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Flickr is the photo sharing site of choice for photography enthusiasts and professionals. Symbian users can already upload to Flickr either by email or Gravity. However, until FlickrUp came along, there was nothing available for browsing and uploading. This Nokia Belle-style Qt app is fully functional, resplendent with options, and is available for the princely sum of zero!
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YouTube is the Web’s biggest video sharing service - which is part of its problem – there is a bewildering amount of choice. If you want to discover new content, having some sort of curation would be nice to find something entertaining for a few minutes. That’s exactly what Symeo does by providing pre-loaded channels of YouTube videos (not Vimeo as the name might suggest). Read on to see how well this version 1.0 app performs.
Guitar playing and fiddling with tech seem to go hand in hand, judging from the number of fellow strummers I've come across. Many worse than me and a greater number a lot better. But we all have to tune our guitars every time we get the 'ol six string (or in my case the 12-string) out - which is why there's a booming cottage industry on every mobile platform in guitar tuning aids of every type. Here's a free option for Symbian....
Way back in the last decade, around 2003 or 2004, with a creative four year old daughter who was just taking her first steps on one of my PCs, I discovered a wonderful application, Electronic Colouring Book, an old DOS application, I believe, which kept her happy for ages. Rather than requiring super-precise mouse skills for proper computer artwork, the idea was to present line drawings and have the painter pick which colour to fill each enclosed section with. Worked a treat, and now today's four year olds can do the same with their parent's Symbian smartphone, thanks to Coloring Fun.
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If you’re an aspiring astronomer but never get a clear night to see anything, do not fear. You can explore the cosmos in the comfort of your home with your smartphone. Escapist Software has just ported Star Chart to Symbian over from its Android and iOS versions. If you want to view the night sky without getting too technical, this could be the app for you.
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Getting the latest news is one of the most basic needs of an always connected smartphone user, whether through an app or the mobile web. 'CNN app for Symbian' provides news in both text and video across a varied range of topics and geographical regions. It also supports the emerging field of citizen journalism by integrating CNN’s iReport service. How well does it all fit together?
Mobile banking seems to be one of the last few frontiers that are not well catered for here in the UK. There are many money managers, but few official applications, for our high street banks. Lloyds TSB has stepped up to provide Symbian users with access to online banking and the ability to find nearby branches and ATMs. One catch though – the mobile banking element is handed off to a mobile website. Which is... something of a fail...
Traditional newspapers and new media are still trying to work out their differences, but The Guardian in the UK has been forward looking. It has resisted the temptation to create a paywall and seeks to engage the smartphone market by creating an app for every platform, including Symbian (reviewed here, below) and Windows Phone 7. This well designed application not only delivers the latest news, but also provides Guardian podcasts, photo galleries and offline reading.
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WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the web. Until recently, the only option on Symbian had been the official client. Now though, thanks to the freedom of open source software, Abhishek Kumar has created CutePress. This new WordPress app takes the code of the official client, revises the feature set, and wraps it up in a QML user interface. Has he improved on the original? Read on to find out.
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Symbian already has a wealth of options for accessing Twitter, but there’s no official application. This means the time you spent learning the layout of a Symbian-only application will be lost if you move to another platform. Fear no more because Tweeties is here in free and paid versions – it’s the latest Twitter client for Symbian and it follows Twitter’s design language to a T. Read on to find out how well the Twitter design language translates to Symbian.
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