Telexy Networks has launched Network Commander, a collection of useful network utilities for Symbian OS. A while back Telexy released a piece of software called SymSMB - basically it allowed Symbian devices to connect to network shares via Wi-Fi. Very clever, but they encountered a small legal issue with a large Finnish phone maker. To cut a long story short, they shouldn't have been doing two jobs at once. Naughty. So SymSMB was pulled from sale, sadly. But there's now Network Commander and I've looked at it briefly below.

Telexy has been beavering away on some enhancements to the basic concept. Well, they made a few... like Wireless Sync, Wireless bi-directional file sharing, PPTP VPN capability. And, coming soon, Remote Desktop Connection.

You can, of course, play media files directly over the network.

This software installs and works flawlessly on the N97. There is a 14 day free trial from Telexy.

If you don't feel the need for the full Network Commander, you can purchase one of the component modules. I recommend downloading and trying this on your device. You don't need an N97, pretty much any S60 device with WiFi will do the job. I'll admit I haven't tried this over 3G... I'll leave that to others who have proper data plans.

Check out the list of features:

• Configure PPTP VPN Access points (SymVPN)
• Share drives and folders (SymNAS)
• Perform automatic local/network file synchronization (SymSync)
• Play MP3 content directly from network locations (SymPlayer)
• Browse network, map network shared folders to a local drive letters, manage local/network files and folders, open files (like pictures or office files) directly from network locations, etc...
• Do it easily on touch panel devices (like Nokia N97)
• Do it all securely and wirelessly

More information here. Comments welcome!

Paul Swafford