Lately I’ve been doing some business travelling and have set up my N82 with many nice apps that may become handy on the way. I’ve been a happy user of WorldMate for example because I think it’s one of the most comprehensive travel apps there is. When I visited San Francisco a little over a week ago I noticed that there is still one app that I desperately miss on my trips.

When traveling on business you don’t have that much time of to do shopping, see the sights and all that, but sometimes you just might find a couple of hours to play tourist. Being a huge sneaker freak, I of course always head towards the sneaker stores. The problem for me is that when I’m in a strange city and have only a couple of hours to spend on shopping, I usually do not have a clue where to head for the coolest sneakers, especially if I haven’t had the time to familiarize myself with the city beforehand.

Now, what would be handier than an app that would tell me where to go! I would get a list of shoe shops, what kind of shoes they are selling (sneakers, high heels etc) and a map to locate the store.

Any other good travel apps you'd recommend besides WorldMate? Or even better, has someone already created the prefect sneaker-locator? Managed to find a decent pair of All Stars this time anyway though.

The folks over at Kuneri have made a very impressive hand drawn animation of a Nokia N95 using only MS Paint and mouse. The clip was made to advertise KuneriLite, which is a Rapid Application Development toolkit to extend Flash Lite capabilities and create S60 apps without any Symbian knowledge. If you want to know more, check out http://bloggy.kuneri.net.

Greetings from Las Vegas, Nevada! I'm spending a few days here for the annual CTIA Wireless conference, the biggest mobile technology show in the US. There's no official S60 presence here, but I did give a presentation about the S60 runtime and developer offering at the Smartphone Summit that preceded the main event. I also had a chance to meet some of the companies in the Nokia stand that have interesting and innovative S60 applications and services.

One application that's particularly interesting is the KNFB Mobile Reader. This application helps blind and visually impaired people read printed text, and recognize printed documents, by converting the printed text into audio. The program also recognizes US currency, which is particularly useful since all US bills are the same shape and size(!)

It takes advantage of S60 3rd Edition FP 1 and the 5MP camera and Xenon flash available in the Nokia N82.

If you want to see more, I have been uploading photos from the event to Share on Ovi:

-Oren

We at Nokia care about the environment and conserving energy is very important. Nokia is joining millions of people around the world on March 29th to support EarthHour by turning off all the lights in the Nokia headquarters in Espoo and other selected sites for one hour.

Given the expansive growth of mobile communications, it is important for us here at Nokia to minimize our global environmental impact. We see the environment as being everyone’s responsibility. We are doing our bit through better product design, closer control of production processes, greater material reuse and recycling as well as incorporating sustainable practices and environmentally conscious planning.

Check out the EarthHour website to learn more!

From time to time it is important to view the world through someone else's eyes. Pangea Day connects people by harnessing the power of film and encouraging people to view the world through someone else’s eyes. Nokia is supporting Pangea Day by inviting everyone to enter the 2008 Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Awards by creating and submitting their short videos to www.ovi.com/pangeaday.

These videos will be considered for inclusion in the first Pangea Day broadcast event on May 10, 2008. If you register, you can also vote to select five finalists, who will have their videos screened during the Pangea Day broadcast and win a trip to the live Pangea Day broadcast location in Los Angele. So, be sure to make use of your S60 devices!

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and empathy while uniting millions of people to build a better future. Created by award-winning documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim in collaboration with the TED Conferences, Pangea Day's mission is to create a worldwide network of caring and concerned citizens who will make a difference.

For more information about the 2008 Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Award Competition, visit the Pangea Day website at Ovi.

Phil introduced our first Chinese language blog already in December and since then we have been working on to set up two more blogs and a front door similar to S60 Blogs for our Chinese site as well.

In addition to the first "玩转 - Play around S60" hosted by Daniel Qin, the Chinese Blogs now include "乐在鼓捣 - Fun with S60" hosted by Andy Li and "个性S60生活 - Living with S60" hosted by Paul Wen. Welcome onboard guys! Like Phil, I unfortunately can't comment much on the content due to the fact that I can't speak Chinese. However I'm sure that Daniel, Andy and Paul will be able to come up with lots of interesting topics and news to share with our Chinese speaking community.

Check out the new Chinese Blogs front door from http://blogs.s60.com/cn. All feedback is very welcome!

The S60 browser provides full web browsing experience. Recent enhancements in this area - e.g. support for commonly used Flash video content type and improved content download support - provide an even more desktop-like browsing experience. This video shows a short demo with a couple of examples of the S60 browsing experience.

Experienced developers can expand the capabilities of mobile devices and leverage the creativity of open source communities using powerful runtime technologies (C++, Open C, Java, Python). This demo features a couple of examples on what you can do with S60.

Had I been around Tampere, Finland on Dec 4th I definitely would have loved to try this. For a puzzle game addict like me controlling the world’s biggest Tetris on my N95 would have been awesome.

A group of students from Tampere University of Technology created the world's physically largest colored graphics platform by using the windows of a student house as light pixels. The games were controlled with a mobile phone over WLAN or Bluetooth. Here’s one of the may videos about the demo on YouTube:

It's now possible to upgrade the firmware of the N95 8GB through the Nokia software update service to version 15.0.015 (depending on your country and operator specific software this may not yet be available to all). This upgrade is not only about improving the quality and performance of the software, but introduces also - for the first time in devices - two major new S60 functionalities, namely Flash Lite 3 and Web Run-time.

Flash Lite 3 support means you can browse web sites with Flash video content. Sites like YouTube, MySpace, etc. can be viewed just like you do with your desktop browser. Now you don't need to be satisfied with just a subset of videos converted to mobile video formats.

Web Run-time enables new types of applications - widgets - to be installed and run on devices. Widgets are small, lightweight applications created using standard web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, style sheets, etc. There are already tens of Widgets available e.g. through the Nokia MOSH service

There is a great, more profound review on the new version by Rafe and Steve at All About Symibian

Hey all! I come bearing both good and bad news - It brings me great sadness to announce that I have accepted new challenges within the company and will be leaving the S60 blogs. It has been an *amazing* past couple years with you all here on the blogs. We've seen the number of blogs grow to 18 total, we've seen the number of readers grow rapidly each and every month, and we've seen the diversity of our readers spread all around the world.

The goal was to give each author complete ownership of their blog, breaking the barriers between company and consumer while aiming to provide you with their unbiased and unfiltered thoughts. The conversations we've had have been intriguing and the feedback you've provided about our products and services have been absolutely essential to us. I think I've achieved my initial goals, and can't thank you all enough for your participation and continued support in the S60 community.

Fortunately I won't be going far. On January 1st I begin my new role as "eMarketing Manager, Internet and Applications". I'll remain working very closely with S60 and the community, both online and offline, which I'm really looking forward to. And I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on my activities on my Jaiku channel, so please join that if you haven't already. Which leads me to our next big piece of good news…

Beginning January 1st, my good friend and colleague, Saara Bergström, will be taking over responsibilities of the S60 Blogs. I am with sincere honesty when I say that there couldn't be a better individual for the role. Saara has been working closely with the S60.com and the community for the past year and is highly knowledgeable and passionate about S60, she will no doubt do a stellar job. She'll have a blog post coming soon in her own words, and I plan to release a Voice of S60 podcast interview with her so she can tell you more about herself and her vision for the blogs.

So please join me in welcoming Saara to the S60 Blogs!!