Caught a Weather Bug Right Inside N95

WeatherBug, the world’s leading provider of live, local weather information and services, announced the WeatherBug S60 widget for the WRT enabled Nokia devices, that means N95.

WeatherBug’s S60 widget utilizes Nokia’s latest Web Runtime Technology (WRT) and bring advanced, local weather information to millions of Nokia users worldwide.

The WeatherBug S60 widget is available right now from the http://is.gd/got and soon will be available via the Nokia Download application as well. Nokia also plans to pre-install WeatherBug on select Nokia devices; enabling the widget to be easily accessible with a single click from the S60 idle screen.

Use iPhone Google Reader on N95

Google is in bed with iPhone. We all know that. Google even went this far to create a Google Reader for iPhone, the first time the search giant do something for a “small” piece of hardware. How about us N95 owners?

The NokiaAdict dude tried the iPhone Google reader on his N800, which pumped Dotsisx gave it a kick on N95. Here is the link for trying yourself: http://www.google.com/reader/i/ Just browse to the URL from your N95 and see how do you like it.

According to Dotsisx:

Now with Google Reader for the iPhone, the situation is different. By choosing a zoom level of 75%, I can easily browse the new items, with a great amount of separation, which makes each title individualized with a small snippet. By pressing on “Feeds”, I go to my subscriptions, where not only I have my feeds grouped by folders, but I also have the same layout as on the computer, ie : my shared items, friend’s items, my starred items, my tags, and my folders. Awesome!

I agree. The biggest challenge using the regular Google reader is that it’s hard to read. Now we have a solution.

Play Drum with N95 via NiiMe Drums

Here is another cool software developed using the motion censor we have on the N95, the NiiMe Drums. It is a music-product solution that allows you to compose the music tracks just by shaking your N95 or any other Symbian S60 phone with motion sensor. The result is instantly playing on the PC. Not sure if this could be for serious music guys but it certainly be fun toy to be a musical hero. Besides, when you need some beats, a N95 in you pocket is definitely much accessible than a full rack of drums. You can download it from here.

Or, see for yourself before getting it:

Your N95 is in Your Pocket All the Time Anyway

I can’t think of better way of using your N95 without “using it”. I would think this is the most useful accelerometer software I’ve got so far.

Ever wanted to know how much you walk or run as you go about your daily life? The Nokia Step Counter not only counts your steps, it also determines the distance you have covered and your energy expenditure. You can even compare your activity levels on different days by looking up the summaries stored in a handy diary.

Want to know how it all works? Your steps are measured by analyzing the output from an accelerometer in your S60 mobile device. All you have to do is carry your phone around with you whenever you move, for example in a pocket of your clothing, attached to a belt or your upper arm, or in a handbag worn over your shoulder.

Go download it from here.

Known issues: (don’t worry, we’ll fix these)

• If you have the Activity Monitor from research.nokia.com on your phone, remove it before installing the Nokia Step Counter (added 12.05.2008)
• Height and weight must be entered in cm and kg regardless of whether Metric Units is chosen in Settings -> User
• If the scheduler is disabled and the Step Counter is run past midnight statistics might be incorrectly allocated to different days

Newer Nokia Maps 2.0 Released

Nokia released latest (and possibly last) beta of Maps 2.0 and it is available today for anyone with a S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 device such as ourN95).

I’ve been really impressed by Nokia Maps 2.0 so far and use it as my day to day sat-nav with no reservations. It’s not perfect, but it’s as good as any of the other systems out there and I like the way you can choose to pay for actual voice navigation on an as-needed basis.

Changes noticed so far:
* Faster start-up; new start-up screen
* Street names on smaller roads; more detail on maps
* New ’striped’ indicator in satellite and hybrid modes, to denote lack of satellite coverage.
* Faster zooming & scrolling
* Map updates (seemingly there’s more building-shape data, at least where I live)

The previous 2.0 was already very nice. Routing is now mostly through the main roads and not byways. They make better use the screen and roadsigns etc… The routing is good, the voice information is good and if you miss it because of some reason, the display will fix you with the proper info. The POI search is pretty good, much better than Map24 or google search.

Earlier beta 2.0 did not cancel my 3 years subscription on the N95 classic. It works for the previous map 2.0. Besides you can alway reinstall your firmware and get rid of it. In this Nokia is no stinch. Then again this is what it should be.

Nokia Headlines Tool Goes Stronger

The Nokia Channel Headlines is now Nokia Headlines. It is a beta application developed by the Nokia Beta Lab. Through Nokia Headlines, you can enjoy daily news, sports, and entertainment, provided by international and local branded publishers. The service is completely free from Nokia, and the experience is fully optimized for mobile. You can access your favorite publications via WiFi or GSM, and read the content either online or offline.

A new update is just released. According to Nokia:

Even though some of the more technology-savvy folks don’t understand why somebody would want a branded media service and a content discovery system in the world of open internet and RSS readers, Nokia Channels Headlines keeps going strong. Now, we have re-packaged and re-branded the concept as Nokia Headlines.

I guess people are still using the net very differently and every existing technologies and tools have their places there to serve the web surfers.

The new features of the Nokia Headlines are:

w name and icon: Headlines

If the battery level drops below 14%, the intelligent content background updater stops automatically.

After reboot background updater starts automatically.

Publication content packages are stored to memory card when available.

Possibility to offer “preinstalled” publications.

Add content item added to Option menu in My content view.

Possibility to fetch advertisements from publisher’s own Ad serving platform.

You can download the application from here.

Now Screen Rotation Goes Native on N95 8GB

I wrote about RotateMe software to make N95 rotate screen like iPhone does. And there are bunch of other N95 software utilizing the build-in motion sensor. Now finally, Nokia makes a official usage of the motion sensor. A new firmware (v20.0.016) is available for the Nokia N95 8GB (sorry folks, only the European N95-2 is supported for now) that comes with built-in support for the automatic screen rotation feature that the iPhone made so popular (sorry, I had to get that in there). I still don’t understand though why Nokia waited this long to have this cool feature released so that let iPhone steals all the thunders when they twist the phones.

You can enable and disable the screen rotation feature at will, so there’s basically no reason not to download and install this latest firmware for your Nokia N95 8GB. That is, unless you’re rocking the N95 8GB NAM (N95-4), in which case, you’ll need to wait it out a bit longer. Go download the new firmware here.

When You Need is Privacy

I’ve written about a few software to add tags to your photos taken by the N95’s 5MB camera. What if what you are looking for is to be more private about the photo?

Before going further, just in case you don’t know, there is this binary standard format called EXIF, which is used to embed some information into every photo taken by a digital camera. These information could be, the size of the photo, horizontal resolution, veridical resolution, bit depth, frame count, equipment make, camera model, color representation, lens aperture, flash mode, focal length, F-Number, light source, date picture taken, etc. Now you’ve got the idea.

So you want to make your photo to be anonymous for some reason. This software could help, the Photo Detagger.

With the Photo Detagger on your mobile phone, you can now detag and wipe out all these tags from your photos before sending them out or posting it on the Internet! Previously, the only other way to do this on the phone was to use the phone’s photo editor to alter and re-save the file, reducing the quality of the photo in the process. Photo Detagger removes the tags without damaging the photos and in the process even reduces the size of the JPEG photos by about 3-5 KBytes as well.

The detagged photos will be saved to the “Images” folder of the microSD card with a “-001″ suffix. You can then send out the detagged photos via MMS or upload it as per normal to your preferred photo-sharing websites or blog. Photo Detagger is designed for Nokia phones minimally supporting CLDC 1.0, MIDP 2.0 and JSR 75.

You can download it from here.