There’s never anything on the TV is there? That is apart from that fantastic thing you wanted to see, but missed among all the other dross that litters our channels. To help get around such mishaps, what Symbian needs is a TV schedule application. That’s where TvPyx steps in to save the day. This free Qt application lists the range of content on UK Satellite and Freeview TV. Read on to see what we thought about it.
Data siloing is a persistent problem with some Internet services, i.e. you put your data online and you can't always get it out again when you need to. This applies to a large degree with (the infamous) Facebook, in that you upload lovely 12 megapixel images to your 'albums' - and it's not unreasonable to assume that you can, one day, later download the images again should you mislay the originals from your phone. Facebook Album Sync, reviewed here, aims to help but ultimately is utterly crippled by Facebook's limitations.
Reading e-books on Symbian is still something that is not well catered for. We’d love to see a Kindle application be released, but as time goes on that looks less and less likely. Therefore, we need an alternative for getting e-books onto our Symbian handsets. The current standard format for e-books is ePub. Fortunately, we have BuBue Book Reader for Symbian, a free ePub viewer. Read on to find out whether BuBue is smarter than the average book reader!
While Symbian users are STILL waiting for a Kindle application, we are not completely without a source of literary entertainment. Project Gutenberg is at the rescue with its vast library of public domain e-books. If you have a taste for the late and great classics, then you will mostly likely find what you want there. The mobile site of Project Gutenberg is brought to us as a web runtime (WRT) widget, just called “Gutenberg”, from Pointlabs.
So you want a Hammond organ in your phone? No? Go on, give it a try. Still no? Well, you can sound like Rick Wakeman and recreate some classic 1970s organ prog intros? Yes? There - I knew you were interested. See my review and video below, demonstrating Drawbar Organ for Symbian. It's not perfect, but it's a unique slice of musical fun.
Part of Nokia World 2010 was the Nokia Innovators Hackathon, which asked developers to come up with some smart ideas and test code in a limited amount of time. One of the winners, Facelock, is now polished and up in the App Store for you to download. Who needs a password for your phone when you can use your face?
While it won't replace local knowledge and a friendly face, Toozla's audio guide to the world around you is a great little tool to have in your pocket while you travel, or even if you want to explore your home town and discover something about where you live. But it has some very rough edges - which might be enough to stop many people using it.
Writing a comprehensive language translation application is a lot easier when someone else is doing all the heavy lifting for you - as is the case with the new genre of translation applications which piggy back on the Google Translate API. For us, the users, it doesn't really matter whose servers are doing the work, mind you. In this case we have a simple and functional interface - all that's needed is a modest mobile Internet connection and you're away.
Viewing photos on a phone is something that we all take for granted. The Photos application on Symbian does a fine job, especially on touch enabled devices. However, if you don’t want to swipe through everything on the device, you’ll have to create albums. This can take some time, and there’s no way to view photos in relation to where they are saved. Fortunately, that’s where Folder Gallery steps in, generating galleries based on directories in your mass storage drives. Read on to find out how well it works.
Mobile data is an expensive resource unless you have an unlimited tariff. Oh wait, ‘unlimited’ doesn’t mean unlimited! While Symbian OS can tell you how much data you’ve used during a given connection session, that count is gone once you disconnect. It would be useful if we could have a third party app running in the background, keeping a running total of your data usage. SPB Wireless Monitor is one such application, but how well does it work in practice? Read on to find out.
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