Another year, another attempt at a playable piano on Symbian - and yet again the implementation is somewhat limited and flawed. Which is not to say that you can't make a great racket on Grand Piano Recorders, thanks to the developer's implementation of reverb-heavy piano tones that ring long after you tap each key and a rudimentary recording system. However, don't expect to play anything serious on this!

We know that Symbian supports multitouch on capacitive screens. We know that it supports polyphonic music playback. We know slick and responsive UIs are possible. Yet combining all of these into one application in the form of a playable mini piano seems to elude every developer. Maybe the application use case itself is just too niche?

Grand Piano Recorders plays what sound like genuine grand piano note samples when you tap each key and each sample continues to play to completion even when you start tapping other keys and adding their sound to the originals. The latency for each key is kept very low, which helps a sense of realism, but there's no true multitouch - any chords have to be played in 'arpeggio' form.

The notes shown in the screenshot below are the default, but you can swipe left and right to see other octaves on the piano, even while notes are ringing out.

The recording function (there's no export or save function, sadly) simply records your taps to RAM and plays them back on request. Handy to remember a tune that comes to you and saved as long as you keep the application open. Interestingly, there's enough polyphony here that you can play along to your recording - for example setting up a bass line and then playing a melody part over the top.

All in the name of fun, really, this isn't quite capable of being a serious musical tool. But worth £1 in the Nokia Store, I thought?