Abbas Sumar presenting the Sony Ericsson W960

Risking to be a bit tedious with the Fast Track stuff I’m going to share this clip with you guys. Abbas Sumar, Application Acquisition Manager at Sony Ericsson was the man on the 29th of November as it was him who broke the news about us getting the Sony Ericsson W960 instead of what most believed the Sony Ericsson P1i. Mr Sumar was also one of the few speakers who actually mentioned user interfaces as an important key factor in the years to come.

I of course already had my suspicions on the W960i (and was hoping Motorola would announce the Z10) as the P1i was getting old news already. I’m not sure if I recall this correctly but I believe the Fast Track website changed information on which phones they’d be handing out, first specifying the P1i and the Z8 and later only stating ‘a free Motorola or Sony Ericsson UIQ 3 phone’.

Mr. Sumar also mentioned that over 40% of the Sony Ericsson P1 users downloaded an application to their device the first month, which is an impressive figure and might be an indicator that Sony Ericsson is not only doing some great form factor designs and music phones but also is starting to get a hold of application sales. The same figure for pre-P1 devices is less than 3%. Infact 15% of all sales on the Sony Ericsson Application Shop comes directly from the P1i. For more information on application sale trends, check my report on Handango’s Q3 2007 Yardstick.

UIQ wants YOU to deliver applications!

You’ll find the wiki at books.uiq.com
(make sure you put it in your bookmarks if you’re planning to start with UIQ development)

Here’s some of the topics to be covered:

Aims, features and architecture

• Introduction (full chapter content online)
• Background
• UIQ 3 basics
  

Starting development

• Development environment and quick start (full chapter content online)
• Symbian OS essentials
  

User interface framework

• Understanding UI components
• List boxes (full chapter content online)
• Commands and categories
• Layout managers and building blocks
• Views and dialogs
• Building an application (full chapter content online)
  

Multimedia and communications

• Multimedia
• Communications
  

Improving your applications

• Refining your application
• Symbian Signed
• Testing, debugging and deploying
  

Porting

• Porting
• Reference

You’ll find more information and support about development subjects by visiting

UIQ Developer Community

Symbian Developer Network 

Sony Ericsson Developer World

Motorola Developer Network

Rumors on the Motorola Z10 and the Motorola SKARVEN

At the Fast Track event last week I had the opportunity to listen on Paul D. Leeper, Ecosystem and Market Development director at Motorola. Paul’s Market & Business Development team is responsible for working with developers and technology enabling companies to discover, develop and deliver core functionality and rich experiences that differentiate Motorola products. Paul did not confirm any speculations on the rumored Motorola Z10, however he did confirm that Motorola would get busy developing several devices for the UIQ platform in 2008. Paul seemed much focused on GPS services and fast data delivery systems such as WiMAX.

Motorola Z10 rumored specifications

If the rumors are true, this device will a cool upgrade from it’s precursor the Motorola Z8. The cover consists of gray metal, the camera is upgraded featuring 3.2 megapixels. The device also comes with HSDPA, a QVGA screen, Bluetooth A2DP, USB and a microSD slot supporting up to 32GB memory cards. I’m not sure if this baby will include a touchscreen but the form factor suggests it does not.

Check the gallery for more images on the Z10.

 

Speculations on the Motorola Skarven

The Motorola Skarven sounds like a fantastic device featuring an 8 megapixel camera, 3x optical zoom (which probably will drain you battery faster than you can blink), a huge 2.8 inch screen, 16 million colors, GPS and WiFi. A device with 8 megapixel camera is however more likely to depend solely on digital zoom to save battery, that is if the sensors are good enough.

Remember these are all rumors and nothing has yet been confirmed.

[Via Gizmos.es]

Unboxing the Sony Ericsson W960, first impressions

Here’s a video of me unboxing the Sony Ericsson W960 which I received at UIQ’s developer Fast Track in Budapest last week. The phone basically being a Walkman® smartphone has a slick design being glossy-black on the front and somewhat rubber-matte on the backside. The sides are tastefully white colored and the phone just feels great in the hand with it’s 109 x 55 x 16 millimeters weighting 119 grams. I can’t help comparing it with my Nokia’s N95 8GB which now seems like a brick. This phone will not replace my N95 (it’s now even close as powerful as the Nokia and shouldn’t be compared to it) but will be a great ’spare time device’. The SE W960 runs on Symbian OS and the UIQ interface.

The W960 is an orgie of input possibilities with a jog dial on the left side, a touchscreen which both makes use of a stylus and good old fingerplay as well as a traditional keyboard. The ‘hardkeys’ are however way to hard. My thumb almost cramps when I try to type a text using the keyboard which rarely happens as the stylus input is great once you get a hold of it. There’s also dedicated softkeys for the Walkman® application allowing the user to easily play, pause, switch, fast forward and rewind the music.

The screen is 2.6 inches and runs at 240×320 pixels (QVGA). Surprisingly it works quite well even in hard sunlight (I’ll have to do more testing on that when I write the proper review), but it is possible to distinguish a square pattern all over the screen if you try to look real hard. I should also mention the 3.2 megapixel camera and the 8GB internal memory for all your music.

A proper review yet to come… 

ShakerRacer, control your car like James Bond with the Nokia N95

I was fortunate to meet up with Andreas Jakl during the Fast Track event in Budapest. Andreas spends his days as an assistant professor and Symbian OS teacher at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria where he and his collegues make all kind of crazy stuff such as modifiyng a regular RC-car by inserting a microcontroller and a Bluetooth-module to control the car using the Nokia N95´s accelerometer sensor, just like James Bond did in the Tomorrow Never Dies movie from 1997.

They also made this cool video demo:

And here´s the original James Bond inspiration:

Read more at Andreas blog.

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