The first 10 applications on your phone?

[Rafe]

What are the first 10 applications you install on your phone? That's the question that was poised, and answered, by Mark Guim of the Nokia Blog. Also weighing in with responses were a number of other S60 Bloggers: Vaibhav Sharma of the the Symbian Blog, Steve Rowlands at S60 Blogger, Gerrymoth at Nokia Addict, Zack Epstein at Symbian-in-Motion and Stefan Constantinescu at IntoMobile. Read on for a summary of the applications mentioned and their popularity.

Read on in the full article.

[snoyt]

I'd expect mobipocket to score a lot higher and Windows hotmail client (free). Location tagger, sportstracker, Tunein.fm (free radio streaming optimized for low bandwidth GPRS/3G). Share online, nav4all (free voice satnav), joikuspot, nokia internet radio and conversation. And please note that half of my first 10 applications on my N95 are Nokia add-ons...

Why opera-mini scores so high is also a complete mystery. The builtin browser with flash support beats it with both hands tied behind its back. I strongly suggest a multiblog/website wide poll (as in ONE poll published on multiple websites). It would be very interesting to see the results over a wider range of public.

[kflyer]

snoyt, Opera Mini scores so high because it is speedier and much cost effective. In mobile browsing, many believe that speed must come first. Opera Mini doesn't support flash, because it's still a web viewer and not a full web browser.
@Rafe: Don't you think that you made a mistake in linking?

[tenoce]

Why Opera Mini Browser vs. inbuilt Nokia browser?

*1 hand navigation
*no need for horizontal scroll
*faster up-down scroll
*small screen rendering
*much less data traffic due to the proxy
*much faster page download due to less data for the same page
*many banners are filtered out due to the proxy (faster, less data)
*easier link-to-link jump instead of cursor driven in-page navigation

[jah]

I use UIQ3, S60, WM6 & Palm OS 5; here are my favorite applicatoins across all these platforms:

1. Agendus (Palm, UIQ)
2. Handy Safe
3. Mobipocket
4. Projekt
5. Mail for Exchange / Road Sync
6. Opera Mini
7. Linkboy (UIQ3)
8. Quick Office (V5, E90)
9. Tracker (E90)
10. Task Man (E90)

guys, i think u mistakenly linked stefan to gerrymoth's site...

great post (as usual)!!!

[Rafe]

Quite right - now corrected - sorry Stefan.

I do use Opera Mini, but its not absolutely essential for me. I use the standard browser most of the time to be honest. The exception to this is when I am roaming in another country and this is for bandwidth / cost reasons.

Another reason to choose Opera Mini over the Nokia Browser, especially if you have an older S60v3 phone (e.g. the still popular E61i): Opera Mini seems to use less memory and be more stable.

About one time in three I use the Nokia browser it bails out with an "out of memory" error (you know, the one that asks you to close some apps, and then turns out to already have closed them all for you). Never happens to me with Opera Mini. Nokia's is also slower to load and/or render pages and occasionally crashes (without an OOM error).

This is one reason why I find this site's Java-hating "native application" evangelism so ironic.

[moylan]

* qreader
* y-browser
* ped
* python
* mini opera
* calcium
* msgexport
* mobipocket

instead of the top 10 apps that are installed a list perhaps of what apps people have on the active standby screen and what the buttons are configured to call up. 1st app on the active standby screen is search.

The primary reason I use opera mini is that you can go back in history without reload with it.

This is the single worst thing with the builtin browser in my opinion.

Load a large page, like a newspapart start page.

hit a link read it

go back to startpage - and the startpage reloads - takes like 40 sek

In Opera mini history back is instantanous (sp?)

With a large-mem system (E90) it makes no sence that the built-in browser doesnt keep history for at least a few pages. The lores overview is kept, so when you go back you see a preview of the previous page, but when you select it, it reloads every time.

I agree with the previous posts that OM is also quicker and more easy to navigate, but in comparision to the history problem those issues are minor in my view.
regards /Jaclu

[kflyer]

And if you think it's suitable, my choice is at, http://lankamobile.blogspot.com/2008...i-install.html .

[rbrunner]

This is one reason why I find this site's Java-hating "native application" evangelism so ironic.

Well, I think the trouble with Nokia's "native" browser is that it is not really native. It's running as a Symbian program, but was not written for Symbian; it's a port of the WebKit browser engine, wrapped into a S60 UI.

That's not a detail, but an important point: WebKit was not written with low-memory devices in mind. Its memory hunger probably is a bad fit for a smartphone with only a few tens of megabytes of memory at most.

A browser engine for Symbian, written from scratch with limited memory in mind, would probably behave a lot better. But of course the development of such an engine would take ages and gobble up tons of money. Won't happen anymore.

Opera Mini, on the other hand, is "only" Java alright, but probably was written from scratch with certain well-defined goals like small memory footprint and fast rendering on smartphones in mind. It looks as if the result speaks for itself. How was that - no pain, no gain?

How can all those users live without TextQuick? If there was only one application I could install, it would be that one. It should be build right into S60, but it certainly wouldn't be as fast and stable xD another must-have would be Google Maps and JoikuSpot, oh, and LightSabre.

Originally Posted by rbrunner

A browser engine for Symbian, written from scratch with limited memory in mind, would probably behave a lot better. But of course the development of such an engine would take ages and gobble up tons of money. Won't happen anymore.

Good points, but I think you also make the point I was sort of getting at: decent engineering makes more difference than whether an app is "native" or not. And some languages make that easier than others.

Obviously needing access to the device's functionality makes that less true, but in that respect C++ apps are no more "native" to Symbian than Java apps - they can use only that functionality that the Symbian + S60/UIQ/whatever C++ APIs let them, and they jump through (internal) hoops to do so. There's no technical reason Java, Python or Ruby apps couldn't do (nearly?) everything a C++ app could do, if Symbian or Nokia or whoever provided the APIs. The RIM APIs for Blackberry app development provide access to all kinds of "native" platform and device functionality, and they're Java APIs.

[Wolfcat]

LocationTagger
ExtGps
Palringo
symTorrent
Gmail
twibble
scribe
WaveLog
Mobile Divx
Stris 2
A damn good “free’ as well Tetris clone, an oldie but a goodie.

Plus a good Pacman and a good Space Invaders will never go astray for killing sometime.

I all the details on whys e.t.c are here http://www.wolfcat.com.au/randomrants/n95-8gb/ but most of you should know most of this list.