Physics is fun! No really it is, think of all those pool games, Angry Birds, Worms – they're all physics simulations. Next along in the realm of physics-based action puzzle games is The Marbians HD. You're in control of 'Martians', who have crash landed and you have to bounce them around inside marbles (yes, really) to get them back to their flying saucers. If you like pool games, Martians and the 1950s, then you should read our review.
Developer ZhuShuoSoft shows that it's possible to take an existing successful genre, mix it up and add a whole new layer of enjoyability. Airport Control takes the 'flight control' line-drawing game, adds in a measure of flight simulation, cranks up the realism, adds a musical soundscape - and then makes the result harder to play. Sounds like an addictive, immersive game to me...
As you may recall, I've been trying out a number of Bluetooth speakers, first the Jawbone Jambox (loud, but massive and expensive) and then the Nokia Play 360 (loud, but still big and expensive). And now the budget contender, the SoundWave SW50, at just over 7cm wide/high and costing less than £30, so roughly a quarter the price of the previous two speakers. I tested the SW50 with both my Nokia N8 and N86 from the Symbian world, with my Lumia 800 from the Windows Phone world and with my Android-powered Galaxy Nexus. Summary: it's almost as loud as the two pricier contenders and amazing value for money, with only one caveat.
Available either in 10 day trial form or for immediate purchase, Notekeeper aims to offer a healthy degree of access to your Evernote online account from your Symbian smartphone. In the absence of an official client (the Web Runtime version for S60 5th Edition was phased out a while ago), Notekeeper is by definition the best Evernote client for Symbian - but happily, it's also a slick, thoughtfully-implemented and reliable solution that I can recommend.
Take a classic game theme (Aztecs, jungle techno, coloured balls, temple runography) and apply it to simple 'Columns' arcade gameplay and you end up with.... Zuba Deluxe. Unaccountably, it's free in the Nokia Store even though there's also a 'trial' version - don't question it, just grab it while you can. It's a competent enough, even at times gripping, arcade puzzler and with atmosphere oozing from its pores, it's hard to argue with at this price point.
In my last review, I looked at an application that tried to bring the multitasking view from MeeGo Harmattan to Symbian. In yet another attempt at bringing MeeGo to Symbian, we have Thumbnail Folders, which replicates a feature brought in with PR1.2 of the Nokia N9's firmware. Here, application folders icons are decorated with miniature versions of the application icons within. Perhaps all this MeeGo replication hints at how Symbian users really feel about Nokia's transition to Windows Phone 7?
I'm not a lover of cute and cuddly image filters, Instagram-style, as many of you know - why bring the mighty cameras of today's smartphones down to 2003 levels of quality and resolution? However, PhotoFunia promises to work and act differently - the idea here is to take a photographed face and do 'interesting' composites with it, with the heavyweight processing working server-side. Nice idea, with fun results, but don't go looking for anything of useable quality.
The unique Swipe UI of the MeeGo Harmattan-powered Nokia N9 has inspired many Maemo and Symbian developers. One aspect of its UI is the multitasking view which gave live previews of applications and could be zoomed from, say, a three by three grid, to a two by two grid; and to close applications. Whenever one tries to graft the user interface of one mobile operating system onto another, though, things are never going to fit perfectly, but compliments to the developer of Tasks Widget, who has given it his/her best shot.
Something a little different for a Friday. Frustrated that a lot of the Symbian and Windows phones I wanted to try day to day didn't have a built-in FM transmitter (I'll explain why that's important to me below), I opted to grab the Belkin In Car Tunecast 6 Universal FM Transmitter and try it out and about in the UK. Summary: it works brilliantly, far better (surprisingly) than the few phones which did have the functionality built-in.
It feels as if all the games I review lately are variations on established genres, so I was happy to find IronWorm, which seems to defy classification. In IronWorm (a remake of SwingWorm), you play a worm with a vendetta, and in his quest to chase down his nemesis, he has to climb and swing his way through increasingly complicated environments, with a gymnastic grace that deserves to be in the Olympics! His only weapon, and protection, is a mace-tipped tail, plus YOUR coordination and cunning.
