The Dark Furie

The Guardian newspaper has reported recently that Nokia is working on an Android operating system phone, quoting industry insiders as their source. I'd heard that a major newspaper was working on this rumour-based story a while ago and had the Guardian article forwarded to me just before I went to bed this morning but largely ignored it because it's so obviously a great stinking pile of bollocks. Nokia has spent millions buying out the other partners who own Symbian, many more millions transferring that into an open source format, and an undisclosed figure (which I suspect to be in the millions, surprisingly) evolving the system into it's upcoming forms. Would they throw all that down the drain by openly supporting another operating system? The smart money is on no.

And then I came online this morning and checked my feeds...

NOKIA MAKING ANDROID PHONE!

It's everywhere. Almost all the big Symbian and general phone sites have picked up the story and are running with it, taking it as gospel truth. It's a shame really, especially as Nokia released this statement shortly afterwards.

Absolutely no truth to this whatsoever. Everyone knows that Symbian is our preferred platform for advanced mobile devices.

Yeah, here's the thing: when a newspaper prints a speculative piece that ends with them saying that a company was unavailable for comment, wait until the company comments before confirming it yourself and speculating further. That way you lose a few early visits you'd gain from people coming to read such shocking news but you don't look like a gimp when it turns out to be wrong and don't lose readers by printing false stories. The eternal blogging question is whether to be first or be accurate. With so many blogs around, many run by teams it's almost impossible to be first (I think I've managed it about three times in two years) but being right is worth the extra time it takes to go to print.

Yahoo! I've finally found a mobile friendly site to host my voice posts and game collection files, as a way to get around the download warning here which keeps stopping or interfering with downloads. I'll be uploading my best games (broadening the reach of my mailing list) and posting reviews plus download links here at some point, so if you're interested in free mobile games, make sure you subscribe. As always, these are for testing purposes only and I hope that my subscribers will actually buy the games that they like.

I've almost finished making a mobile widget for this page. As I've been learning and working with Web Runtime for a week so far and I'm currently programming this on a phone that doesn't support widgets I'm looking for testers. Anyone with Web Runtime on their phones, please comment, leaving your phone model, if you're willing to test a beta version for me. I need you to take a screenshot of the app and let me know if it's working properly if you're willing. Once the test is through I'll get around to porting it to the different widget systems and creating properly sized icons for them instead of my stand in, though this will require me to use a PC.

Third project in the works is a CSS one for here, but you wont see anything from that for quite a while as I've got so many other things going on. It's something I've been wanting to do for quite a while, but I needed to wait until my skills were up to scratch, and I think I learned enough to put the basics together now. If it works out though, I'll be inviting a few people to help me refine it and a few theme designers should be put back in business here.

So yeah, I'm a busy bee lately.

Gotta love those guys over at the Nokia Beta Labs. Rather than keep the java runtime environment (the part of a phone's software that runs java games and applications) static, or only updating it via firmware updates, they've decided to seperate it from the platform entirely and release it as a stand alone product. This release is currently only for S60 5th edition phones, but it does mean that people using those phones will simply be able to update a single application with a new release rather than go through an entire firmware update in the future. The new runtime environment also updates your existing java applications to enable them to run properly within the new runtime environment.

Nokia Java Runtime 2.0 for S60 (JRT 2.0) is a totally re-written Java mobile execution environment for Nokia S60 devices. It gives you several usability and performance improvements, including:

• One-click application installation
• Improved application launch user experience
• Improved execution performance

Get it here or you can read more here.

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UPDATE

Community member Nico kindly tested this release for us and you can find his comments below. Bear in mind while reading that this is the first release of a beta product tested on only one device and your experience may differ, plus the application will change in the future.

Just installed it. And let's start with the start it installed effortlessly and faster than expected and then proceeded with updating previously installed applications. What impressed me most it did this with opera mini open and it worked just fine after installation.

First change one notice is a new loading icon for the runtime environment similar to the realplayer loading icon. This is a handy addition since previously there was no indication if one actually opened the application after a click and left you wondering for a second or two while it loads. But now you have some needed assurance. Secondly it's really much much faster than before. This morning i installed a java game, nfl 2010, and it was really slow. I was shocked to find this in a game made especially for the 5800. But they must have used an early version of this run time because it now works super.

But it's not all good it seems it's not using once network connection. It seems to handle actions per request and completely ignoring perfectly working socket connections. This is a major problem and causes real sluggishness in opera mini. And it makes instant messaging apps like mxit near unusable. This is a major problem that needs a look at.

Sadly the beta is just too much beta like. And the mentioned problem got the better of me since it affected my most used apps. Just uninstalled it. Hopefully it gets fixed soon since it's really a huge difference in overall performance.

When the Open Handset Alliance introduced the Android operating system to the world the most exciting prospect of the announcement was that any part of the operating system could be replaced by manufacturers. Sense from HTC is the first user interface to deliver on that prospect and it's a quite simply a design triumph.

HTC has a long history of covering their Windows Mobile phones in user interface shells that hide the true workings of the phone behind a pretty good looking and easy to use skin. Their TouchFLO shell is considered one of the only reasons that Windows Mobile devices still sell these days. Unfortunately, the shell has to end somewhere and when it does you're unceremoniously dumped back in to the dated and comparatively Windows Mobile interfaces. Thankfully this wont be the case with the Android version of Sense. Rather than create Sense as a shell for Android, HTC have taken advantage of the open source operating system and created a whole new user interface for the entire phone.

Sense also introduces a new contacts view to Android. Built around the principle that people communicate in a lot more ways than voice or text messages, the Sense contact card shows the latest status updates from Twitter, the last uploaded photos to Flickr, Facebook updates and invitations all alongside the last received e-mails, text messages and call history for the chosen contact.

Having all that present on the one screen (with further online services easily added through firmware updates or possibly a services manager application) streamlines communication considerably.

Sense is built around the core ideas of scenes and widgets. Each "scene" is a user created homescreen that you set up for a particular purpose. Maybe you'll want a scene for work and one for home. Later you might set one up containing all your games, or maybe you're planning a holiday and want to set up a scene in advance with useful applications on it. Once a scene is created it can be customised by defining which widgets are available on it.

Almost every default application is available in a widget form to be placed on scenes allowing you to control any aspect of the phone without delving into menus, and applications downloaded from the Android Market can also have shortcuts placed there. That holiday scene we were thinking about may get a world clock widget with two time zones set and currency converter on it as well as a speed-dial shortcut to call a taxi to the airport, a translator application and a to-do list so you don't forget your passport/luggage/children. The work scene and home scene may have e-mail widgets on each of them but accessing a different address depending on the scene in use. The idea is simple enough and things like this have been done on smartphones before, but never to this level of integration and never with an unlimited amount of "scenes" available to use.

Scenes can be profile, location or time activated meaning your work scene might only come up when the phone detects your position via GPS and deduces you're at work, or the holiday scene activates on the morning you're due to go away. And if that isn't enough customisation for you, how about the fact that HTC is letting users customise the widgets that appear on the screen from several defaults (with over 90 designs mentioned as available for the basic clock alone) allowing you to truly have your phone set up exactly the way you want it for exactly the way you're using it.

The bottom line is that Android just got interesting again. The Sense user experience should pull in more than a few disgruntled iPhone owners, while the extended contacts view should bring over a few people with Palm Pre envy and the customisation and scenes concept will get at least a few Symbian owners foaming at the mouth. Android phones running the Sense UI wont be able to take advantage of over the air firmware updates (at least to start with), but what they gain is far more important. A user interface built on Sense.

The first Sense UI phone codenamed Hero and shown in the images in this article should be released worldwide next month.