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!
While Symbian users are STILL waiting for a Kindle application, we are not completely without a source of literary entertainment. Project Gutenberg is at the rescue with its vast library of public domain e-books. If you have a taste for the late and great classics, then you will mostly likely find what you want there. The mobile site of Project Gutenberg is brought to us as a web runtime (WRT) widget, just called “Gutenberg”, from Pointlabs.
The problem with classic games is that they tend to get overlooked by many because it's been so long since they appeared. Such is the case with ZingMagic's Yacht (i.e. Yahtzee), here in its 'II' implementation, reviewed back by us five years ago on All About Symbian, when the screen size was a brain numbing 176 pixels by 208 - remember? The gameplay's basically identical, but for a classic game this is exactly what you want. And we have improvements in screen resolution and distribution method.
If you’re an eager explorer, a budding builder, have a penchant for politics, or fancy yourself as a swinging swordsman, then you might just be interested in Revival 2. This is a Civilisation clone, all running within your Symbian phone. It’s a complex game genre, being something of a simulator for early human settlements. It’s an old genre too, with its roots definitely in the DOS era of gaming. Read on to find out how well it translates into the mobile space.
