There is no shortage of syncing clients for your portable device however I thought I’d bring this one to your attention as it combines usability with a familiar interface.

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The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is now available on Vodafone for free if you sign up for 24mths contract costing £30pm.

The Vivaz is a fantastic new 8.1 megapixel camera phone that can shoot superb video in HD, and comes with a tonne of features not found on other camera phones that ensures the pictures you take are as good as they would be from a dedicated digital camera.

Pre-order the Sony Ericsson Vivaz in Silver or, exclusively to Vodafone a stunning Ruby Red online and receive an extra 300 minutes for free.

• FREE from £30
• 600 minutes
• unlimited texts
• 500 MB of internet and webmail
• Plus the online exclusive of 300 extra minutes!

Head on over to the Vodafone site for more details.

Nokia made official the X6 16GB via its blog today, availability should start on the 24th February and excludes Come With Music.

Today sees the Nokia X6 get its very own baby brother in the form of a new 16GB model. Unlike its 32GB sibling, the 16GB version doesn’t Come with Music but its sizable on board storage still boasts enough space for 5,500 tracks. Outside that substantial storage sits a lush 3.2-inch widescreen capacitive touchscreen and four new finishes: all black, all white, white with pink highlights and white with yellow highlights. 

Typical specifications from a high end Nokia smartphone are all there: 3G, GPS, WiFi, 5 megapixel camera, and TV out, but what’s nice is that the X6 will come bundled with Spore by EA, and Asphalt4 and DJ Mix Tour, both by Gameloft.

Price should range around the £300 mark and will no doubt be free on contract.

The Beeb is coming to your blower — the BBC has announced three mobile phone apps, to be launched this year. Like Sky, the BBC will offer separate news and sport apps. It will also serve up a dedicated iPlayer app.

The apps will be available on assorted mobile platforms: iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Symbian and Palm’s webOS were all mentioned. More apps will follow the initial three, perhaps offering access to niche BBC content such as its education services, or Bargain Hunt. We reckon big-name brands such as  EastEnders or Doctor Who could even have their own apps.

It’s not yet clear whether these will be paid apps or whether the BBC’s licence fee-funded nature will make them free, or what the international licensing issues will be for overseas users.

Eric Huggers, Auntie’s director of future media and technology, delivered the news in a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress. He shared the stage with Spotify boss Daniel Ek, although there was no comparable announcement from the music-streaming service.

The apps serve up BBC content with thumbnails that are scrolled sideways, rather than the vertical scrolling favoured by most iPhone apps — as in our mockup image above. The first BBC app will be the news, arriving in the iPhone App Store in April. Further apps and versions for other phones won’t be far behind.

Via

All About Symbian have just published an exclusive revealing that Skype is now available for S60 5th Edition. That means you can enjoy the full Skype experience on handsets like the N97, Mini, 5800 and X6, although you may have to close few apps to get things running smoothly on the N97.

Skype for Symbian will allow you to:

• Make free Skype-to-Skype calls to other Skype users anywhere in the world
• Save money on calls and texts (SMS) to phones abroad
• Send and receive instant messages to and from individuals or groups
• Share pictures, videos and other files
• Receive calls through an online number
• See when Skype contact are online and available to chat or call
• Easily important contacts from the native phone address book

You can get going by pointing your mobile browser to skype.com/m (N95 onwards) and downloading when prompted and then head on over to AAS for lots of screenshots.

The unofficial IMDB widget for Symbian 5th devices such as the Nokia 5800, N97, X6, 5230, 5530, Samsung i8910 HD and the Sony Ericsson Satio is now available.

Features:

• Search IMDb for people
• Search IMDb for movie/tv titles
• Browse through episodes
• Quickly extend the search to other services google, youtube, wikipedia, ebay, amazon

Supported Devices:

• Nokia N97 / N97 Mini
• XpressMusic 5800
• X6
• Pretty much all the rest Symbian 5th Edition phones

Download the widget from dailymobile.se forums s60v5 application section

For those of you waiting for Nokia to hurry up and make Symbian usable and generally rocking, the road to glory took a step forward recently with this preview of Symbian ^3, whilst not completely rocking the cross platform code that is QT which also powers Maemo 6, it still never the less looks pretty nifty and will be seen on handsets later this year.

If this video is anything to by, its going to please Symbian fans no end. It even has the mythical ‘pinch to zoom’.

The first devices running the new platform are expected to ship as early as Q3 this year. Along with more efficient memory management, allowing more apps to run in parallel, Symbian^3 also includes support for HDMI, so users can plug their device into a TV and watch a 1080p movie. The new graphics architecture will use hardware acceleration to offer users a much improved user interface, with a refresh rate of 60fps as opposed to the current 15fps.

The new homescreen supports multiple pages for widgets, enabling the user to just flick between each one. Across the board we’ll also see a range of network improvements, including the ability to automatically switch from cell network to WLAN automatically, without user interruption. The platform is also ready for 4G networks.

Sony Ericsson has quickly followed up the recently-announced Vivaz with a QWERTY enabled version: the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro running Symbian S60 5th.

The Vivaz Pro, which adds a full QWERTY keyboard to the original Vivaz that was announced last month. The Vivaz Pro offers some impressive specs – 3.2-inch screen, HD video recording, GPS, WiFi, 3.5mm headphone jack -  and the slide-out QWERTY keyboard looks fairly comfortable. Unfortunately, SE took the original’s 8-megapixel camera, and shaved it down to 5.1-megapixels. That shouldn’t make someone want to stray from the S60 device,  the pro version comes with a VGA port, which you will find not on the original, so you can show off your amateur  photography and video on your TV.

Hit up the read link to get the full specs and if it peaks your interest, its due Q2 2010.

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Looks like Nokia is going to avoid Symbian version 2 and jump straight onto version 3 in the third quarter of 2010. To make thing more exciting Nokia states:

The Symbian version 4 is believed to be based on the Qt cross-platform application development framework developed by Trolltech, which Nokia acquired in June 2008, said industry sources. The Qt will allow software developers to develop application software supporting Symbian and Maemo platforms simultaneously, added the sources.

The multi-touch focused operating system will run alongside the Maemo-based devices, S60 smartphones and S40 feature phones.
Nokia also suggests they will launch Maemo 6-based devices in the second half of 2010.

Source

Espoo, Finland – Nokia has today announced plans to release a new version of Ovi Maps for its smartphones that includes high-end walk and drive navigation at no extra cost, available for download at www.nokia.com/maps. This move has the potential to nearly double the size of the current mobile navigation market. The new version of Ovi Maps includes high-end car and pedestrian navigation features, such as turn-by-turn voice guidance for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries, as well as detailed maps for more than 180 countries.

"Why have multiple devices that work that work in only one country or region? Put it all together, make it free, make it global and you almost double the potential size of the mobile navigation market ," explained Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia. "Nokia is the only company with a mobile navigation service for both drivers and pedestrians that works across the world. Unlike the legacy car navigation manufacturers, we don’t make you buy maps for different countries or regions even if you’re only visiting for a few days. We offer both navigation and maps free of charge, with all the high-end functionality and features that people now expect."

"The large-scale availability of free-of-charge mobile phone navigation offerings using high-quality map data will be a game changer for the navigation industry," said Thilo Koslowski, Vice President Automotive and Vehicle ICT at Gartner. "Such offerings will accelerate mass market adoption for navigation solutions and shift innovation focus to location-based services that go beyond traditional routing benefits."

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