Time lapse photo capture always used to be a feature of older Symbian smartphones from Nokia, but it's a feature that seems to have fallen by the wayside. FastMotion Time Lapse, a commercial application in the Ovi Store for Symbian^3 phones, steps into the breach, and goes the extra mile by also constructing a final MP4 movie for you - the part of making a time lapse movie that many people often struggle with back on the desktop. Read on for my review.
Just as Symbian users start to get used to having multiple home screens, OffScreen come along with an app to completely replace the home screen. Making use of Symbian^3's graphics acceleration, Grid is a super app-grid application, allowing for drag and drop configuration so you can have your apps where you want them. Read on to find out whether I think this puts a whole new spin on the Symbian user experience or whether it's all shine without substance.
This might be a shock to many hardcore Symbian users, but sometimes you don't need a massive social media client to get online and check up on Twitter. There are people who just need a little something to check up on the friends, messages and replies to them, and post the occasional message. And this is where TwimGo could step into the breach.
For anyone wanting to create panorama photographs on their Symbian smartphone, we've had a number of free and commercial options over the years, of varying degrees of compatibility and availability. The basic principle is the same, that of stitching together photos on the phone to create an artistic 'panorama', and the somewhat cumbersomely named QuickPanorama PRO Symbian3 is the latest entrant in the field, implemented in Qt. Read on for my review.
Rafe and Steve have already written extensively about Symbian^3 in their N8 reviews (e.g. three recent parts here, here, and here). Since then, I've had a month long trial with the Nokia C7 in which I've used it as my primary phone. While Rafe will be continuing our full, long term hardware review of the C7, I am taking the opportunity to give my impressions of using Symbian^3. Everything has its pros and cons, and Symbian^3 is no different. Here I present my own in-depth take on the best, and worst, of Symbian^3.
To be honest, the N-Gage had a lot going for it just before it was retired. The game catalogue was pretty impressive (Rifts, Mile High Pinball, and Pathway to Glory’s Ikusa Islands spring to mind), but the standout title for me was the first mobile version of Catan. This German boardgame has continued to live on in electronic form as well as continuing to gather fans in its physical form. Rather selfishly, it’s one of the few N-Gage games that I’ve been hoping would make the jump to the next-gen platform (which it didn’t). Licences Exozet have done the next best thing though, with a J2ME version. And it's rather good.
Gameloft have put a lot of adjectives in the title of their latest Symbian^3 game, and for once, it’s well deserved. Not because Gameloft have done something new and innovative (this is yet another 3d-esque beat-em-up, with the same UI mechanics as Hero of Sparta and Assassins Creed), and not because the graphics look like they’ve been worked especially for this screen resolution (even though that’s true). It's deserved as there seems to be a bit more love and attention paid to this Spiderman incarnation than any of the other current crop of games.
The latest in Nokia's collaboration with third party content sources (in this case the England and Wales Cricket Board - the ECB), all implemented by digital agency Marvellous (you'll remember their infamous X-Factor app?) in the Symbian development system du jour, Qt, ECB Cricket is a competent window onto a busy news web site (especially so, with The Ashes currently winding up). It's more than a simple Web-based RSS scraper, thankfully, and it's good to see Qt being used more and more as each week goes by...
January, the time of year when we all hope for a better life and do our best to make it happen by promising to do things about it – yes it’s the time to make a resolution for the New Year. But how to keep that spark of change alive throughout the year? How about New Year’s Resolution, an application from Marvellous that’s being heavily trailed in the Ovi Store - could this be the key to keeping you motivated and on top of the promises to yourself for 2011?
The latest in our series of reviews of the new batch of GPU-aware, high octane driving games, I take a spin in Raging Thunder 2 (or II, as the title screen proclaims it). With everything, including the kitchen sink and full Internet multi-player gaming, bundled into the new graphics engine, RT2 should be a huge hit. And yet, I can't help but feel that there's just too much going on, leaving the player high on console bling and short on raw driving satisfaction.
