced an agreement under which Matsushita will start evaluating and testing Nokia's Series 60 platform. The recently introduced Series 60 platform is a terminal-software platform for smart phones that Nokia licenses to other mobile-handset manufacturers as a source-code product. Manufacturers will be able to integrate the Series 60 platform into their own phone designs running on top of Symbian OS.

"Matsushita's position is to research, develop and adopt best-suited platforms and solutions in order to provide our customers with mobile handsets that will support key open standards and services, such as multimedia messaging, in a ubiquitous broad-band network. We are playing an important role in launching new 3G operation services in Japan, thus constantly looking for best options that will ensure openness and the highest quality, simultaneously guiding us to the fastest route to truly global mobile services. We are excited to work with Nokia in spirit of openness and non-fragmentation effort, said Mr. Ken Suda, Director, Member of the Board, Overseas Operations, Matsushita Communication Ind.

"Matsushita and Nokia share the same goal of creating a large, unified mobile application market where consumers will have the freedom to choose their mobile devices according to personal preferences and yet be sure of accessing new exciting services without being limited by fragmented technologies. Our cooperation with Matsushita reflects industry-wide commitment to open mobile architecture, and therefore we are extremely pleased to work closely with our Japanese counterpart," said Pertti Korhonen, Senior Vice President, Mobile Software, Nokia

The Series 60 Platform is designed for phone categories providing users with easy-to-use, one-hand operated handsets characterized by rich communications and enhanced applications. The licensees will be able to integrate the software platform into their own application-driven phone designs and thus speed up the rollout of new phone models at lower costs. Nokia will license the Series 60 platform as a source-code product, which means that licensees will be able to differentiate their products from others and thus ensure their competitive edge in the mobile phone marketplace.

The Series 60 Platform will consist of key telephony and personal information management applications, browser and messaging clients, a complete and modifiable user interface - all designed to run on top of Symbian OS, an operating system for advanced, data enabled mobile phones.

Posted by Rafe on 01/12/2001 |

Updated Version of MP3Go Available

m-internet.com have updated their award winning MP3 Player for the Nokia 9200 Series. Version 1.01 of MP3Go has support for a skin free mode which reduces memory requirements to about 700kb. The sound quality has also been increased and a few bugs fixed.

In the new skinless mode all the functions of the player are still supported (like Pause & Resume voice
call) and the interface is still easy to use.

MP3Go can be bought via Handango by following the link below:
http://www.handango.com/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=1&productId=22079

All users of the version 1.0 will get a free upgrade to version 1.01.

We'll have a feature of MP3Go shortly. Keep checking back!

Posted by Rafe on 01/12/2001 |

Remapper and Dictionary for 9210 Coming Soon

Remapper and Dictionary are soon to be made available to 9210 users. The products are from the Hungarian Software Company M.I.T. Systems. Remapper is a keyboard layout editor. While dictionary is a base for several programs including Hugarian to English, French and Itian dictionaries.

From website @ http://www.mitsystems.hu/programok/application.html
With Remapper you can define arbitrary combinations of emulated key presses or even longer texts for any key and you can save your custom keyboard layouts in one or more files. Thus you can, for example, create separate custom layouts for the accented or special national letters of your language and for mathematical symbols or for the abbreviations you use regularly.

Remapper is a file-based application which uses keyboard layouts exactly the same way as other applications use their documents. The installation set also includes two sample layout files, Layout_1 and Layout_2, to help immediate use of the application.
Both sample layout files include all the Hungarian accented letters, such as "�" or "U", in different arrangement. Using Remapper you can access these letters easily by pressing a single key combination when you work on your documents.

Dictionary for ER6 follows the successful EPOC version as well. It is now available with English, German and Italian data. The databases have been updated and extended, so the English-Hungarian dictionary includes some 100.000 entries while the German - Hungarian and Italian - Hungarian wordlists consist of 90.000 entries each. The English-German, and the dictionary generator will be available soon.

The user interface follows the same structure and ease of use that characterised the previous versions. An important new feature is the search list view that makes text entry faster and helps to avoid typing mistakes.

Posted by Rafe on 28/11/2001 |

Castle III Beta from Neuon for 9210

Darren Prescott through Neuon has made available a beta of his well known EPOC game Castle III for the Nokia 9210. He is looking for feedback about the game running on the 9210. The program is an adventure game.

See more at Neuon @ http://www.neuon.com/apps/castleiii/

From the website:

Castle III is the third in the Castle series of role playing games, and the first to run under EPOC.

In Castle III, you play the part of a hero out to defeat the evil Storm Queen, who has taken all the maidens from your village. To do this, you'll have to face many different monsters, while visiting shops to buy new weapons and spells to help you.

Castle III is the biggest Castle game yet - it features more puzzles, more items, more monsters and better graphics than ever before!

Only the first episode (containing 5 levels) is available to unregistered users.

Posted by Rafe on 28/11/2001 |

Updates to Smallbase, RingMaster and DataSafe for 9210

Smallbase, the database application for the 9210, and Datasafe, used for storing sensitive data securely, have both recieved updates. Smallbase is upto version 2.0 and has many bug fixes as well as more field types and customisation as well as ability to encypt data. DataSafe has been updated to 1.21 and contains a big fix.

Smallbase, the database application for the 9210, and Datasafe, used for storing sensitive data securely, have both recieved updates.

Smallbase is upto version 2.0 and has many bug fixes as well as more field types and customisation as well as ability to encypt data.

Full list of updates:

ENCRYPTION of datas with password protection supported. the Encryption machine has been provided by Peter Csutora (Encrypt-it).
New Field types 'File List' and 'Folder List' which allow user to open an associate file or browse into preferred folders
Hotkey added
Filters and Colors may be applied on relative dates from today
Link management bug fixes
Import and Export bug fixes
Import and Export long memo fieds
Choose Font for card view
Small snipsets and bug fixes

The new version can be downloaded from the Corisoft website at http://corisfot.free.fr

Ringmaster now supports zooming in/out on the sample view and some minor bugs have been fixed. You can download a demo copy from the zenobyte website @ http://www.zenobyte.com. Exisitng users should click on the Update Now Link on the RingMaster page.

DataSafe has been updated to 1.21 and contains a big fix. The new version can be downloaded from http://www.jwalter.info/

Posted by Rafe on 28/11/2001 |

Incode Release Time Tracking Tool Demo for 9210

Incode have released a demo of their Time Tracking Tool for the 9210. The program won the Nokia 9210 Communicator business application award. The program is a time management tool that is project based. The program uses projects for certain customers containing phases and tasks to do this.

A free trial of the application can be downloaded from the Incode website at http://www.incode.fi. A powerpoint presentation is also available that explains how to use the program.

Text from powerpoint file:

Incode TTT meets the needs of people who need to monitor their time usage. (e.g. working in several projects)
With TTT you can handle several customers, projects, phases and tasks by using two simple views.
The essential time data is collected into working sessions, which include date, start time, end time and description of the work.
Reporting by Customer or Project
Reports can be exported to any common office applications.

The SIS file can be downloaded directly to the Nokia 9210 and installed there or can be copied from a PC using PC Suite.

Posted by Rafe on 28/11/2001 |

A Light Has Gone Out (News Comment / Joke)

[Editor's Note: This isn't strictly news or even necessary, but I couldn't resist]

A great bastion of light has fallen to the evil of the Dark Side. Even the places we once thought were untouchable have been touched. There has been a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Epoc World; people have been reported tearing out their own hair and rending their clothes in two.

The Epoc world is in mourning after the announcement that even the great RMR Software had sucumbed to the lure of the Dark Side. RMR announced yesterday that they were releasing programs for the Palm OS. Although the brightest jewell in the RMR Crown, RMRBank has not yet been sullied, experts believe it is only a 'matter of time' before it too is seen running on the Palm OS.

Experts on the light side had previosuly commented that RMR looked strong after they unveiled that they were porting their key products to the 9210. Indeed RMRBank, RMRNotes and others have already appeared and it is speculated more may be on the way. Analysts have commented however that the uncertain future of the light weapon OPL has undermined efforts to prevent the Dark Side getting their greasy, dirty fingers in well loved EPOC products. A.N User commented "I hope this makes General Symbian realise that OPL has to be ported to new 9210 Tank if we are to have any chance." However General Symbian's aides have pointed out in the past that the OPL weapon has been replaced by the more robust and powerful C++ and Java based weapons. The status of OPL remains unclear but with increasing addons for the weapon becoming available (including RMR's offerings) we are hoping that it will be making an appearance.

Well Mad wrote to us saying, "how comes they get sync conduits with Windows?". One analyst muttered darkly about it not being possible thanks to Epoc Connect's brilliance. Another user commented, "would you want to sync with something from the very dark side?"

P.Hew said that "I'm just glad they haven't fallen to the very dark side, the ones whose name we must not speak, especially thier arch leader he who must not be named..." However C.Inic said it was only a matter of time. RMR have started down the slippery slope - it can only end in the bed of he who must not be named".

We can only conclude by saying that we honour the bastion of light that RMR was, let its fall to the dark side be a lesson for us all, with every piece of resistance against the dark side we honor its memory...

and now for a slightly more serious approach...

RMR announced this weekend that they were releasing some of their programs for the PalmOS, the program involved are RMRHome, RMRFuel and RMRDiet. There are also some rebranded Beelogic games available.

While this does make me go and hence the reason I wrote this peiece I wish RMR best of luck with their new market. We should also note that they promise to continue to support the EPOC platfrom through Psion and Nokia machines. How true this becomes if Palm sales really take off remains to be seen, but they have a unparalleled repuation after almost 8 years on the EPOC/ Psion scene so I think we can trust them (having said that once the dark side start influencing them..!)

Perhaps this kind of consolidation of products across PDA platforms is a good thing, after all it does give some degree of continuity.

It does seem a black time for EPOC with the withdrawl of Psion from the PDA business and moves like RMR's, however there is optimism to be had. The Nokia 9210 was the top selling PDA in Europe last quarter by some margin, and Nokia recently announced the 7650 Symbian Smartphone. Symbian are now carrying the EPOC/ Symbian flag, though we still mourn the passing of the Psion era there is optimism for the future. One day all PDA's / Phones will run Symbian, one day all will see the light ('yeah right' comes a voice from the back of the room), well I think so!

Glossary (for people who cant understand my warped sense of humour)
Light = EPOC / Symbian OS
Dark = Palm OS
Very Dark = Microsoft Power PC
He who must not be named = Voldemort a.k.a. Bill Gates
Tank = Device
Weapon = Programming Language.

and I'm sure you can get the rest if you think about it...

Rafe

See more at http://www.rmrsoft.com (warning contain images of a distressing nature for light side supporters).