N-Gage Screens and my catch of the day

So I spent a good chunk of my morning snapping screenshots of N-Gage games from my N95
so media could use it (disclosure: I work for Nokia. But no, no one paid me to write this). They turned out quite nice and I thought I'd stick'em up here.


This here's the 'dashboard' where at a glance, you can see yourself and a summary of all the information.


The games tab lists the games that you've downloaded and can play.


The rankings tab gives you more information about your reputation (I'm nil!), your friends and how many N-Gage points you've scored through playing offline or online. There's also a friends tab which lets you message online friends or leave them offline messages. You can also hook up with them to start multiplayer games.


Finally, the Showroom tab lets you download games (you can play the trial versions for free) and purchase them subsequently. I bought my first game (yes, bought you people), Creatures of the Deep, for US$ 7.99 which I didn't think was too bad a price. Creatures of the Deep people - fishing is fun.

Creatures of the Deep - why I like fishing.

Kel told me he thought this game was meh and no one would be patient enough to patiently sit by waiting for fish to bite. Especially not in a virtual simulator. I still wanted to try it out and after a couple of passes with the Trial version (they let you score points even with the trial version) I was hooked (no pun intended). This ain't a review, it won't be fair, but I just wanted to share a few screens.


I love the loading screens. Fun quotes appear with each screen.


The world map and the fact you can travel to different locations to fish I thought was fantastic. Being an RPG nut, I liked that you could level up and upgrade your equipment. Level 10 fisherman anyone?


Every little resort has a shop where you can upgrade your gear to catch bigger fish. That piddly beginner's rod you start with won't catch a shark.


Fishing starts with you clicking on a power button to cast your line. The further you cast, the more you'll have to reel in, but also, the better chance of a good catch whilst you're reeling in.


Once it's cast, you have to wait a bit. Urm...to be fair to Kel, this is the part that I find a bit tedious. But I'm not the patient sort anyway.


A bit of smart tapping, and soon, you get a hook! Start struggling to reel it in. Too fast and the line breaks. Too slow and the fish gets away.


Of course, once you've reeled your catch in, you're told what it is and given some experience points (to level up). In this case, my expert skill means I caught a 66.3 KG Yellowfin Tuna.


And made it to the media. :)


And I'll even sneak a screen of FIFA 08.

My N95 now knows how to shut up...

... when I flip it over! Yay!

Remember sometime late in 2007 when Nokia (me client) unveiled the Symbian S60 Touch platform that will be making its debut this year with this video?



One of the key features was that the new UI will really start to take advantage of a built-in accelerometer (the thing in your device that detects if the device is moving, face down or tilted). If you watched the above video, the lady just has to flip her phone and it mutes itself. Intuitive, really.

Well, as of today, so can my Nokia N95. This is thanks to a nifty little application called FlipSilent by Tong Ren. It's not yet widely available on the net, but I got my heads up from the guy I think is Malaysia's foremost Symbian expert - Smashpop and he was even kind enough to sign it for me. (As a security feature, not all apps can be installed on your S60 device unless its signed to your IMEI (the unique ID of your device, which you can see by pressing *#06#).



You have to let FlipSilent run in background. The footprint isn't too big - about 50kb so it shouldn't make your device run too slowly.



You get to select which profile it switches to when you flip. You can also select that your phone hangs up. Or, for laughs, get it to ring even louder when you flip!

Okay, still sounds unbelievable. Well, here's a video from Smashpop (because I was too lazy to record my own) that shows what it does in real life:


FlipSilent for Symbian from smashpOp on Vimeo

Too cool? I agree.

New Nokia N95 Firmware update!

Lol. This piece of news makes me so happy, because I've always guessed a firmware update was waiting to happen, and when this finally happened...it feels great.

Check out: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/6308_The_N95_classic_hits_v20_firmw.php

For the uniniated, the update helps:

1. Faster camera-time between shots
2. Gallery loads up faster
3. Built-in Search 4.0 feature, right in your front-screen
4. Demand Paging with 30 MB free RAM after booting (sounds like a computer? This means more memory to play around with apps)
5. N-Gage Preview and Nokia Music Store applications (yeah...Ovi...mmm...)

*Disclaimer, yes, Nokia is my client, but I also own an N95 (denying the temptation to upgrade to 8GB) and I can surely blog about my own devices and my excitement over a release that affects me most as a consumer. SO there. :)