The N86 - Nokia's first 8 megapixel phone

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced its first 8 megapixel monster (more like a critter actually): the N86.



The only words that come to my mind after seeing the Samsung i8910 are "too little, too late". But let's not get too incisive. This is a step forward for Nokia. A small one, but at least it's in the right direction. The N86 comes with improvements in a few areas (very fast CPU, 8MP camera, Flash Lite 3.1, a good battery and a load of Java APIs) and one obvious downgrade: the 2.6" screen.

All in all it's very good that Nokia have finally decided to step into the 8MP arena. I'm sure we will see a true flagship device from them again, in time.

More photos of the N86 can be found here.

PyS60 1.9.0 is available

A heavily upgraded version of Python for S60 was released today, 1.9.0. It sports a new core based on Python 2.5.1, a GUI version of Ensymble that is just great, a new format for documentation (HTML) and many other goodies. On the downside, S60 2nd Edition is no longer supported and start-up time is insanely long.

The release thread with much more information can be found here.

What a nice gift from the PyS60 team, just in time for Christmas :)

Happy holidays everyone!

New Nokia N97 announced!

Earlier today, at Nokia World 2008 in Barcelona, a new addition to the Nseries family was announced. The Nokia N97, a 3.5 inch touch screen, full qwerty device, is the latest smartphone from the Finnish manufacturer and, after a long line of mediocricies, a good one. Sure it has only a 5 megapixel camera, but the other specs are pretty nice and together add up to form the best Nokia to date.

Press photos can be found here:

http://www.nokia.com/A4630648?category=n97#

The Tube is here!

Finally, Nokia has officially announced its touchscreen device, the 5800 XpressMusic (known as "Nokia Tube" in the blogosphere). The specs we knew from the rumours were pretty spot on, the device having a 3.2 megapixel camera (a bit disappointing) a 3.2 inch display (yikes! it was about time) and other features that are becoming more and more common in mobile phones today.

Here's the link to the official story: http://conversations.nokia.com/home/2008/10/nokia-5800-xpre.html

Images will probably be made available very soon and the specs should be published too on Forum Nokia.

In the meantime, this noknok.tv video seems like the best material available at the time of writing this post. http://noknok.tv/2008/10/02/exclusive-hd-video-nokia-5800-xpressmusic-aka-the-tube/

Home to Pys60 developers - croozeus.com

Good news for all Pys60 Enthusiastics. I hereby announce the launch of http://www.croozeus.com - "Home To Pys60 Developers !" 

"This project is a joint venture by Pankaj Nathani and Bogdan Galiceanu" 

We have tried to integrate everything about Python for S60 on croozeus.com ! Many of you might have known about the tutorials on Pys60 at - http://croozeus.googlepages.com/py60 ; here we have just tried to make it more better for the new developers as well as advanced developers. The tutorials are freshly prepared and in a more organized manner to learn Pys60 with ease ! The tutorials are simple, extensive and contain code snippets of almost all the modules as well as some third party extensions that may be required for addition features.

Moreover we have also introduced some new concepts like "Pys60 Talks" and "Pys60 Applications". These added sections will only allow the developers to widen their knowledge about Python for S60. 

PyS60 Talks would be an interactive session which would be held online where Pys60 developers can meet and share their ideas. The first Pys60 Talks session would be announced in a few days. 

Pys60 Applications is a section where every ten days, we feature one standalone application in Python for S60 (with source code), so that other developers may learn from these ! 

You can read more about all the features of croozeus.com on this page.

Hope to see you there!

Two new Enterprise devices

The rumors about these two have been doing the rounds for quite a while, but today Nokia made the official announcements about the E71 and the E66. Check out their spotlight on Nokia's virtual events page.

While I wouldn't say they're masterpieces (having somewhat lower specifications than I expected, but the E71 has a monster list of connectivity features), the two new additions to the "E family" look very good on paper, almost good enough to top the E90 (that's my opinion; I'm sure there are people who would enjoy one of these a lot more than an E90).

So, happy E-ing ;)

Python eLearning module - the pros and cons of using this language, plus some useful tips

Forum Nokia just published an eLearning module about Python for S60. It has everything beginners need to start developing software for mobile devices (beginners = people who already know a bit of standard Python). Check it out.