I'm not a lover of cute and cuddly image filters, Instagram-style, as many of you know - why bring the mighty cameras of today's smartphones down to 2003 levels of quality and resolution? However, PhotoFunia promises to work and act differently - the idea here is to take a photographed face and do 'interesting' composites with it, with the heavyweight processing working server-side. Nice idea, with fun results, but don't go looking for anything of useable quality.
The unique Swipe UI of the MeeGo Harmattan-powered Nokia N9 has inspired many Maemo and Symbian developers. One aspect of its UI is the multitasking view which gave live previews of applications and could be zoomed from, say, a three by three grid, to a two by two grid; and to close applications. Whenever one tries to graft the user interface of one mobile operating system onto another, though, things are never going to fit perfectly, but compliments to the developer of Tasks Widget, who has given it his/her best shot.
Predating NFC in mainstream use by a year or two, and with some definite areas of overlap, QR codes still haven't taken off fully, I'd argue. You don't see them on every shop window, on every publication, even though they're easy to generate and free to present to the world. Regardless of take-up, there will be times when you want your Symbian smartphone to read both QR codes and the older, linear barcodes - so what software is currently available to read these and how well do all the titles work?
Blaving is an "audio social network", and according to the developer's website it's the "leading audio social network". Whether that's true or not, it is the only competitor to Audioboo that I've heard of; plus they have comprehensive support for smartphone platforms, including Symbian. Let's put Blaving through its paces and see if deserves a place on your Symbian handset.
The balance between an application simply being an on-device advert and being genuinely useful is often a hard one to strike, but AA Breakdown & Traffic has got it slap, bang on right. Holding your details, providing an obvious action to take in the event of a breakdown and advising on incidents are all part and parcel of this useful little applet... even if you're not actually an AA member.
After our Top Five File Management Apps list, commenters asked us to review the popular Symbian Dropbox application, Dropian. Not wanting to disappoint, we've given it the All About Symbian review treatment. Will its responsive user interface win us over, or will the lack of file selection options turn us off? Read on to find out.
After our Top Five Blogging Tools, we had suggestions of other clients we hadn't looked at. One that caught our interest was Blob, a client for Google's 'Blogger' platform. This is a simple client that lets you push text posts to your account. It isn't restricted to one blog either; it can handle all the blogs attached to your account. How does it stack up against the functionality of Symbian's Wordpress clients?
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Trying to remain productive is the enemy of many who work at a desk, even more so for freelancers who work at home. Trying to remain applied to a task at hand, amid all the inevitable distractions can be difficult. That’s why Parus Pomodoro caught my interest. It claims to help, by implementing a time management system devised by Francesco Cirillo. However, it requires a certain amount of discipline and honesty from you to use effectively. Is it worthwhile?
Finding the ideal PDF reader has been an ongoing quest for us here at All About Symbian. Some are standalone, some are part of office suites, most are pricey, and they all lack some feature or another. We had given up hope, until we came across NSR Reader. Might we have found the best all round PDF reader? Quite possibly; with its jump to page, reasonable price, and best of all text reflow!
"Why on earth does the Symbian world need yet another camera application?" I can hear you muttering. "Ah, but this one's got a 'histogram' feature", I mention. "You know, the prickly stat thing that's coming in the Nokia 808 PureView's Camera UI? This is one way in which you can get the hang of how using a histogram might help you take better photos." OK, this is something of a stretch, but SCam does have a few more tricks up its sleeve...
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