Either Christmas is season for small utilities or perhaps now is the time of year when I finally get round to looking at them? Either way, here's a look at Decibel Meter, an ultimate one trick pony application that works surprisingly well. Go on, have a guess what it does...
Yes, yes, I know the OS is supposed to handle RAM for me. And, on the whole, it does a fine job. But I wish Nokia/Symbian would trust me with the salient statistic of how full my phone's RAM is. It's a statistic that only an uber-geek would want, but then that's me. In the past I've installed task managers or file managers, just for an incidental RAM reporting menu option, but this is much easier. One tiny and simple (and free) widget and I can now see exactly how much RAM is left with once glance at my home screen.
Lock screen customisation has so far been the preserve of Android devices. However LockScreen for Symbian is looking to redress the balance. With this application you can add five shortcuts, including Music player controls, to the lock screen that comes up after you press the menu key. Read on to find out how well it works in practice.
Yes, yes, talk about mundane - apps to log fuel fill-ups and calculate economy have been around since the dawn of PDA time (1993). But every time you fill up your car, don't you get a tiny twinge of guilt that maybe, just maybe, you should still be still logging all this petrol or diesel? Maybe you should get a feel for how much your metal steed is costing you each week? Fuel Manager is one of the latest entries in the Nokia Store to claim to help...
You know the feeling: you're on a bus or in a taxi to the train station and you're cutting it very fine. What if there's a queue at the ticket office? Always welcoming new ways to find train times and buy tickets from a smartphone, here I review Rail Tickets, the official application for First Capital Connect/First Great Western here in the UK, for all S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 phones - despite its Java implementation it does a competent enough job to keep it installed.
Data siloing is a persistent problem with some Internet services, i.e. you put your data online and you can't always get it out again when you need to. This applies to a large degree with (the infamous) Facebook, in that you upload lovely 12 megapixel images to your 'albums' - and it's not unreasonable to assume that you can, one day, later download the images again should you mislay the originals from your phone. Facebook Album Sync, reviewed here, aims to help but ultimately is utterly crippled by Facebook's limitations.
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.
While it won't replace local knowledge and a friendly face, Toozla's audio guide to the world around you is a great little tool to have in your pocket while you travel, or even if you want to explore your home town and discover something about where you live. But it has some very rough edges - which might be enough to stop many people using it.
Viewing photos on a phone is something that we all take for granted. The Photos application on Symbian does a fine job, especially on touch enabled devices. However, if you don’t want to swipe through everything on the device, you’ll have to create albums. This can take some time, and there’s no way to view photos in relation to where they are saved. Fortunately, that’s where Folder Gallery steps in, generating galleries based on directories in your mass storage drives. Read on to find out how well it works.
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