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.
You may remember the developer's name from Mobile Darts, which I reviewed last year? This has now been updated but, in case you're wondering, many of the same criticisms apply to the new version. But while Darts Scorer stays with the same theme, it's an application designed to help you play the real world game. And, although somewhat primitive in interface, may be helpful to those for whom mental maths is not their strongpoint.
You may remember that I reviewed the rather limited HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photo Camera back at the start of the year, concluding that it was extremely limited in what it could do on the phone (not all its fault) but that it had vague possibilities in terms of gathering bracketed exposures for later HDR processing back on the desktop. And now we have HDR Pro Camera, from a different author - can it achieve better results, either on the phone or back on your PC? In short - not really, though as with the earlier application, the real limitations are in Symbian OS itself and in the amount of RAM available.
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Symbian has had rather limited options when it comes to dealing with podcasts. Since Nokia's Podcasting client disappeared, the only option has been Podcatcher - or side loading MP3s via a desktop media manager. A new podcast client, Podmaster, is now available - but only for Nokia Belle handsets. Is this the master of all podcast clients, or just a pretender to the throne?
It's not often I highlight a theme here on AAS, but this one's worthy of the spotlight. A lot of our Symbian^3/Anna phones have AMOLED screens, which means that the blacker a theme is, the more power you'll save. Yet a totally black theme (as per the Nokia-supplied 'Midnight' defaults) is pretty boring - surely there's a compromise between boring and really colourful? Something power efficient yet with good colours and a consistent 'message'? Rush Hour, by Arjun Arora, caught my eye as having all these attributes, here are screens of it in action. Along with a few more general musings on themes in general...
Either Christmas is season for small utilities or perhaps now is the time of year when I finally get round to looking at them? Either way, here's a look at Decibel Meter, an ultimate one trick pony application that works surprisingly well. Go on, have a guess what it does...
It's all very well having 'Equaliser' presets in Symbian's Music player, but what about if you want a different EQ profile? There's no way to edit the defaults, out of the box, but smartEQ promises to allow this, plus the creation of your own custom EQ profiles. How does it work and how effective is it?
Maybe I'm just rubbish at making 3D photos. Or maybe I haven't got enough patience. Regardless, I've still had fun trying out 3D Photo Camera for Symbian^3 phones - it's hard to use (properly), the results aren't that satisfactory and the application is very definitely glitchy. But - hey - it produces 3D photos - for real. On existing hardware. What's not to love? Quite a bit, actually, read on...
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