Both Nokia and the wider community have been busy with a lot of updates, some of which we summarize here.

Firstly, Nokia has updated both the Nokia Maps application for your Symbian device, but also a new Nokia Map Loader. Symbian Guru has kindly worked out the direct download links, which are Nokia Maps and Map Loader, if you don’t want to go via the normal Nokia Maps flash webpages.

Symbian Guru also points out that Python for S60 has been updated too, and is now at v1.4.4.

In other Nokia news, Mobile Web Server has been updated to v1.4, and Nokia have also released the new v7 PC Suite, and the Nokia PC Music client is now at v1.5.

Finally, the plan for Nokia to buy Navteq has now been approved by the EU, so it will be interesting to see what impact this has as the companies merge together.

ShoZu have been busy people. First of all, they’ve announced ShoZu for iPhone, which should be available in the next few weeks, in line with the updated Apple iPhone 2.0 firmware, and the Apple App Store. ShoZu allows you to take photos, and then ShoZu will organisee uploading those pictures to your selected sites in the background. A very popular Symbian S60 app, and now available for the iPhone, supporting the same range of sites. As well as the traditional upload facilities, there are now facilities for downloading pictures from your friends, reading and commenting on your and your friends’ photos / posts, interaction with Facebook, and geotagging your photos for you. It even supports a variety of “Citizen Journalism Sites”, such as the BBC website, Scoopt, CNN and ITV.com.

ShoZu supports many sites, and the other big news is that they have recently added support for Ovi, the new Nokia sharing site. Interestingly, two months ago they only support 29 site; now they support 46, and looking through the list the majority of picture based sites we could think of were included. Although they support Twitter, they need to expand their range of text based sites (such as Plazes and Jaiku that add location information to the messages) to complete their support and claim to be able to support the majority of Web 2.0 sites.

Some content thanks to Jonathan at atmaspheric | endeavours, and Darla Mack at her website.

Many people have speed camera databases loaded into their SatNav, and we support and recommend Pocket GPS World as one of the most accurate and regularly updated camera databases for the UK. However, up to now, if you used Nokia Maps on your Symbian phone as your primary navigation device, you were left without speed cameras. This is now resolved. If you head to this HOWTO at Pocket GPS World, they’ll explain what you have to do to get their database working on your phone.

Basically, you have to install a freeware application, and the subscribe to the Pocket GPS World site (if you aren’t already a subscriber), and download the “Nokia Speedcam” specific database from their site, and you’ll have working, and up to date speed cameras on your phone. The software has only been tested on a UK N95 with Nokia Maps v2, although there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work with every S60 3rd edition phone, and, like Nokia Maps, it supports Bluetooth GPS units if you don’t have a built in GPS.

Having just released the new N800 / N810 firmware, which supports new firmwar updates without the need for a full reflash, Nokia have produced their first (in a long time) OTA update for a mobile phone, the N78. Although it’s only just started shipping, the firmware improves areas such as Bluetooth stability, music playback, optimized camera performance and navi-scroll sensitivity.  The key point is that this update also does not need a full reflash, and hence all settings and software are kept intact.  In fact, Nokia has (currently) gone as far as only releasing this update as an OTA update, removed the need to use the Nokia Software Updater at all (which is good for some, as they’ve still not fix the Vista compatibility issues).  With many other Symbian phones supporting OTA updates, it will be interesting to see whether Nokia continue the trend and release all firmwares this way.

Nokia have announced two major updates today. Firstly, they have announced they are purchasing the remainder of the Symbian shares they do not already own, and will therefore take complete control of Symbian. As part of this purchase, Nokia have also announced that they will turn portions of Symbian (the OS), S60 and UIQ (controlled by Sony Ericsson and Motorola) into Open Source, via the new Symbian Foundation. This process will take a couple of years, but follows in the footsteps of the work Nokia has put into the Maemo community (for their Internet Tablets). This bodes well for the future of the platforms.

In other news, Nokia have also released a major OS (firmware) update for the N800 and N810 Internet Tablets. Apart from lots of bugfixes, and some improvements in the applications, the key new feature is that future OS updates will be able to be installed without a full reflash of the firmware back to factory condition.

Many people have installed the Google Search shortcut, which provides direct access to Google from Nokia Symbian smartphone’s Active Standby screen. Now Google have updated this, and provided localised versions, including a UK specific version which will use google.co.uk as it’s search engine instead of google.com.

If you want to get hold of this version, point your smartphone to m.google.co.uk. Google are also claiming it’s 40% faster too.

Nokia has bought Plazes, a location based activity social networking site. It’s believed that Plazes will eventually become part of the Ovi strategy, and may even get absorbed into Nokia Maps (Nokia Maps is mainly developed by Nokia Location Service, which is the new name for Gate5, who are based in Berlin alongside Plazes’ development team). Plazes itself today is not very mobile friendly (no m.plazes.com, no mobile specific browser support, no windows mobile / symbian clients, although SMS is supported and there is an iPhone client due soon), so it will be interesting to see how quickly Nokia get those things changed. There is a Nokia Internet Tablet client, although we couldn’t even persuade it to login to plazes, let alone interact with the site.

Given Google’s Android phone OS is likely to be including a whole range of Location Based Services from day one when it ships later this year / early next year, if Nokia want to compete they will need to get a Symbian client created quickly, integrate the Plazes solution into their whole suite of online websites, and get new firmwares out for existing phones as well as their new phones (after all, if you can upgrade your current phone to support all the same features as a Google phone, the need to replace your Nokia with a non-Nokia phone will diminish, and keeping their current customers must be key to Nokia over the next few months as Google and Apple release “must have” phones).

Missing Sync, a Mac sync program, will soon be available for Symbian phones, according to an article at All About Symbian, and even better, will support S60 3rd edition and the latest UIQ phones too.  Although Nokia do provide some Mac tools, a lot of Windows Mobile users have found Missing Sync a very useful program, and we are all looking forward to the release of the Symbian version.  More details here.

The screenshot shows the Windows Mobile version, All About Symbian have stated the Symbian version will look very similar.

Nokia released the PC Phone Beta back in December, but have now withdrawn the product from the Beta website. They’ve said that they will not continue development as a standalone product, and have removed the software. They did also mention that although a standalone product would not be following, they would “incorporate the best parts to other Nokia offerings”.

In other news, the Nokia Support Discussion forums are now accessible from WidSets, via the Nokia Discussions WidSet widget. Although read only access right now, we’re hoping Nokia develop this further to allow full two way access to the site from WidSets.

Finally, the Nokia 5800 phone, ie the touchscreen S60 phone, has been spotted on a German advert (above, courtesy of Symbian World), so can’t be far away from launch. As the first of the new generation of Nokia touchscreen phones, it’ll be interesting to see how well it functions.

As well as the existing Nokia Internet Tablet range, Nokia are definitely preparing Linux based cellphones. The comments have come from Nokia’s CFO, Rick Simonson. Whether it’ll be their own OS, Android, or LiMo, is unknown, as is whether it’ll use Trolltech’s Qt UI, a company Nokia bought earlier this year, but we can be sure of one thing; it’s likely Nokia will not stop at a single device, and we should, over the coming years, expect to see a whole range of devices. We don’t suspect Nokia will give up on Symbian S60 anytime soon, so it’ll be interesting to see if the Linux phones compete in the high end smartphone sector, and how much overlap of technology and applications they bring from the current tablets.

Story from Thumb Report, a new smartphone news service, which tried to encompass the news within 160 characters.

According to this article on the BBC website, sales of smartphones will outstrip laptops in the next 12 to 18 months. With Symbian recently reporting that more than 200 million Symbian smartphones have been manufactured and shipped (the actual figure is at least 206 million), and Nokia predicting it will sell over 35 million GPS enabled handsets in the coming year, it’s all go for smartphones.  It will also be interesting to see how the other manufacturers react; there’s already strong indications the new 3G iPhone will ship with a built in GPS, or at least GPS support.

BBC Link via SMS Text News.

Here’s an interesting snippet of information. Google have released an updated version of their iPhone version of their Google Reader, and it’s been noted that any device can access the URL, which is http://www.google.com/reader/i/. This version works well on both Symbian S60 smartphones, as well as the Nokia Internet Tablets, both of which seem to benefit from the additional effort Google has put into the user interface. It offers a better interface over the traditional mobile version by offering you easier access to each post. If you are a regular Google Reader user, and have never got on with the mobile version, then give this version a go…

Symbian Freak has some pictures and specs of the rumoured, but not yet announced, Sony Ericsson P5, which is a smartphone running UIQ. Head over for more pictures at Symbian Freak.

The Symbian Guru has written up a comprehensive article that answers this very question, comparing the mobile GMail application, accessing GMail through the web browser, and using the built in messaging app and accessing GMail via IMAP. He has also included the Pros and Cons of each option. A useful article if you are looking into GMail access from your phone.

The article can be read here.

After a long wait, Skype have released a beta version of their mobile client. This is a Java app, which gives them a good range of compatibility across many handsets, but does not provide an integrated solution for Symbian or Windows Mobile users that many would like. Also, although it uses the internet data connection for presence and IM messaging, it makes a traditional phone call to connect into the Skype infrastructure to get VOIP connectivity, so there is still a real cost to these calls (if only that they will come out of your inclusive minutes). Skype even advertise it as “no WiFi needed”, but fail to mention that it really can’t take true advantage of a WiFi connection, even if you have one. Overall, Skype themselves hint that the 3 SkypePhone might be a better solution for many, and right now, I think I agree.

More details direct from Skype.

If you are into your music, and have a last.fm account (which allows you to publish your music tastes, and what you are and have been listening to), then Michael Coffey has released a native last.fm client for Symbian S60 phones. It has a simple interface (you provide it your last.fm username and password and that’s it!), and whenever you play music it will silently in the background update your last.fm account (it also remembers the music should you be disconnected and will upload the data when a connection is available again).

Download it here.

Here’s an interesting rumour we’ve picked up on via the internet. It appears that Nokia might be trying to beat Apple to the launch of the first 3G touchscreen smartphone, by announcing the 5800 Tube in advance of the iPhone announcement in June. Although they’ve both been beaten to touchscreen mobiles (like the LG Viewty), it would be an interesting turn of events if Nokia beat Apple to this crown. It’s unlikely, but an interesting rumour nonetheless…

This above picture comes from Symbian Freak, a picture of the new Nokia Tube, which will be the first 5th generation S60 device with a touchscreen. This model should be available in early 2009, and will be a mid-spec model, with a high spec model shipping later next year. Having said that, the spec of it is still impressive; a high resolution screen, which is at least 3″ and 16:9 format, a camera (though unlikely to be 5 megapixel), a front facing camera for video calling, 3G, Bluetooth, WiFi, built in GPS (with geotagging support), all in a device roughly the size of the N73. It won’t, apparently, feature multi touch, but will have haptic feedback.

Information and picture courtesy of Symbian Freak.

On top of all the other devices getting firmware updates, Nokia should be releasing v20 firmware for the N82 in the next few days. This mainly adds Flash Lite 3 and WRT (Web Run Time Widget). A full Changelog is available from Symbian Freak. With the N82 already having User Data Preservation (as mentioned here), it should be easy to apply too.

As we predicted, JoikuSoft has been updated again to include WEP support, which now adds a simple level of security to the connection. This may not be enough security for many, but it is at least a start. Another new feature is the ability for the software to shutdown when the battery gets too low. As always, the software can be downloaded from here.