Planet S60

The official Meego website has new screenshots in its UI design guidelines that show how operators and OEMs can customize the user experience. We’re not exactly sure which UI Nokia will use, but the photos give us an idea how it might look in their upcoming Meego device, the Nokia N9. You can see a [...]

Julien Fourgeaud wrote some very convincing reasons on his blog that the Nokia N8 could start spreading to consumers on September 14th instead of the official “end of Q3.” We hear a lot of rumors in the blogosphere, but I’d pay attention to Julien because of his history with Nokia. He previously worked on development [...]

Not content with helping a humble Manchester lass break the world record for fastest texter ever and appearing on the new Samsung Galaxy Tab, typing app Swype is winging its way over from Android to Symbian handsets. Now available in...

Wouldn't it be nicer if you could switch your phone to Silent profile with just a press of a button, instead of going through the menu? With SilentKey by PhonePhreak Software, you can now silence your phone by just holding down the Red key (and then return to the normal profile the same way). SilentKey preserves the standard behaviour of the Red key during normal use (short keypress) unchanged. It merely adds a new functionality for holding down the key (long keypress).

Korean manufacturer Samsung has confirmed that they are not currently looking at Symbian to power future phones, rather choosing to focus on Android and proprietary platform bada to get smartphone-savvy consumers interested. Head of Marketing YH Lee confirmed at IFA...

Nokia is discontinuing the Ovi Files service, effective October 1, 2010. Read more here and on Ovi Files pages.

One of my wishes for Nokia became true this morning when Swype for Symbian became available at Beta Labs. If you are unfamiliar with Swype, it’s a faster way to input text on screen by sliding your finger over the letters. I know it sounds crazy, but it works really well after learning how to [...]

Swype provides a faster and easier way to input text on any screen. With one continuous finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard, the patented technology enables users to input words faster and easier than other data input methods—at over 40 words per minute. The application is designed to work across a variety of devices such as phones, tablets, game consoles, kiosks, televisions, virtual screens and more.

I've recently decided to sell my Nokia N95 and 5800 mainly due to the arrival of the HTC Desire. Whilst having a backup X6 available too, there is no value holding onto these two handsets any more.

I decided to put them up on Envirofone's website, I didn't want the hassle of trying to sell them to a someone else, the hassle of selling to people isn't worth it. I wanted to make sure that all my data was wiped off both devices before sending them off. I navigated to the "Factory Settings" option buried in the menus to reset the handsets to factory settings, i.e. how one would expect to find the handset if it was just out of the factory. This is true for my HTC Desire (I've reset it many times already) it's a simple process. 30 seconds and all my personal data are gone, the phone and settings are restored to factory. My experience with the Palm Pre was also similar. But with Nokia it seems to be a different story.

The Factory Reset on the Nokia handsets doesn't seem to mean quite that, very misleading, but harmless? Perhaps not. Consider this. Mobile phones these days tend to carry a lot of private data, it's a central base for the user to have a lot of personal data stored on them; contacts, e-mails, passwords, bookmarks, forms and usernames, meeting entries too. There is a lot of information. I'm glad the new Nokia's have UDP (user data prevention) this is great when doing firmware updates, but reinstalling the firmware again using PC Suite should trigger a wipe all scenario, or at least give the option to.

Now if any average user trying the same thing probably would not have realised that their information was still on the phone, because after doing the factory reset the setup guide is initiated, so it seems like all was erased. But unfortunately that isn't the case. I had a few people on Twitter telling me to enter some codes to reset the mobile to proper factory settings. That's fine, for me. But what about your average Joe who just had has identity stolen because he thought all was fine and dandy? An exaggeration? Perhaps, realisation most definitely. Nokia needs to start addressing this issue.

We knew that announcing the closure of Nokia Messaging for Social Networks Beta would not be easy news to break…and your comments from the past week made it clear.

This is the unfortunate nature of the work we do in Beta Labs. Sometimes the products we create do not make it to commercial release. It’s the nature of the test environment.

Written by Kari Pulli, Nokia Fellow and the head of the Visual Computing and Ubiquitous Imaging research team at NRC Palo Alto.