We covered O2’s plans to add support for Twitter from 1st August via SMS last week, but O2 decided to go one better, and actually started their Twitter support from Monday this week.  Anyone who had previously signed up to Twitter SMS alerts may well have discovered SMSes coming in already this week, and for all others on O2, you simply need to head over to Twitter and setup SMS support for your O2 phone.  Remember, you’ll get 500 free twitter messages (tweets) sent to you, and SMSes you send to Twitter will come out of your inclusive bundle, or be chargeable at your standard rate.

After we informed you about a number of new Nokia devices available on Vodafone this year, it appears even more devices are coming…

Dan at World of Nokia reports that the Nokia E63 is coming out soon, and that Vodafone will also be stocking the new Nokia E52 (the replacement for the Nokia E51, and a similar design to the Nokia E55, but without the hybrid keyboard).

What’s also interesting is that Dan points out the Nokia E52 will be available for £225 on PAYG, but will not be SIM-locked, which makes it a good value high spec smartphone…

So, that’s the Nokia E63, Nokia E71, Nokia E72, Nokia E52 and the rumoured Nokia N97 Mini all being available on Vodafone over the next few months; it seems Vodafone is trying to make up for the various exclusive phones O2 have picked up by offering a greater range of form factors…

Nokia have this week released a new firmware for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone (v30).  As this phone has UDP (User Data Preservation), normally no applications or data would be lost in installing a firmware update, but this firmware isn’t quite like that…

Along with a range of stability and bug fixes, Nokia have added the ability for Nokia Messaging to add email notifications onto the homescreen.  However, this additional feature requires a hard reset of the device to become activated, thereby losing all installed applications and data.  So, although we normally still recommend taking a backup before performing a firmware update, this particular firmware update will involve starting afresh to get the most out of it.

As always, this firmware update is not yet available to all branded firmwares, we’ll keep an eye on the situation and report back as to how quickly each UK network operator makes this firmware available…

Although we don’t usually speculate on rumours, a couple of interesting ones seem to be flying around at the moment.  Firstly, there’s the rumour that with the release of the Apple iPhone 3GS, O2 have lost their exclusivity on the old iPhone 3G, and we may well see it turning up on at least 2 networks in the next few months.  Although good for consumers and sales of the elder device, we’ll have to wait and see on this one.

However, another rumour, which seems much more likely, is that Amazon are working on releasing their latest Kindle ebook reader across Europe, and in particular, the UK.  They are looking for both WiFi and 3G connectivity options, which may well point to another device heading to O2’s networks.  It’s been known for somewhile that their latest Kindle device has a space on the motherboard for a GSM chipset, and with sales of other eBook readers (Sony devices at Waterstones, or the Elonex eBook Reader at Borders), it’s a logical step for Amazon UK.

These are both interesting rumours, and both would create significant sales for their manufacturers should they come true…

Over at “The Nokia Phone Blog“, Ang has put together a nice complete step by step process for how to encode video for best viewing on these devices, namely the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the Nokia N97, and it’s well worth a read if you are looking to ensure you use the optimal settings for the correct quality to allow good video without taking more than necessary disk space.

Nimbuzz, a popular mobile client on Symbian, have announced they have released two new products.  Firstly, they have released a Mac version of their desktop client, which allows access to many IM networks (Facebook, AIM, MySpace, Google Talk (Orkut), Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger (MSN), ICQ) as well as voice calling to Nimbuzz, Windows Live Messenger (MSN), Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk users.

Their iPhone / iPod Touch client gains the ability to share photos, music and videos, and also supports Push Notifications for alerts of incoming calls or chats.  It also adds support for location sharing.

More details on both can be found on the Numbuzz website.

Nokia have announced a three year agreement with RoadPilot, whereby RoadPilot will be providing Nokia with speed camera / safety camera information to allow Ovi Maps to offer this as a subscription service.

With the move of many users away from a traditional SatNav device to using their phone for navigation, it’s key that Nokia feel they have a solution to offer, and this is quite possibly the first of a number of relationships to cover a range of services for their platform.

Of course, you can also use other camera data, such as the Pocket GPS World data if you install SpeedCam as a solution which sits on top of Nokia Maps / Ovi Maps which we’ve covered before here, or another option is to simply buy a dedicated speed device such as these.

A few weeks back, we carried an article about Devicescape’s plan to start charging for their app on S60.  Well, since they recently had their issues with the iPhone version (which we covered here and here), which ultimately lead them to returning to the iTunes App Store, but as a free app, they have taken the decision to apply the same logic to all their clients, and hence they plan to leave all clients as free clients for the time being.

This is, in our opinion, good news for Devicescape, as we’ve already seen a lot of people move away from ShoZu since their decision to start charging for downloading their client.

We should point out that selecting Devicescape from the Nokia Download! client will still incur a fee, but their client will be free from the Ovi Store.

IBM announced last week that there are two new third party plugins, or widgets, for Lotus Notes.  These are from TripIt and from LinkedIN, both popular websites both with ourselves, but also many other corporate users.

The TripIt widget (above) looks very interesting, with the ability to see your upcoming trips (including trips shared by others) within your Notes environment.  TripIt have also included information on how to get Notes to directly import your TripIt calendar via iCal, something I find very useful as a way of getting data out of TripIt into both into my personal calendar, but also as a method of feeding data into Dopplr.

The second widget is for LinkedIN, which allows people to access their network, updates within their network, search and access to professional profiles directly within Notes.

These are the first two third party widgets for Notes, although more are likely in time, but both of these seem to offer enough extra that I suspect many Lotus Notes users would be wise to install them right away…

Back in March when Vodafone announced their support for twitter, they stated that the ability to send tweets via SMS would be free “for the first few weeks”.  Well, finally, that is coming to an end (18th August), and soon those sent SMSes will come out of your inclusive SMS bundle, or failing that will be chargeable.  However, you will still be able to receive up to 500 tweets as SMS a month for free.

This is also pretty much exactly the same offer that O2 will have from 1st August; receive up to 600 tweets for free via SMS, and pay (via inclusive SMS / normal charges) for sending tweets via SMS.

Of course, with both networks starting to bundle internet access into their higher monthly contracts, many people will be able to use apps like Gravity (S60) or TwitterFon (iPhone) and not need to use SMS at all, although a lot of people seem to like to be notified via SMS of their favourite friends.

With 3UK and INQ planning to release a “Twitter Phone” later this year, it’s interesting to see that 3UK aren’t yet offering this sort of arrangement….