Archive for February, 2010

Symbian OS is open and free now

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

This month the Symbian platform has become completely open and free. Lee Williams, CEO, says that this operating system is already a dominant one, but now mobile software development for Symbian gets all the advantages of work with open source projects, almost unlimited possibilities. Mr. Williams also stresses Symbian additional advantages comparing with Android OS. He explains that Android has not more than a third of open codes, and the rest of them are closed.

One more advantage of Symbian OS: programmers and other specialists working at platform development will regularly publish plans of the future upgrades according to Lee Williams’ words.

The initiative to open Symbian appeared in June of the year 2008, when Nokia announced its plans to buy the rest of the Symbian programming codes from other companies and place them under control of Symbian Foundation. Now there are more than 330 million of Symbian-phones in the world. They are produced be such companies as Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Fujitsu and Sharp.

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Game developers want to use the Apple iPhone platform

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

The Game Developer Research Company conducted a new survey to find out which of the gaming platforms is the most popular among games developers. The results of this research showed a clear trend — “developers are migrating towards the Apple iPhone platform”

Authors of the published report also explained that Apple gadgets in its time significantly stimulated the market of mobile games. Before they were launched the mobile games market was amounted to 13% of the total entertainment market, now it has almost doubled to about 25%.

Why do companies develop mobile games for iPhone? Among the reasons that lead to migration towards this OS, experts named the popularity of Apple devices, their broad functional capabilities and sound pricing and marketing policies of App Store. As it was noted in the report, mobile software developers can lower prices for their programs to even ridiculous rates and yet at the same time earn good money. Besides, Apple has done everything to simplify the process of porting existing games to the iPhone OS.

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Google Nexus One: it includes Multi-Touch now!

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Hurray! The American version of Nexus One supports multitouch, notwithstanding the fact that it’s a patented Apple technology. Google representatives do not comment it.

Google Inc. released its first update pack for the Nexus One smartphone, which was shown to the general public just a month ago. Besides some fixes this fresh mobile software contained a very useful innovation – support of multitouch technology.

It means that now interface and screen-oriented capabilities of Googlephone do not yield to its main rival, Apple iPhone. So users of the first Google smartphone can test multitouch in action. It works in Google Maps Navigation, picture viewer, as well as in web browser.

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As can be seen, a mutual agreement between Apple and Google (so called “promise not to add multitouch support in Nexus One”) now is worth nothing. Search Corporation decided to change its word in the light of recent events.

Studying different modern devices from the main manufacturers, starting with Apple and Palm, and ending with HTC and Motorola, Google’s experts has realized that multi-touch support has become a standard, so many users are accustomed to this option. Undoubtedly it opens new possibilities for innovative mobile applications development, now they can create new software for Android taking into account this new potential.

So now we have a smartphone that based on Android 2.1, and we also can use a new way of control and navigation. By the way, the European version of Nexus One has this function by default. However, the sales in Europe start not earlier than in spring this year.

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