Sports Tracker, the popular GPS and activity utility that was spun out of Nokia Beta Labs and which is now its own entity, has just had a big upgrade to v4.0, available over the air by simply running an older version on your Symbian-powered phone. The main change is the addition of social sharing functions, to friends or 'everyone' on Sports-Tracker.com and/or to your friends on Facebook, but there are other enhancements, including a new night mode. Some screenshots and more details below.
Asri al-Baker, from i-symbian.com, and friend of All About Symbian, has just released a Web Runtime widget for all Symbian devices which will load up the iPhone version of the GMail website. This version of the website offers the richest functionality for any mobile platform. Asri reports that this work was actually inspired by a tweet made by myself(!) Thanks for the contribution, Asri! Read on for more ...
Symbian Podcatcher, the Open Source project to provide podcast collection and playback (and especially useful on many Eseries phones and the new Symbian^3 devices that lack Nokia Podcasting), has received updates across the board. The Symbian^3 build has received a minor update to 1.0.9, while the Symbian^1 (a.k.a. S60 5th Edition) and S60 3rd Edition builds have received more major updates, to v1.0.32 and 1.0.1 respectively. Read on for the download link and a brief comment.
Have you ever jealously eyed up the battery usage stats in a friend's Android-powered phone? Now available in Ovi Store for all S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 models is 'Nokia Battery Monitor', a joint development between Nokia and VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland. It runs in the background, gathers information on exactly where your battery power is going and predicts how long you've got to go before the dreaded 'power saving mode' kicks in. See below for links, screens and more details.
Nokia Beta Labs have released their Wellness Diary application, which they announced in September. Available for all touch-screen enabled Symbian phones, the application runs in the background monitoring the user's activity. For example, it uses the accelerometer as a pedometer to measure your physical activity, and a schedule can even be set for the application to periodically ask you how many snacks you've eaten! Users can set personal targets and share their progress with social networks. To find out more, read on.
The well known WiFi tethering application, JoikuSpot, has expanded its range of supported Symbian devices. In addition to S60 3rd Edition and Symbian^1 devices from Nokia; JoikuSpot now supports recent Sony Ericsson devices (Satio, Vivaz and Vivaz Pro). Further expanding its compatibility with Nokia devices, the JoikuSpot have also released a Premium edition for Symbian^3 devices. Prices are currently reduced from 15 Euros to 9 Euros.
Just released in the Ovi Store is Auto Trader Mobile for all S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 handsets. Auto Trader, as the name suggests, is a huge online second hand car buying and selling system and this new solution works well, if quirkily, giving full information on search matches, looking up your location and allowing you to store server-side notes. See below for screenshots and comments.
Now getting seriously mature is Symbian Podcatcher, an open source replacement for Nokia Podcasting and of serious use to all the owners of Symbian-powered smartphones without any automatic way of gathering in audio and video podcasts. Today sees the release of v1.0.8 for Symbian^3 devices, screenshotted below. Versions for vanilla S60 5th Edition and 3rd Edition phones are a little behind, but hopefully the developer can back port as many of the bug fixes as are practical. Next stop for Symbian Podcatcher? The Nokia Ovi Store, hopefully! In the meantime, get it here.
An update for Swype for Symbian^1 devices has been released by Nokia Beta Labs. The update improves overall performance; the core Swype functionality has been configured to make the UI and output more responsive (tapping and word prediction changes, improved haptic feedback and improved landscape mode). A number of UI fixes mean there are fewer on screen artifacts, notably the word choice window has been reword. The update also adds support for downloadable dictionaries and fixes a number of bugs.
My day just got off to a potentially great start. Opera has just released a beta of their proxy-based (read time and money saving) Opera Mini web browser for all Symbian phones. And not just for these phones, but written as a native Symbian application and not as a Java application, so we're talking faster startup times and smoother browsing. Plus you can now switch all text input to use your phone's native system, even T9. And compatibility is, amazingly, right back to Series 60 (effectively S60 2nd Edition). With Web receiving criticism for slow handling of huge web pages, Opera Mini 5.1 beta on Symbian impresses by being many times faster than any native browser on any platform. Some screenshots, links and details below.
I'd been meaning to write up the Socially app for S60 and Symbian for a while, but now I don't have to because Vaibhav beat me to it. In this case he's showing how to automatically sync Facebook photos and birthdays into your Symbian Contacts application on the N8, but compatibility is surprisingly wide. With Nokia Social on the new Symbian^3 devices being somewhat limited in its Facebook integration, Socially promises to help extend the concept, plus it has a few extra tricks up its sleeve, as Vaibhav reveals.
Symbian utility specialists Cellphonesoft have come up with another possible touchscreen front-end, this time based around a single touch in the top left corner of your screen, which brings up their new 'Instant Menu', with application shortcuts and some utility functions. Some more details below.
Let's say you worked in Nokia marketing and had a great idea. Given that the company was sponsoring the X Factor, one of the largest entertainment shows in the world, each year, why not have an X Factor application? One that could be promoted before each ad break, riding the current wave of app-frenzy, showing off what the phones can do and also getting an even wider audience for the content? Fabulous. Meanwhile, back in reality....
Based on Web Runtime and a little clunky round the edges, but nevertheless free and available now in the Ovi Store is Nokia Shopping List, screenshotted below, with multiple lists to help you with your weekly/daily/special shopping trips. As usual with this genre of application, you just cross items off as you buy them, then clear the list at the end, ready for next time round the supermarket/mall.
One novel promotional idea the Ovi guys and gals had a few months back was to produce a promotional magazine in the Issuu 'virtual' format - here's issue 1 of the 'Ovi Guide', from the Spring. Issue 2 has just been released at a whopping 44 pages and, though biased towards marketing Nokia's products, does have plenty of app mini-reviews, plus some useful tips and pointers in it. Moreover, it's glossily implemented, embedded below on this page (if your browser window is wide enough!) and well worth a detailed look.
