As is traditional, I save this sort of accessory review for Friday. Bluetooth speakers are very common and commoditised by now, of course, but I chose this one to review because it has a single unique selling point. It has a carrying handle. Don't laugh - it makes a huge difference and is immediately likeable - every other speaker has to be held in a vice-like grip or cradled somehow. The DA150 here can be hooked around a finger while you carry other things, to the beach, to the garden, whatever. Read on...
Guest writer David Addington brings us a detailed review of one of the landmark texts in the smartphone industry and a superbly detailed history of Symbian itself. Read the review and then grab the (e)book!
It's fair to say that ViewRanger has come a long way in seven years, since my initial 2006 review on a sub-QVGA device and I can only apologise to all concerned that we haven't updated our coverage of it on All About Symbian since then. The first versions concentrated more on the unique 'panorama' and photo sharing functions, but it's fair to say that ViewRanger is much more of a general GPS and off-road navigation tool now. Best of all, it's now much more Internet aware in terms of getting new maps as and when needed.
File this review well and truly under 'Really? This app is still going?' - ChessGenius has been around the Symbian world for many years, we even looked at it in 2006 briefly, on S60 3rd Edition. Wow. Seven years ago. Making it all the more remarkable that ChessGenius has not only survived well into the era of nHD screens and Symbian^3, it's fully compatible with the latest Belle FP2 phones and had even had updates in the fairly recent past. And, with that seven year gap in mind, here's a 2013 review of ChessGenius on the Nokia 808, powered by the fastest processor in the Symbian world. Taking on the game's chess engine under these circumstances was more than a little daunting...
Word games never get old. Over the years there have been plenty variations on Scrabble and word search games. After looking for something new, I came across Word on Word, it's a dated title, but brings a new way to apply both planning and vocabulary. Giving you a loose literary equivalent of Columns or Bejeweled, could this keep your mental dictionary engaged and enthralled? Read on to find out.
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.
I know what you're thinking: we've reviewed this before, back in the mists of time (2007), when QVGA was still a novelty and nHD was merely a gleam in OPK's eye. Yes, Micropool has been around the Symbian world forever, but it's still the game I install first on every single new smartphone and I still play it for 15 minutes a day. Every day. Making (gulp) 27,000 minutes of pool time since I first started playing the game. Oops.
If you're old school enough, just old enough, you may guess this game from the title. Being close, but not quite the same as 'Galaxian', the breakout arcade classic that followed on from Space Invaders back in the mists of time. At the time, a whole raft of arcade copies sprung up, all with slightly different names and slightly different gameplay, but the heritage was obvious. As it is here, with plenty of swooping alien spaceships to blast out of the sky in a blaze of colour and sound. And - what do you know - it runs on every Symbian device from the last four years and in fact plays better on the E71/E72/E6 than on the larger screened Symbian devices - who'd have thought it?
The Nokia E6–00 is currently the only candybar QWERTY device in the latest Symbian line up. Picking up where the E72 left off, the E6 adds a touchscreen and high pixel density display. The E72, just like the E71 before it, was a big hit among Eseries fans. Does the E6 match up to its S60 3rd Edition predecessors? In this review, we take a long-term look at the E6, and discuss whether E72/E71 users should consider an upgrade.
Reading e-books on Symbian is still something that is not well catered for. We’d love to see a Kindle application be released, but as time goes on that looks less and less likely. Therefore, we need an alternative for getting e-books onto our Symbian handsets. The current standard format for e-books is ePub. Fortunately, we have BuBue Book Reader for Symbian, a free ePub viewer. Read on to find out whether BuBue is smarter than the average book reader!