Mika Tuupola

Nokia has launced an N-Gage guerilla campaign. Two amateur webpages by KalleVee and TumppiKoo claim they have found a cd-rom from train which was labeled UNFINISHED MATERIAL. FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY. The cd-rom contained seven Nokia N-Gage adverts. The two boys decided to “put them into internet” even though their father said they should not.

Frozen Bubble has been ported to Series 60 and yes, it is free.

Frozen Bubble is an addicting game so I thought that it would be a nice application for Symbian mobile phones, like Nokia 6600, Nokia 3650, Nokia 7650, Siemens SX1 etc. So I decided to port it to Series 60 platform. And here it is! It’s based on the Version 2.0 of the Series 60 platform but it should compile with previous SDK versions, as well. I used my Nokia 6600 to debug it on target device so I can guarantee that it works at least on Nokia 6600. However, I’ve seen it running on Nokia 3650 as well. It should run on most Series 60 devices. Have fun!

Apparently mobile phones are now prohibited in North Korea and the mobile phones are recalled back from their citizens. The service has been available for year-and-a-half in the communist country. Mobile phones were banned from May 25

North Korean authorities banned mobiles for the country citizens to restrict their communications with foreigners. It was hard for North Korean special services to overhear all conversations as more and more people were using mobiles.

According to KEITAI-L mailinglist Oracle employees have been warned about bluetooth security.

... If a hacker is within range (just a few meters) of a Bluetooth enabled device, the attack could result in the phone resetting or terminating the current operation. In the worst case, a hacker could use your phone to send SMS (Short Message Service), and use your browser to access the Internet. The connection fees are charged to your phone bill, since the connection was made via your phone.

No “device pairing,” such as a remote headset, is required from one Bluetooth device to another Bluetooth device. Therefore, anyone in range of the phone could initiate an attack. (Device Pairing refers to the initial authentication of two Bluetooth devices such as a cellular phone and a remote headset.)...

Sixty minutes ago the old brand of Kolumbus brand was revived as new cheap mobile connection. It has been nice two weeks work. Now it is time to sit back and tail -f access_log for a while.

FlyerOne has released interesting software for Series 60 mobile phones called Guitar Tuner. I am not a musician myself but I find the concept quite interesting. The software replaces analog tuner and features a real time display of pitch and frequency of a stringed instrument. It should be compatible with any Series 60 device.

GuitarTuner is an automatic, interactive guitar tuner software designed exclusively for the Series 60 platform. The built-in microphone of the device is used to record and analyze any sound that can be heard, and the detected pitch is displayed in real-time. This application is designed for stringed instruments and the proprietary algorithm used to detect the pitch has an accuracy of about one hertz.

As reported by Spong the games especially made for Nokia N-Gage might not be so N-Gage only after all. With special installer (BlizzardN-GAGE.SIS) you can install and run the N-Gage games atleast in Siemens SX1. Check the screenshots. It has been reported that atleast Nokia 3650 and Nokia 6600 are able to run N-Gage games too. Due to small amount of RAM Nokia 3650 needs to be booted into safe mode in order to N-Gage games to run, but Nokia 6600 should be able to run most of the games in normal mode.

A new version of Opera for Series 60 has been released. Among other improvements this version has approximately 250KB smaller memory footprint than the previous version. Huge consumption of memory has been the main reason why I switched to NetFront, the browser also used in i-mode phones. NetFront is small and light but has some limitation such as not supporting gzip content-endcoding.

More info can be found at press release and the Changelog for Opera 6.10 for Series 60.