iBomber Defence is the latest tower defence game for Symbian, and being my favourite genre of game, I jumped at the chance to review it. This is a title that has been ported from the iPhone, and Electronic Arts have done a great job. The problem is that tower defence games are a dime a dozen, and so to be great you have to introduce some new features to differentiate from the rest. In this review I investigate what new twists have been added to this title.
As more smartphones are designed with non-replaceable batteries, the potential of getting through a day of heavy use by carrying a spare battery is going away. This has in turn created a market in external batteries. For instance, the first phone with a non-replaceable battery was the iPhone, which has an array of battery jackets. However, these are fixed to just one phone design. The alternative is external batteries that connect via cable. It's a less stylish solution, but guarantees that any of your devices can be topped up. That's where Nokia's new DC-16 external battery steps in, and we've been putting it to the test in this review.
Predating NFC in mainstream use by a year or two, and with some definite areas of overlap, QR codes still haven't taken off fully, I'd argue. You don't see them on every shop window, on every publication, even though they're easy to generate and free to present to the world. Regardless of take-up, there will be times when you want your Symbian smartphone to read both QR codes and the older, linear barcodes - so what software is currently available to read these and how well do all the titles work?
Blaving is an "audio social network", and according to the developer's website it's the "leading audio social network". Whether that's true or not, it is the only competitor to Audioboo that I've heard of; plus they have comprehensive support for smartphone platforms, including Symbian. Let's put Blaving through its paces and see if deserves a place on your Symbian handset.
On the face of it, Pool Rebel should be just about the most mature pool game on Symbian - it's certainly the title with the longest heritage, starting life back in the days of Windows Mobile (most recently in 2008). However, though I was impressed by the options all round and by the physics, Pool Rebel just isn't ported as well as it could be to Symbian, with too much wasted space on screen and with on-screen action that's, at times, eye-strainingly small.
Ah, it's the weekly "What do you get if you cross....?" section here on AAS. In this case, what do you get if you cross pool with Angry Birds and Cut The Rope? FantasyPool is the answer - it's pool, but not as you've ever played it before. Balls that fall asleep and then get woken up again, glass barriers to shatter, whirling sticks, a table made of marble, they're all part of the charm of FantasyPool.
The balance between an application simply being an on-device advert and being genuinely useful is often a hard one to strike, but AA Breakdown & Traffic has got it slap, bang on right. Holding your details, providing an obvious action to take in the event of a breakdown and advising on incidents are all part and parcel of this useful little applet... even if you're not actually an AA member.
After our Top Five File Management Apps list, commenters asked us to review the popular Symbian Dropbox application, Dropian. Not wanting to disappoint, we've given it the All About Symbian review treatment. Will its responsive user interface win us over, or will the lack of file selection options turn us off? Read on to find out.
Avatar was a 2009 blockbuster with a difference – it started the trend of 3D movies. So yes, if you hate the glasses then you can blame James Cameron. Anyway, there couldn't be a more natural franchise to have a 3D video game than Avatar. Fortunately, to play the movie tie-in you won't need any glasses. In our review, we ask whether the game has any novel features to offer or if we've seen it all before?
After our Top Five Blogging Tools, we had suggestions of other clients we hadn't looked at. One that caught our interest was Blob, a client for Google's 'Blogger' platform. This is a simple client that lets you push text posts to your account. It isn't restricted to one blog either; it can handle all the blogs attached to your account. How does it stack up against the functionality of Symbian's Wordpress clients?
