Need more Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and FourSquare from your phone? Nokia's Social Networking application not doing enough for you? Then have a look at Socially, a social network application that covers the main networks in a consistent interface on your Symbian smartphone. Having spent some time with it, it might be a touch idiosyncratic, but the interface is consistent, it gets the job done and it has a number of deep integration features which are innovative on Symbian.
Adding to its range of services, Nokia’s multi-platform Instant Messaging (IM) client has now been officially released on the Ovi Store; we reported on its beta release last year. The client is available for all touch screen Nokia phones (i.e. Symbian^3 and S60 5th Edition), and supports Ovi Chat, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and Myspace IM. The client also integrates with Contacts, indicating contacts’ online presence. Read on for our review, and plenty of screenshots.
From Ovi Maps to Google Maps to Here and Now, there are more 'what's around you' applications that you can count on every mobile platform. And into this crowded arena comes Poynt, written in Qt and offering business, restaurant and movie look-ups around your current location, complete with Ovi Maps integration for driving directions. Is it slick enough or comprehensive enough to matter?
With the start of the Formula 1 season now behind us (the race yesterday in Australia proving to be an interesting curtain raiser), my eye now turns to keeping up to date with all the news from the F1 Grand Prix scene, and ESPN are hoping their Qt based application, ESPN F1 on Symbian, will be my route to updated news.
First Aid skills are something that everyone should have some knowledge of. Fortunately, the Ovi Store has recently added First Aid Box to its catalogue. Is a mobile phone application any substitute for practiced skills? Can reading from a phone be a quick enough way to give help in an emergency? Read on to find out more.
For the scholarly amongst us, one genre of mobile applications that never seems to get old is that of reference applications. Most of which are scientific in nature, and you can’t get more so than the periodic table of elephants, pardon me, elements. I’m glad to say that Offscreen Technology has trumpeted the cause for scientific reference by producing a periodic table of elements application for Symbian touch screen phones. Read on to find out more.
Applications which dynamically pull live data from the real world around you are, of course, one of the benefits of the 'modern' definition of "smartphone". Such utilities have been less numerous that on other newer platforms, but it's good to see numbers still rising on Symbian, with TrainTimes being a pretty good example of the breed. It's not perfect, but I'd still give it my recommendation - with a huge caveat, of which more below.
Colorising photos for dramatic effect is an idea that's been around a while, even before the computer age, so there's nothing dramatically new in ColorizIt, created in Qt for all Symbian touchscreen smartphones. However, it's available, it's very cheap and it's just about perfectly implemented - what more could you want? Perfect for whiling away a boring train journey, jazzing up your favourite photos...
Are you getting tired of pulling the slider on the side of your Symbian phone? Are you locking and unlocking so often that your thumb is getting sore? Well, you should seek medical attention! After you've done that, you also need to check out Pocket Lock from SBSH, available from the Ovi Store. This is a free application, which uses the phone's proximity sensor to detect when it has been put in, or taken out, of a pocket or bag. Read on for our special video review.
The Nokia N8 is surely enough camera for anyone in the phone world? Well, yes, but the problem is that keen photographers want to go even further. To twiddle and tweak and experiment. Trying to facilitate this is CameraPro N8, from Tequnique, with 'raw' image capture and more settings than you could go through even if trying a different set for every day of the year. It also allows - wait for it - both pre-focus and continuous autofocus in video capture, the one arguable achilles heel of the current N8 camcorder set up. With a radical interface and ambitious features, CameraPro N8 is very much a swiss army knife for the N8 fan.
.jpg){kind=icon}
