Via AAS. Impressions from the comments on the interwebs mention the following changes:

• Anti-hacking measures
• New weird bug that mixes english with whatever language you selected for phones with changed product code (don’t know how that’d happen, but it’s the word on the street.)
• Bold application names on the menu. (As seen on the Bluetooth, Kreat. WLAN on the screenshot above.
• Preinstalled N-Gage games.

So I’ll skip it for now, after a changelog or after it’s found out to be hackeable I’ll install it.

Just put this .txt (Save as) in C:\private\10202be9\ and reboot. It works!

From Nokioteca, via Daily Mobile

As usual, this one’s for hacked phones only. I thought I had made a post about this earlier but no. Better, since now this post can be updated with phones that come with Share Online on the rom (e.g. v30 N95)

Let’s start with identifying what puts that in the standby. The culprit is a file called SoActiveIdle.dll. It stays at !:/sys/bin/

So if your phone didn’t came with SO3.0, it is mearly a case of hacking your phone, disabling caps, and deleting that file.

But when that file is in the rom (Z:/), it gets trickier. UPDATE: You have to make the OS look for the file in drive C:/, and to do that you have to install a Share Online Upgrade from europe.nokia.com/A4388352 (The one it comes with is 3.0.08(13) and this one is 3.0.08(23). After that you can modify the SoActiveIdle.dll.

You can’t just erase it, as then the OS will load the Z: version, you have to corrupt it. I did this by opening the .dll in notepad, changing a few characters in the file, and then copying it back to C:/sys/bin. Rebooted and the shortcut was gone!

So long story short, you can just install a Share Online upgrade, download my modified dll, throw it on C:/sys/bin, reboot and enjoy the clean active standby!

Thanks Ben for noticing I had missed something :P

UPDATE 2: Or you could just do this. Which removes share online AND search, god bless Symbian-Freak :P (found here)

Man I really dislike it, bugs came back, the benefits are negligeble, and the only new cool thing is a new theme (in my opinion).

Let’s see the changelog:

• Nokia Maps 2.0 built-in
• Full N-Gage client
• Nokia Search 4.0 with Google plug-in
• Share online 3.0
• Enablers for Comes With Music
• Download! application updated (v 3.1.50)
• Upgrade to Music Player
• Update for Flash Lite 3 (improved viewing of sites like YouTube)
• Current consumption improvements (for e.g. WLAN scanning)
• New baseline for VoIP (with significant error corrections)

Now my complains

• Nokia Maps 2.0 built-in (old version already, you can download a newer build on europe.nokia.com/maps)
• Full N-Gage client (comes installed in drive C: instead of Z: (rom), negating any space saving. besides that, it is already obsolete too, since 5230 and N96′s version (1.10) is available to download)
• Nokia Search 4.0 with Google plug-in (still slow and useless, not the new firmware’s fault really, plus is occupies 2 lines of active standby now, weird)
• Share online 3.0 (as it comes in Z:, I can’t remove C:/sys/bin/SOActiveIdle.dll, to get rid of the standby shortcut. Again not really a firmware fault UPDATE 3: found a solution)
• The camera buttons bug is back. When the backlight goes out, the gallery and volume/zoom keys flash blue. This bug was solved back in firmware V12.)
• Menu is bugged out, showing it’s icon, leaving less space to apps’ icons. (see screenshot below)
• Auto screen rotation is slow, as with other Nseries, Samir‘s rotateMe is better (not that I use it that much, just for turning the screen 180 degrees)

I haven’t really noticed the improvements to the music player/flash lite/battery life, but I guess it’s too soon. Anyway, I expect a V31 firmware soon.

Screenshots via AAS

UPDATE:

Found a difference in the Music Player, the controls are now blue instead of green:

Compare with V20

There is a new option under configurations in the connection settings (because I’m sure Configurations was the last one):

And the last change, is that the display rotation that happens when you open the multimedia slider got slower (!). Now it’s open, wait a second, then the display rotates. The same speed as auto rotate.

I think I’ll make a video to show the new speed, but it’s very annoying.

UPDATE 2:

Someone found a way to get rid of the menu icon, only until a restart, but still. This, as random as it seems, works.

And another change I noticed, they removed the transitions option (which didn’t work) from V21 firmware:

This option isn’t available anymore on V30. (Not that it did anything)

Today’s post is a quick little tip, just to break the silence.

There’s times you know there is an wifi access point nearby, and you have the password or whatever you need to get to the internet, but your phone is not detecting it, even when nearby laptops are getting it. There’s an option to change that.

Go to Menu -> Settings -> Connection -> Wireless LAN -> Options -> Advanced Settings -> Yes -> Disable Auto config and finally scroll down that you’ll find the screen in this post. You can disable the power saving mode for WLAN, and the device’s range increases greatly.

But there is a reason why the buried this setting so deep, and you have to confirm what you’re doing a few times. When the phone says this option saves power, it means it! To the point that one day I forgot to turn it on after an wifi session, and I seriously thought there was something wrong with my battery. It drains power like nothing else.

But when you’re in an email emergency, and need your internets, this setting comes in handy. Just remember to turn in on again afterwards and you should be fine.

I had recorded a video to illustrate this post, but had forgotten to post it. Err… Here it is then. =P

This saturday, my modem decided to die, just after business hours too, so I’d have to wait until monday to order a new one. So it was up to my phone to keep me connected meanwhile. And, surprisingly for anyone who tryed to tether an older phone (memories of my 6600 :p), it was incredibly straight forward!

I started connecting my phone to my mac in PC Suite mode, just to see what would happen, I figured I’d have to download thousands of drivers and whatnot, but that was not the case. As soon as I opened the Network prefpane, a new connection appeared on the sidebar:

A couple settings after, and I was connected! The only thing that slowed me down for a while was the modem type, but that was solved pretty quickly by clicking the Advanced… button and selecting the right “vendor” from the drop down menu:

So there, I was online again, kudos to whoever at Nokia or at Apple who made this so simple. The only downside to all of this really is the speed

I really wouldn’t mind having a N95-3 now. :P

Highlights:

• Perfect sound! (see the last version for comparison, awful video)
• Future SegaCD/MegaCD support!
• Multiple savestates
• Better landscape rendering?
• Loading times increased :(
• Finally a non-pixelated icon :P

This version was released at My-Symbian forums, but the download is for registered members only, so I mirrored it here.

Recently I found out about this Landscape Pro V2 that allows you to rotate your s60′s screen both ways, and I wondered how did the app handle it? Manual turning or did S60 had a secret inverse landscape mode?

Turns out that it is the former, and now I’m trying to documentate the differences between the behavior of certain app.

It unlocks the N95 8GB exclusive landscape screensaver, but it actually shows up upside down when holding the N95 270º (just the way it shows up in the N95 8gb).

Menu acts oddly too, it can show up two ways:

Normal landscape view (but the softkeys are inverted in this view, meaning the up left one is options and the right one is exit, just like normal portrait.) (This also happens with custom UI apps, like Nokia Maps 2.0)

Or it can also show up as the native inverse landscape orientation (!!!)

In this way the softkeys are normal and apps act just like normal landscape, just that the blue bars are inverted.

Other example of the native inverse landscape mode:

Now for the even weirder things, as you know the front camera app forces the phone to go to portrait mode when opened in the normal landscape mod, but it allows itself to show up on the inverse landscape:

(This showed up upside down in the N95, with the inverted softkeys, just like the menu)

The regular camera also handles this new orientation surprisingly well:

Just the softkeys stuck to the left side of the screen, like the should to stay near the real keys, expected behaviour.

(btw,the image shows upside down, because there is no way of rotating the sensor, of course)

And then, there’s a couple apps that just screw up everything, for example Device Status (rip :(), didn’t recognize any key press, besides the review/gallery key, so I couldn’t take a screenshot, but when turning it into portrait it showed up like this:

And then there is just some bugs that will probably be ironed out when this landscape mode comes out (FP2?!?), like rotating via software to inverse landscape and then manually to portrait (opening the slide) give you this:

So this is what I have discovered about this mode until now, I had to restart my phone and it is turning on again right now :P But again, I’m impressed of how well S60 handles a screen orientation that isn’t supposed to be there! Ah the benefits of a mature platform!

Edit: N-Gage app also looks weird:

It was physically upside down when launched in the inverse landscape mode. So I can assume that every app that forces the phone into portrait mode (N-Gage, screensaver, front camera) will screw up the screen. And if the N-Gage app doesn’t know how to react to this inverse landscape mode it doesn’t give me hope that we’ll see this mode in FP2… Ah well, maybe in Touch.

But people don’t realize that this app is competing not with the internal browser (which btw, setting google as your homepage is cheating), it’s rival is Nokia’s own Search app, and it completely kicks its ass. See the videos below for comparison. I also measured the time between the first keystroke to when ebay starts loading in the browser.

Nokia Search app, 53 seconds

Google Search app, 13 seconds (and just because I missed the link when clicking in the browser =P)

And just for fun

Browser Bookmark, 24 seconds

You can take your own conclusions, my personal choice is the google bookmark, since it’s moderately fast and it doesn’t have a ugly shortcut like the Google app.

For me, if the google app had a standard standby plugin (which Nokia really need to open the api for) it would be a killer app.If only because it opens and connects the browser in the background, while you’re typing. So when you’re searching for big things, it takes off a HUGE part of the loading process.

And this again shows what a joke Nokia Search is. They should tear apart the device search and the web search, to make the web part faster. (But I still love the device search feature).

EDIT: To demonstrate why the pre-loading of the browser in the Google app is awesome, here’s two videos with a larger search string:

Rumors with Google Search, 18 seconds

Rumors with Browser, 31 seconds

The difference is that when you open the browser it stops to connect, the “Connecting via internets” dialog you see. In the Google app it connects on the background, definitely speeding up the process.