Animation is, as Disney would have told you decades ago and as Pixar will tell you these days, expensive in terms of time. Every detail of every frame has to be created, up to 25 frames per second. And, scaled down a million times, animating simple sketches on your Symbian smartphone is also time consuming. Animator is a fun new utility for creating hand-drawn animated GIFs, which can then be shared. Now, my art skills are legendary - ok, ok, legendarily limited - but I've had a go anyway, in the interests of writing up this new Symbian app.

From the description in the Nokia Store:

Unleash your creativity and create short animations directly on your phone!

• Paint up to 25 frames of animation.
• Keep track of previous painted frames with alpha layer support.
• Save and load in 5 built-in slots.
• Export your animations to GIF format and play it directly on any device!
• 5 level undo, copy/paste functions between animation frames (NEW)
• 30 color palette, and 5 pen sizes

Here's Animator in action (and apologies for the limited art skills at my end!):

Frame by frame you draw over the 'greyed' outline of the previous frame, building up the animation needed... Although you'll often be drawing anew, there are copy and paste controls on the main pen/colour selection screen, which can also save some time.

Clear explanation of the tools and controls here on the Help screen; (right) the Frames menu is where you'll pick a frame to edit or add a new frame - or simply press 'Play' and enjoy the animation so far.

You can keep up to five animation projects on the go, exporting any to animated GIF file, for onward sharing. The export process is extraordinarily slow, mind you - over minute to export my ultra-simple set of eight frames!

You can buy Animator for £1.50 in the Nokia Store or there's a free trial version, limited to 10 frames, as well. 

If you create something amazing, please do email it to me or insert it in the comments below!

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