With some criticism on the store launch, all in all the Nokia Ovi store delivers the promise of a central hub for purchasing applications and building a developer community base. What I found more intriguing was the transparency and quickness of reaction from the Nokia Conversations blog that did admit to some server hiccups. See, corporate blogs work!
[photo taken from Nokia Ovi Store screenshot]

Sad news. This June ‘09, S60 is shutting down their word of mouth campaign, the Ambassador Program.
It’s been hardly a year since the Ambassador site launched – and what a journey it has been! Over 21 thousand Ambassadors signed up, we ran 9 campaigns, and heard from you all via nearly 6000 personal accounts you’ve submitted. Such colorful reports they have been too! We can’t thank you enough for all that passion, effort and enthusiasm you have bestowed upon us. Rest assured that every one of those reports have been personally read and responded to by one of us here …read more

It’s attention back to the S60 developers who are currently running an online video contest! It’s been all about the apps lately as the group wants you to show off your best S60 Tips or do a show and tell of your favorite S60 app (mine is still PaNoMan). It’s crazy creativity that will be the judge – as well as the YouTube community who will rate your videos! The contest closes on the 20th of May leaving us with 12 days for submissions.
There are some guidelines for the contest and you can read the official page by clicking on …read more

I’m in Singapore! Although the Nokia Go Play event ended several hours ago (we took a post event trip to Equinox, a bar located at the highest peak of Singapore), there are a lot more things happening tomorrow. In the meantime let me give an overview of what took place today as Nokia launched several new products and services.

Unlike other harmless proof of concept mobile phone viruses, this S60 trojan works by sending out SMS to premium numbers in your phone book. Premium numbers are rented numbers that can cost up to $1.00 per message. The virus is unattractively named Trojan-SMS.Symb.OS.Viver.
[source with image]

Are you jealous of those Sony Ericsson users who can pair their phones with their PC / Macs with a bundled application? Well, fret no more because ControlFreak is now available for free as a Christmas gift from the guys at mtvoid.
What is ControlFreak?
ControlFreak enables you to control Winamp and the rest of your computer with your Bluetooth Series 60 phone. It has all of the music and video controls like play, pause, stop, next, previous, fast forward, rewind and volume.
ControlFreak 2 is now even better at controlling music and video thanks to full Winamp Media Library support. If you’ve …read more

The S60 blogs has posted an indepth review of the Opera Browser for S60 phones and compares this to Web browser for S60.
Here are some of the highlights:

Web browser is free. Opera browser costs 19 Euros.
Opera can cache images. Web browser can’t (darn!)
Web browser comes with an RSS reader while Opera doesn’t.
Opera browser has the option to display html or plain text easily.

You can read the full comparison here.