Well, what do you know? The Post Office, a grand old institution in the UK, still with branches in many villages across the country, just got itself an official 'app' in the Ovi Store, commissioned by the PO from developers Grapple Mobile. The result is implemented in Java and a trifle simplistic, but it's still a quick way into some of The Post Office's most needed information.
An archetypal third party application, BabyFeed runs on all Symbian^3 (and above) phones and aims to be the perfect companion to the new mum or dad, helping you track your baby's progress in a multitude of ways. It certainly beats scribbling things down on scraps of paper. The star feature here is automatically notifying your partner about important medication taking or feeds - this is a great way to help them feel involved and informed even if they're stuck at work.
Have you ever looked over at third party camera applications on other mobile platforms and got just a little bit jealous of all their filters and transformative templates to make your photos just a little bit more fun before uploading them to the likes of Facebook or Twitter? Then perhaps CameraBag is for you?
Coming from the Trainline website - which acts as a central ticket agent for all the UK train companies - this utility application is aimed at the frequent traveller, allowing you to check train times and fares from the handset, and then buy your tickets from your phone without having to worry about call centres, complicated websites, or a very long queue to the one ticket sales counter open in the station.
Okay, Soundtracker Radio is an interesting one. It's another "music based social network" web service with a mobile client, but unlike Flowd, which I looked at on Monday, Soundtracker isn't as impressive in its presentation, or in the implementation of this application. It lets you stream music from user-generated "stations" of music, but there's not much else of benefit here.
Back when T.Rex played the first Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, it was easy to keep track of the eight acts that were playing what has turned out to be one of the largest open are music festivals in the world. In 2011, it's a little bit harder (the number of acts, singers, comedians, buskers and hangers on is in the thousands... plus The Wombles). Perhaps UK network Orange's mobile guide to Glastonbury 2011 will replace your paper guide, whether you are heading to the farm or watching it live on the BBC? The short answer is yes, by the way.
Here's a tricky sell. Creating a file manager utility for an OS that has included a File Manager application for the last six years. Yet this is exactly what Lonely Cat Games and Kenvast Software have done, aiming their applications at a more technical, more fussy audience than the general Symbian populace. The users who, when something goes wrong, are happy to dive under the hood, even into 'system' folders and the device's firmware, rather than give up. These then are apps for geeks - and why not?
This is going to seem an awfully trivial application review to start the week, but I should point out that 101 Big Sound Buttons is a lot, lot more than your typical (and infamous) fart application. I'm pretty sure such a sound is included here, but there are 98 others, covering a wide variety of 'uses'. And yes, that only makes 99 - the remaining two are missing in action! There's still plenty here for the sound effect board fan though.
We have social networks for location, social networks for short messages, and social networks for sharing everything with the mega-corporations such as Facebook. Now it's time for a new social network that promises to put you in touch with "your favourite acts' moves and grooves." Beyond the PR fluff, is it any good? Technically, yes. Socially... the ball is still up in air.
I'm a bit of trainspotter. Not in the sense of physically collecting the numbers of each train that I see on the platforms of Edinburgh Waverly - once removed from that. So the availability of an application that brings subway maps from the major cities of the world to my handset has a certain base appeal. Unfortunately, this application feels more like a programming exercise to show off the capability of the developer rather than a genuinely useful globe-trotters guide.
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