
Nice festive touch from Sony Ericsson, they've got a flash game you can use to make a custom snow dome and email it to a friend, it also appears to be available as a J2ME game for a number of Sony Ericsson phones, available for direct download from the game site or by visiting www.snowshake.com from your mobile phone (which was down when I tried it).
Verdict? "Bah humbug" or "Ho, ho, ho"? I reckon it's a hearty "Ho, ho ho!"
I've been playing with the new beta of Google Maps for Mobile on the E61for a week or so, and it's been rather amusing with its pseudo-gps based on cell mast locations.
Amusing however isn't really the most appropriate adjective to describe what should be a useful application. But, in this case it is the most apt. In my experience the location finding is very hit and miss, as it appears that Google only has GSM mast location data for Orange UK, so if you've got a nice fat 3G signal Google Maps has nfi where you are. This makes me wonder if Google are using an elderly (public?) database for mast location, after all Orange's 3G network has been live for 4 years or so. Perhaps this situation will improve a little when Google start to use more user contributed data - if your phone has a GPS, Google collect location and mast data, and hopefully update their database.
Additionally as a reliable app (if we ignore the surreal nature of a location aware app that has no idea where you are), Google Maps falls well short, just disappearing when put into the background, or exiting if it loses a network connection. Hello? The real world has tunnels and valleys where you might just have no signal...
Perhaps the most disappointing feature of Google Maps for Mobile is that Google are building a huge database of mast locations with our help, but the only way to access it is through their application. This type of data is crying out to be open licensed in the spirit of FreeThePostCode, OpenAerialMap or OpenStreetMap. Why can't Google do the decent thing here, are they really evil?