What is the difference between symbian belle and Symbian Anna? Is it just small updation of Symbian ^3 or entirely a new os?
Belle offers six home screens and the previous siblings of Symbian have 3 home screens only.
Widgets have been redesigned and are now available in five different sizes. Widgets can be rearranged to create complete personalized home screen.
Belle has taken a neat approach to notifications through – a pull down notification tab that incorporates common setting, notification for incoming messages, missed calls, etc.
Belle has introduced a toggle widget for one touch operation of Bluetooth, profile, Wi-Fi, etc.
Lock screen is active in Symbian Belle. It will tell about missed calls, incoming message, etc. Colored wallpaper can also be added to lock screen.
Near Field Communication (NFC) is integrated in the Symbian Belle operating system.
Belle incorporates new apps such as Microsoft Lync – an IM for business, SharePoint, OneNote, Exchange ActiveSync, and PowerPoint Broadcaster.
Symbian Anna is the name for Symbian^3 PR2 (and PR means product release).
Symbian Belle is the name of the next update, and is a considerably larger update than Anna, with lots of UI changes.
Both use the same Symbian operating system, although Belle will have more updates. Most applications should be able to run on Symbian^3, Symbian Anna and Symbian Belle phones.
Symbian Anna can be updated on existing Symbian^3 phones such as the Nokia N8.
Symbian Belle can also be updated on Symbian^3 and Symbian Anna phones.
Nokia has made a specific point of making both of the updates fully compatible with older handsets on the same basic platform, so Symbian^3 handsets such as the Nokia N8 and Nokia E7 have been issued with a Symbian Anna update, and will also benefit from an update to Symbian Belle too.
That will leave a single group of high-end Symbian handsets all running on the latest Symbian Belle platform within the next few months.
So what about the updates themselves? A common question we're seeing right now is which is the bigger update – Symbian Anna or Symbian Belle? Well, we say this having not had a chance to actually try out Symbian Belle yet, but it seems obvious even at this stage that it's a far more bigger step forward than Symbian Anna is, which is great news indeed.
In terms of headline improvements, Symbian Anna offers an attractive new icon design and font, a better web browser plus updates to other Nokia services, a portrait-style QWERTY keyboard and split-screen text entry.
Symbian Belle offers a doubling of the number of homescreens you can work with, the introduction of more flexible homescreen widgets in several different sizes, a wide range of NFC capabilities (though that will of course rely on your phone itself being NFC-enabled, which of the current range only the Nokia C7 is), a new status bar which takes a neat drop-down approach to notifications, dynamic real-time multitasking previews and a lock screen that shows additional detail, such as incoming messages and missed calls.
We'll have plenty of time to delve into the specifics of each of these improvements in due course, but as a whole they certainly give us a lot to look forward to.
There's no sign yet of any device-specific features being rolled out with the Symbian Belle update, as we've seen for the Nokia C7 and Nokia N8 with Symbian Anna. Time will tell, but we're certainly not complaining about what we've seen so far.
What do you make of Symbian Belle in the light of what Symbian Anna has to offer? Do you think the new features being lined up make for a bigger step forward than we've seen in Symbian Anna? Let us know what you think in the Comments!
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JQM leaves C-grades usable, not appealing to look at. Does the market share of C-grade browsers justify making a whole new stylesheet for them? Are there any credible statistics on their popularity?
Blackberry 4.x - You can get the ans here- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1868567/what-market-share-do-each-of-the-blackberry-models-have
as u can see for 4.x its too less to worry about and its diminishing everyday.
Windows Mobile - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile#Market_share
As read from the article, the market share is very less and no major manufacturer supports. so gone case.
All older smartphone platforms and featurephones – As the link says all browsers/smartphones not supporting CSS3 media queries will experience C class experience. Here is a link to give u an idea of browsers. http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html#t021
And correspondingly for those os' or browsers the market share is way low to consider making a separate style sheet for them without media queries.
Here are metrics from a site I work on from Jan 2012 to March 22nd for mobile. Out of MANY thousands of visits:
64.49% Safari (iOS)
26.01% Android
2.95% Chrome
2.56% Mozilla Compatible Agent
2.42% Firefox
1.03% Internet Explorer
Keep in mind that market share of handsets does not exactly translate to actual web usage. A lot of people still have feature phones and other C-Grade devices. However, that's pretty irrelevant because the experience of surfing the web on those things SUCKS. The users all know it and thus they do not use it for surfing the web. I think it's noble that jQuery Mobile even tried to support them, but they really didn't have to because none (statistically speaking) of those people are surfing the web on their crappy little old devices.
What's the latest on JavaFX mobile? I'm having trouble finding any relatively current info regarding what phones (if any..?) are JFX compatible, how to distribute applications to said phones, etc. I have a current desktop application, and another semi-related mobile project is on the horizon (within the next couple months). If I can use JavaFX with minimal pains, that'd be fantastic (to minimize the number of different technologies). My gut says Android or another mobile OS/framework/technology would be the better choice at the moment...
Still trying to wrap my head around the current "reach" of JavaFX. In theory it all sounds fantastic (deskop, mobile, web, blu-ray applications in one go), but it seems to be a ways out from truly being that.
My developing experience has been pleasant so far with JavaFX if it's any consolation... :)
As a fan of JavaFX myself, I was hoping that this years JavaOne (2010) will shed some light on the topic.
Best case scenario for us developers...Larry E convinces Steve J to allow for a JRE on the IPhone.
Worst case scenario for us developers...JavaFX continues its current trajectory toward oblivion.
i need some help!, i am planning to develop such LBS Mobile Application which find nearest things based on gps data from mobile.
1.what are the best free and (preferably) open source technologies for development?.
2.What programming language to use for development of such application?.
3.what are the points to be considered?
I need the general overview of the requirements for planning, I was interested in having a general understanding of the data, tools, and frameworks required to accomplish the job.
The future proof way to write your application is using Web technologies.
Iphone and Android devices already support the W3C Geolocation API, with more on the way.
I recommend you take a look at a sample http://geo.webvm.net/ to get you started.
On Symbian phones, you can access location information via C++, java (when JSR-256 is implemented) and probably python.
You might also want to look into the Qt runtime as that is the new technology to use for Symbian development.
To start with Symbian application development, start with the Fundation's developer wiki
Both StackOverflow and Forum Nokia contain information about how to use JSR-256.
Relevant plug: There is whole chapter on LBS in Quick Recipes on Symbian OS.
Developing an application with impressive and a little complex GUI is quite easy for Pocket PC platform. But if I want the same application to run on SmartPhone platform as well, I need to make extensive changes in my application.
Smart Phone doesn't even support radio buttons.
I want my application be usable on as many mobiles as possible. Can anyone help me regarding this.
If I say that I should only develop for Pocket PC because SmartPhone platforms are a very small part of the market, to what extent is this true or false?
Or I have to develop for the both platforms? :S
I've developed for both using a single UI-- it's a bit annoying but not impossible. You have to avoid certain controls (use LinkLabels instead of Buttons, etc.), or even switch out whole forms depending on the device.
For example I have a form that really just needs a whole different layout for smartphones. I build two different versions of the form and have them both. The system picks which form to display at run-time based on the OS version. It's not a lot of extra work since the smartphone form is fairly scaled-down.
Even though there are a more pocketpc users out there, the smartphone people are very happy to have options.
I can't say if you should develop for Windows Mobile Standard or not, that's dependent upon your market and application. I do know from experience that you have to treat Standard and Professional as two completely separate platforms and can share very little code between the two. They need two different designs, both UI and program wise, and also two different approaches in terms of features and functionality.
Unless you have the need for WM standard devices then I personally would go Pocket PC only. I would say that 95% of the WM devices I have seen in the 'real world' are touchscreen pocket pcs.
I wouldn't touch Windows mobile standard with a barge pole as the devices are soo rare! I mean just look at HTC's website. Out of the 26(or something I cant be assed to count) windows mobile devices they currently sell, only 6 are Windows mobile standard!
Now that Nokia will soon ship my pre-ordered n900, I thought I would familiarize myself with mobile development - maemo seems friendly enough for a guy who's done development only on Linux since days of Amiga and C=64 and is in love with Python.
However, I have no clue whatsoever on stuff like UI:s and especially mobile UI:s - also, I would not like to learn to code just for n900 but in a more broad sense. Looks like most guides etc are very platform or device specific, so any suggestions on like "UI best practices" tutorials, books or websites that are general to all mobile platforms - not just for say Maemo or iPhone.
Actually, that is not really true. If you learn how to use the two main windowing toolkits (GTK+ and Qt) in Maemo, you will be able to write GUIs for all sorts of devices. Nokia has purchased Trolltech, the makers of Qt, and they have released all the GTK+ changes back to GNOME. This means that both Qt and GTK+ are open source so you can port them to any platform.
In fact, Nokia has already done some of the porting for you - they are porting Qt to Symbian which runs on millions of mobile phones. Both Qt and GTK+ run on many platforms, not just linux, so you can write programs for Windows with these two toolkits as well. Note that you are not going to be able to create applications that take advantage of the native operating system's Windowing software, like Aqua, but you'll be able to get a native look and feel.
Learning either one of these Windowing systems will stand you in good stead for developing GUIs and nearly any platform you can think of.
Everything you're finding is platform specific because device development simply is very platform specific. The API sets are widely different. The UI paradigms, including how controls are created and layed out, are different. The processes themselves are handled are vastly different.
There simply are no "one size fits all" rules or recommendations other than maybe broad hand-waving like "remember you have limited resources, so keep your memory footprint low" or "the processor is not a desktop, so things take longer. Code complex algorithms accordingly". As you can see, not terribly concrete or useful.
The unfortunate thing is that you really have to just pick a platform and start to learn it. If you want to try your hand at multiple platforms, you basically have to learn multiple separate skill sets (and often multiple development tools as well).
Forum Nokia has good documentation about user interfaces for mobile devices, of course these are simple general rules as already said here, but take a look to this page: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Design_and_User_Experience/ (see also the essential links at the bottom)
The mobile UI isn't GTK+/QT folks. And there is a "one size fits all".
It's called the Web. Learn HTML5 and start writing mobile applications.