Over the last few years, I've had a burning conviction that's been growing and growing as I watch the current craze for 'Apps' blossom. Now, I've nothing against genuine applications or games, but it has to be said that a large number of so-called 'Apps' are simply scraping or managing exactly the same data as you get right now, on any phone, for free. And my way there are no installations, no complications and no hassle. Apps? Pah - I've a new slogan to rival Apple's. "There's a Bookmark for that!"
In this feature, Ewan summarises a variety of ways of using your Symbian smartphone to marshall the ever-growing list of 'things you've got to do' - some apps, some widgets and some cloud-based solutions, so something here should take your fancy?
It used to be just receiving a call, or picking up an email via a push SMS (good old email-to-text gateways back in the nineties). Now, to impress people with your phone in the pub, you need something a little bit better - and it tends to be a game. So what should your Symbian-powered touchscreen smartphone be ready to show off when called into action? Ewan and I run through the Top Ten contenders...
I was asked a very good question last week: "Why do you stay with Symbian when there's a world of wonder with iPhone and Android?" I have to admit to finding a number of positives in these other platforms, sometimes accompanied by positives in their hardware, but it's true that I do keep coming back to Symbian as the OS powering my smartphone-of-choice. Investigating my own leanings and trying to justify them, read on for the top 10 reasons why I stay with Symbian.
Nokia's Podcasting is a wonderful media consumption tool. But, aside from its own somewhat limited 'Directory', Nokia doesn't make it simple to get new podcasts into Podcasting's feed 'system'. In this tutorial, David Gilson looks at way of using Google reader on your desktop computer to harvest interesting podcasts and import their feeds into your smartphone.
Nokia's own Internet Radio application - or rather its absence on its S60 5th Edition phones - left a pretty big hole in the power user's software catalogue. In this feature, Ewan investigates a number of (mostly free) alternatives - can you still stream radio to your smartphone in 2010?
Last week saw my departure from safe waters into the world of hardware modding, in an attempt to get round the problems in Samsung's latest firmware for its i8910 HD flagship, ending with me installing firmware 3.17. In this followup article, I talk about what came next, some of the issues I faced, how I tried to overcome them and what I've had to learn to live without.
Mobile Documents promises to significantly improve the email experience on Symbian devices, tackling — among others — the challenge of working with large or multiple email attachments while on the road. I take a look at this new email application, which has just been released as an invitational beta, and ask if it is the better email “mousetrap”.
David Gilson recently performed a big feature on Twitter applications on S60. Mind you, thanks to the feedback of AAS readers, he has now expanded his survey to now cover an eye watering seventeen options for S60 users wanting to get more out Twitter. Gulp. Read on!
