Getting old is something that (hopefully) happens to all of us. Before that happens though, there's a fair chance that at some point in your life you'll have to look after an elderly relative. Can mobile technology help make the task any easier? That's what the makers of Elderly Care have tried to do with their application. If you're looking after an elderly relative, read on to see if this might help you.
There's not a huge amount of choice for fans of real-time strategy games, but thankfully Net Lizard, with their release of Moon Colonization, have provided genre afficianados with a compelling game that manages to balance all the required elements, albeit saddling the title with a slightly ropey fictional framing device.
Come on, we've all been there. It's a day out with family, at a big attraction. At the end of the day, you all head for the car park, stare at five thousand neatly parked cars and think "Now where the heck are we?". The free Parking 2 aims to solve this problem - and rather elegantly and with a not insignificant amount of flair and geek cool along the way.
It's rare that you trace the rise of a new genre of game to a single title, but that's what Firemint's "Flight Control" managed when it was released on the iPhone. It stayed in the iOS family for a long time, but it's now working through the conversions and onto other platforms, including Symbian. I was hoping for the Concorde of line-drawing games, but instead I feel like I'm the last person to board a Ryanair flight to London Prestwick.
Thanks to Nokia's Calling All Innovators and the release of the Qt 1.1 SDK we've been seeing a number of interesting games and applications published recently. Bijou 360, an implementation of the popular gem matching style of game, is a good example of this. It's been written by Tom Udomprasert, in his spare time, and boasts a feature that we can't recall seeing in any other Symbian game: It is playable, to a real purpose, in four different orientations.
Google Reader is a blogger's best friend. For Symbian, the most accessible methods of access have been the various modes of its mobile website. However, noted Qt developer Tommi Laukkanen has been working on a Google Reader application called NewsFlow, which he has written in QML and Javascript. Read on to find out how well it can feed your news needs.
One of the signs of the coming together of a mature software platform and a powerful hardware platform has always been that a decent guitar tuner will turn up, adding another practical convergence feature to the ubiquitous smartphone. Enter Tunerific 2.0 for Symbian, which has replaced my standalone guitar tuner and chord book in one fell swoop. With bells on.
Cloud storage (web based file hosting) has become an increasingly popular way to backup and share documents, images and other files. Accessing such services from your smartphone clearly makes a lot of sense: either for mobile access to essential documents or for easy file backup and retrieval. One of the best known of these cloud storage services is Dropbox, but unfortunately there's no official Symbian client version. However, help is at hand in the form of cuteBox - a slickly implemented third party Symbian^3 client for the Dropbox service.
You might think that The Impossible Game is yet another running and jumping game, where you have one control (in this case tapping on the screen) to make your character avoid the obstacles. On a superficial level you'd be right, but as the game speed increases there's simply not enough time for "an older reviewer" like me to react to the terrain and decide the correct course of action. But there's more to it than reaction time.
At the end of last year David reviewed Coming Next, an application which provides an agenda like view for calendar entries and an improved Calendar widget for the homescreen. In this follow up mini-review we're going to take another look at the application, highlighting an extra set of functionality, which is available if you download the application from its own website, rather than the Ovi Store. Additionally, this also gives an opportunity to provide a quick look video review of the application.
