Mobile banking seems to be one of the last few frontiers that are not well catered for here in the UK. There are many money managers, but few official applications, for our high street banks. Lloyds TSB has stepped up to provide Symbian users with access to online banking and the ability to find nearby branches and ATMs. One catch though – the mobile banking element is handed off to a mobile website. Which is... something of a fail...
Traditional newspapers and new media are still trying to work out their differences, but The Guardian in the UK has been forward looking. It has resisted the temptation to create a paywall and seeks to engage the smartphone market by creating an app for every platform, including Symbian (reviewed here, below) and Windows Phone 7. This well designed application not only delivers the latest news, but also provides Guardian podcasts, photo galleries and offline reading.
Arctica has got me sussed. Throw in 3D action with plenty of particle physics and a sci-fi theme and I'm basically putty in its hands. In this case detailing a review of the latest particle experience, SpeedFest. If you're into seat-of-the-pants action games then I think you too will love it. Read on for a wealth of screenshots and a video that will give you a great idea of the gameplay on offer.
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Tower defence games are a regular addition to my review tray – so much so that I’m becoming a connoisseur of the genre. This is no doubt why Save The City was assigned to me. In this most miniature of militaristic marches, you are tasked with saving your city from a stream of tanks and alien spacecraft. Does it add anything new to the genre or have we seen it all before?
Cricket remains, I contend, a sport that's extremely tricky to simulate in any enjoyable way on a phone screen. The sport timings, complexity, atmosphere - you name it - are all just... wrong. Which hasn't stopped a number of publishers writing a cricket game anyway and Ashes Cricket is, like the others I've tried, ultimately doomed to disappoint. Here's my full review.
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WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the web. Until recently, the only option on Symbian had been the official client. Now though, thanks to the freedom of open source software, Abhishek Kumar has created CutePress. This new WordPress app takes the code of the official client, revises the feature set, and wraps it up in a QML user interface. Has he improved on the original? Read on to find out.
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Symbian already has a wealth of options for accessing Twitter, but there’s no official application. This means the time you spent learning the layout of a Symbian-only application will be lost if you move to another platform. Fear no more because Tweeties is here in free and paid versions – it’s the latest Twitter client for Symbian and it follows Twitter’s design language to a T. Read on to find out how well the Twitter design language translates to Symbian.
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Sideways scrolling platform games aren’t as popular as they used to be. To maintain interest in a genre, developers need to come up with unique twists that will keep gamers coming back for more. Failing that, a good movie tie-in never hurts. Fortunately, GameLoft has managed to do both with The Adventures of Tintin.
You may remember the developer's name from Mobile Darts, which I reviewed last year? This has now been updated but, in case you're wondering, many of the same criticisms apply to the new version. But while Darts Scorer stays with the same theme, it's an application designed to help you play the real world game. And, although somewhat primitive in interface, may be helpful to those for whom mental maths is not their strongpoint.
You may remember that I reviewed the rather limited HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photo Camera back at the start of the year, concluding that it was extremely limited in what it could do on the phone (not all its fault) but that it had vague possibilities in terms of gathering bracketed exposures for later HDR processing back on the desktop. And now we have HDR Pro Camera, from a different author - can it achieve better results, either on the phone or back on your PC? In short - not really, though as with the earlier application, the real limitations are in Symbian OS itself and in the amount of RAM available.
