Monthly Archives: February 2009
The title says it all really. The latest beta version of the Panels SDK has been released, and is available now to download free from the Sony Ericsson developer portal.
The new beta includes Open GL ES support and allows you to access the internal hardware graphics acceleration on the X1.
If you’re a developer with any questions drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch with the right people at Sony Ericsson.
We’ve got 4 new panels – Skype, CNN, On the road, and Mytopia, coming to the X1. They are being unveiled today at MWC and after a period of testing should be available for download on the /fun section of the Sony Ericsson website. So what do they do?
Skype: See at a glance which of your contacts are online, easily call or instant message them in “just a couple of clicks,” and as far as I can tell from the pre-release material, there’ll also be some kind of graphical customisation using evening, daylight, or event based effects.
CNN: Live news sport and weather direct to your phone and access to i-report (CNN’s citizen journalism tool.) You can browse news by category, tell it what you’re interested in and get it to send you local news based on your phone’s location
On the road: a driving panel. gives you big touch buttons and simplifies call handling / media streaming / GPS tools.
Mytopia: Gives you access to the online bingo and poker games on mytopia.com
These will all be made available for download as well as all the shortlisted entries to the content awards.
I’ll update this as soon as I have more information, pics etc…
Sam
UPDATE: image courtesy of omio – also worth checking out there is a video of the CNN panel in action
The guys over at PointUI have just released the beta version of their new home-2 software.
I only installed it this morning but I’ve already been won over. It is intuitively laid out, easy to navigate and slickly rendered. The beta has quite limited functionality but it’s a great taster of what’s to come when they release the pro version, and perfectly useable in it’s own right. It’s free and available for download in panel form from the products section of the PointUI website.
feel free to leave any feedback re: the Xperia panel in the comments, we’ll collate it and get it back to PointUI.
Sony Ericsson announced the winners of their content awards for 2008 this morning. You can see all the other winners on the content awards site but the prize for the best new Xperia panel went to SPB software for the SPB traveler panel.
The panel uses the internet connection and the GPS on the X1 to provide you with a number of useful travelling tools including a currency convertor, flight search, multi time zone diary and a phrasebook. For more information check out SPB’s website.
Update:
The nominees were:
Mobisystems (English to Japanese dictionary)
PlusFourSix (for their work on 3 sweden’s operator panel)


