Sites covering Nokia, Symbian and Meego phones and software with news, reviews, downloads and forums

Nokia Conversations
conversations.nokia.com/ (xhtml-mp)

Nokia Conversations which calls itself, "The Official Nokia Blog" is one of the handset maker's primary ways of interacting with users. It's really more of a tech news site than a typical dry corporate blog. Conversations is about firmware updates, game and app reviews and recommendations and coverage of Nokia in the news. And in keeping with the blog's name it's a two way communication channel, reader comments are accepted and encouraged. Nokia doesn't appear to censor negative comments either as it's very easy to find them on the site.
Conversations is available on the mobile web too. For the mobile edition Nokia turned to Mippin, a third party service that generates a rather attractive mobile site from any RSS feed. There are a lot of similar services but Mippin seems to be the market leader in both adoption and attractiveness of the finished product. Mippin sites include blog comments, although you can't leave comments. You can tweet or email stories from within Mippin and there's a social networking aspect as well, registered Mippin users can rate and recommend sites and stories and follow Mippin friends to see what they are sharing, reading and recommending.

All About Symbian
www.allaboutsymbian.com/mobile/ (cHtml)
The leading Symbian site. News, reviews and forums for users of Symbian OS phones. Updated daily.

Ovi Blog
blog.ovi.com/ (xhtml-mp)
The official Ovi Blog now has a mobile version created with WordPress Mobile Pack. The site has tips and tricks for using Ovi services, product release announcements, polls and contests to win free stuff. The current contest is for a trip to Nokia World in London. including accommodations and airfare from anywhere in the world!

Symbian Foundation Blog
blog.symbian.org/ (xhtml-mp)
The official voice of The Symbian Foundation. Content includes news, product announcements and high-level technical discussion relating to the popular open source operating system.

My Symbian
mobile.my-symbian.com/ (cHtml)
wap.my-symbian.com/wap/ (wml)

The Nokia Blog
thenokiablog.com/ (xhtml-mp)
Mark Guim's blog features news, guides, reviews, previews and videos covering Nokia devices and software.

3-Lib
3lib.ukonline.co.uk/ (cHtml)
Tools, tips, applications and specs for for all Symbian devices from the Psion PDAs to the latest phones. Home of the Phones Show video podcast published weekly since 2006.

My Nokia Blog
mynokiablog.com (xhtml-mp)

Jay Montano's My Nokia Blog is one of my favorite Nokia specific sites. Covering Symbian and Maemo and updated daily the site is full of tips for making the most of your Nokia smartphone. There are also reviews of the newest Nokias with plenty of quality photos and videos and a catalog of free apps, games and themes.
As a WordPress.org site, My Nokia Blog benefits from WordPress' built in mobile support which detects mobile devices and delivers a couple of different mobile formated themes, one for touch devices and one for non-touch.

FreeEpoc
www.freepoc.org/ (cHtml)

The S60 Blog
s60blog.com/ (xhtml-mp)
Anirudh Sharma's The S60 Blog covers the latest from the Symbian world with editorials, news, reviews, guides, videos and a selection of app and theme downloads for Symbian S60 and Nokia Devices. The S60 Blog's mobile version is generated using the wp-pda WordPress plugin.

Nokia Experts
nokiaexperts.com/ (xhtml-mp)

Remember Mathew Miller at ZD Net's Smartphones and Cell Phones? He's the guy who wrote the ultimate T-Mobile G1 launch day review with five videos and 260 images including a shot of every single screen and dialog box on the phone!
Matthew's back with a new site, his third and it covers my favorite mobile hardware brand. It's called Nokia Experts and the topic is Nokia phones and software for them. Nokia Experts is available boyj on the full web and on the mobile web. The mobile edition is created with Alex King's WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in. There is no special mobile URL, if you go to nokiaexperts.com with a mobile phone you should get the mobile formatted version
Mathew has been witting about portable electronics since the days of the original Palm Pilot. think he started at PDAGeek and then went on to create two blogs under the ZD Net Blogs umbrella; The Mobile Gadgeter and Smartphone and Cellphones I've been enjoying his writing for a long time, he's an excellent writer, his reviews are very through and he doesn't hesitate to point out the flaws in the devices he covers.

SymbianOne
mippin.com/symbianone (xhtml-mp)
News blog covering Symbian games, development tools, usage case studies, market analysis and employment opportunities. Source Anything Geospatial

ZOMG its Cj
zomgitscj.com/ (xhtml-mp)
Nokia and Symbian news, reviews and tips from frequent DarlaMack.com contribtor Clinton Jeff.

The Symbian Blog
thesymbianblog.com/ (xhtml-mp)
I recently found Vaibhav Sharma's site, The Symbian Blog. The name is a little misleading as focus of the site seems to be mainly Nokia and S60 rather than Symbian as a whole. There's very little about UIQ and MOAP. But I suppose that's OK as those platforms are likely to soon become history and Symbian will become a synonym for S60.
The site is updated daily and features product announcements, hardware and software reviews and tips for getting the most of your S60 phone. It's not pure Symbian boosterism either. Vaibhav doesn't hesitate to take S60 and Nokia to task in the areas where they deserve it; like the slow, convoluted and unreliable Nokia Software Update application or that the N96 is in many ways a step backward compared to the N95. I'm really enjoying The Symbian Blog, it's timely, nicely designed, well written and makes good use of images and videos. A worthy addition to the ranks of S60 news and review sites.
The Symbian Blog just launched a mobile edition using a new mobile WordPress Plugin called MobilePress. MobilePress does what Alex King and Andy Moore's plugins do which is to detect mobile devices and deliver the full content of your blog in a stripped down, single column format. But MobilePress adds a few tricks. First it supports themes using the same structure as regular WordPress themes. There don't seem to be any custom MobilePress themes yet but I'm sure there will be soon. Another nice thing that MobilePress does is to support different themes for specific devices. You can have four themes. One each for the iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows Mobile and a generic theme for everything else. You can also tell MobilePress to deliver the default PC version of your blog to one or more of the three non-generic platforms.
One thing MobilePress doesn't do which I think is really needed in a true mobile plugin is to split pages and re-size images to control page weight. To be fair the other WordPress mobile plugins don't either but it's still a problem that needs to be solved. As it stands, The Symbian Blog's pages average about 40 KB, too large for feature phones using the Openwave and Motorola Browsers. Other than that MobilePress looks quite promising, I'll try to set it up on a test site and share my impressions.
Symbian Tweet
www.symbiantweet.com/ (xhtml-mp)
The mobile edition of a lively, frequently updated tech news blog . Symbian Tweet offers news, game and app reviews and tips and tricks for Nokia, Ovi, Symbian, Maemo and Meego users.

WOMWorld/Nokia
www.womworld.com/nokia/ (xhtml-mp)

Nokia's WOMWorld received a redesign last week. Gone are the dozens of static product images which were only interesting the first time you viewed the site. The new layout is lighter, cleaner looking and loads much faster.
A nice side effect of the redesigns is that WOMWorld is now available in a mobile friendly version, created with Crowd Favorite's WordPress Mobile Edition.
WOMWorld is a news aggregator that pulls together the latest news and opinions about Nokia from blogs, social networks and mobile phone enthusiast forums. It's also the home of the Trial a Nokia Program which loans the latest handsets to bloggers and active forums users.

Nokia N97 Fanatics
www.n97fanatics.com/ (xhtml-mp)

The N97 is Nokia's flagship model, at least until the N900 comes out. It didn't get very good reviews initially but with last week's release of new v 2.0 firmware I'm seeing a lot of positive reports about the handset. The N97 seems to be selling like hotcakes too, moving two million units in the first three months to become Nokia's best selling Symbian device.
Some of those two million have likely been to N97 Fanatics to read the best break down I've seen of what exactly is in firmware 2.0 as well as a comprehensive hands-on 2.0 review.
N97 Fanatics is Mike Macias' newest site. Mike ran Nokia's S60 Ambassador program, until it was recently shut down, and has a couple of other model specific sites; E71fanatics.com and theN82blog.com. N97 Fanatics looks to be a great place for N97 users and prospective buyers to hang out and read the extensive coverage of the phone as well as apps, games and themes for it. There are also inks to the best current deals on the phone and an active N97 users forum on the site.
The mobile edition of N97 Fanatics uses Crowd Favorite's. WordPress Mobile Edition plugin to generate mobile formatted versions of all the site's pages except the forums. There is at least a link on the mobile site to the desktop version of the forums, which load quickly and are actually quite usable in either the Nokia browser or Opera Mini.

Nokia Mobile Talk
www.nokiamobiletalk.com/ (xhtml-mp)
Nokia Mobile Talk is a popular blog featuring reviews and news updated several times a day. The focus is on the high end Symbian and Maemo devices and Nokia's Web services. The mobile edition of Nokia Mobile Talk is automatically generated using the Mobilepress plug-in for WordPress.

The Meego Blog
themeegoblog.com/ (xhtml-mp)
Formerly Maemo Central. A new blog from The Symbian Blog's Vaibhav Sharma covering news, reviews, guides and videos of Maemo and Meego devices and applications.

SymbianFreeware
www.symbianfreeware.mobi (xhtml-mp)

Independent Symbian Blog
www.i-symbian.com/ (xhtml-mp)

Asri al-Baker's been a Symbian enthusiast since the Psion days. He published i-Symbian for many years until shutting it down last year. Asri recently started up his blog again as "The Independent Symbian Blog". It's updated daily with items on the latest Symbian hardware and software including some of the best coverage I've seen of Opera Mobile 10 for Symbian. Asri uses the MobilePress plugin for WordPress to generate the mobile version of The Independent Symbian blog.

OviFlash
oviflash.com/ (xhtml-mp)
Third party directory and reviews of mobile Flash games and applications in Nokia's Ovi Store with direct links to the item's Ovi download page. Source: FlashLite4Nokia

S60.com
blogs.nokia.com/s60blogs/ (xhtml-mp)
S60.com is a Nokia owned site promoting the S60 smartphone platform. In addition to a web site, S60 also has an attractive mobile site which has some interesting and useful content for current and prospective S60 users. I like that there is a complete database of all S60 devices, past and present, with fairly detailed specifications. There is also a short page of hints and tips, a page of news releases, another one highlighting several recently released applications, a download section, an event calendar and links to a couple of other Symbian themed mobile sites. The site is unusual in that it uses a background image, rare on mobile sites and not widely supported by mobile browsers - but it sure looks good on the Openwave V7 browser on my Motorola :).
Update Nov-2009: S60.com was shut down by Nokia in 2009 when the S60 brand was retired in favor of just plain "Symbian" Some archived content from Nokia's S60 era can be found at blogs.nokia.com/s60blogs/

Symbian-Guru
www.symbian-guru.com/ (xhtml-mp)
A great news and tech blog for Symbian users. It's frequenty updated with news, reviews and tips for getting the most out of your Symbian phone.



