On behalf of the editorial team, Rafe peers into the crystal ball to see what awaits the Symbian world in the next 12 months. "The mists are clearing, I can see..." Read his predictions here.

Ewan reverts back to a two-box solution with his in-depth review of the Freedom keyboard for Series 60 and UIQ smartphones. And Palm OS and Pocket PC and....

NTT DoCoMo customes can now pick up the FOMA powered F901ic, making this the seventh Fujitsu powered phone in the Far East. Vodafone KK are also starting to ship the 702NK, which is a rebadged Nokia 6630. More details from Symbian.

You know all those virus/trojans that are heralding the death of Symbian? Well, most of the peope who have any sensible knowledge of whats going on will realise it's all based on one bit of code with the name changed and a new procedure. So watch out everyone, because it jsut went Open Source (reports The Register). Lots of wacky names, strange things going on, and all preventable if you just leave bluetooth off till you need it, and don't load strange apps from warez sites.

Symbian's CEO will leave the company at the end of March 2005 (reports Symbian). David Levin will move to United Business Media. He will continue to work as the Chief Executive until then. There's no word as yet on who his successor will be.

Following on from the Sharp/NTT DoCoMo accouncement last week, Sharp have confirmed they are now licencing the Symbian OS (reports Symbian). Note they're not joining Symbian, but rather just licencing the OS, in the same way Motorola are now doing.

The two reported Trojan programs for Series 60 (Cabir - which tries to send itself via Bluetooth to another Series 60 phone) and Skulls (which replace all the Desktop Icons with Skulls) have been programmed together. Skulls-B uses the Cabir Bluetooth transfer to send the Skulls payload. Some simple hints to avoid this - don't leave your phone's Bluetooth set to discoverable, and confirm any file you recieve over Bluetooth. And if you see an Icon called "Caribe" on your phone, don't run it.

Symbian has announced that Sony Ericsson and Sharp will be using the Symbian OS in their phones developed for the NTT DoCoMo FOMA network. Symbian OS is also used in Fujitsu existing FOMA phones, the Vodafone 702NK (6630 variant) and the first Motorola phone for the network is also announced as using Symbian OS. With this announcement Symbian tightens their hold on the lucrative Japanese high end market.

As of today SPMark™04 is available for end users. SPmark will do a set of comprehensive OpenGL tests to measure your phone's graphics performance and it features a detailed system information module that reveals technical data about your device. It supports handsets with Symbian 6 and 7 operating systems and Series60 or UIQ user interface so that includes most of the major if not all handset manufacturers out there. The best bit is that SPMark is FREE! Get it here

With the title of Independent, Non-Executive Chairman, Sir Peter Gershon joins the board of Symbian, taking up the space if not the exact title, of David Potter (Psion) who resigned when Psion sold its stake in Symbian. Sir Gershon is no stranger to large organisations with different objectives; he led the review of Whitehall and local UK Government efficiency in the past. So helping Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic and all the other partners to agree on future direction shouldn't be a problem.

And theymake good reading. They've hit all their targets... 19.2 million Symbian OS handsets in the world, over 3,200 applications available, 38 products in development ...and while they acknowledge it's still not a significant percentage of the worlds mobile phone sales, they are working to get the OS into the mid-tier high volume phones to push those numbers higher.

Build your own wages calculator by following Ewan's guide to spreadsheeting on your smartphone. Read the tutorial here

Fresh from the new version of Crossfire (released November 1st), Appforge will provide Developers and Users with access to Intellisync's Data Sync software (part of Intellisync's Mobility Platform). This will allow for remote data sync, transfer and querying on the mobile device using the Crossfire runtime.

Slipstream, in a double header news release, announced not only that it's powering a Download Accelerator for Opera's next major release, but has also signed up to join the Symbian Platinum Partner to promote its data compression and acceleration technology to the Symbian OS Platform. Opera already have a nice market for their proxy based acceleration service, and we'd expect v7.6 of the browser to build on this with Slipstreams help.

According to Reuters Nokia will start using hard disks in their devices next year. Reuters refers to Apple's iPod as the first portable music player to incorporate a hard disk. Which might be a logical comparison seeing as smartphones are used by many as a portable music/video player these days. And as smartphones are becoming more and more capable of handling multimedia content, the demand for storage will surely increase.