Archive for the ‘Apps’ Category

Nokia E55 App Review: Sports Tracker

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

 Nokia E55 App Review: Sports TrackerNokia Sports Tracker is an application from the Nokia Beta Labs. This free Sports Tracker will help you find out what distance you jogged, at what speed and how long it took you to cover that distance and much ore. So overall it grants you a very interesting view on your  daily training status.

The Nokia Sports Tracker consists of two parts, the first being the app itself which you install on your phone and the second part being the standalone Sports Tracker website.

This app has four main parts; New Workout, Routes, Training Diary and Settings. In New Workout you can choose which workout you are going to do now e.g. running, walking, cycling, skiing. With the help of GPS you can then measure the distance of your running or walking sessions. To do that you only have to start the actual app in New Workout and stop it when you finish the workout. Each finished workout session is saved in your training diary from which you can upload selected sessions to the Nokia Sports Tracker website. Before uploading you can decide whether everyone or just your friends will be able to take a look into your activity results. On the website you can then compare your times with that of your friends for each route that you guys ran. With the help of the training diary you can also track your progress between a specific time frame very well.

During workouts the running app shows you the time, pace and distance. You also have access to other interesting information and graphs like your longitude, latitude and changes in altitude.

So that this app tracks your workout correctly you have to enter your characteristics such as gender, weight, height and age in the settings options. There is also a possibility to have multiple users on one device.

The Nokia Sports Tracker is a very interesting and innovative application for S60 phones. It is very helpful for every hobby athlete. The app shows what phones with the help of software have become. It uses the built in GPS in an interesting way and also helps to socialize with your friends over the Internet. Of course there are still things which have to be worked on like the official website of sports tracker but at the moment the overall app and service are pretty satisfying.

To get more info on this app just visit the Nokia Sports Tracker website.

Nokia E55 App Review: Ovi Contacts

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

screenshot0040 Nokia E55 App Review: Ovi ContactsOvi Contacts is another application form the Nokia Beta Labs. It is somewhat of an IM client which is available on almost all of the S60 3rd and 5th Edition devices. Ovi Contacts which was known as Contacts on Ovi is still not finished yet but it runs pretty stable. There were already some updates which got rid of bugs and introduced some new improvements.

What Ovi Contacts basically does is that it allows you to chat with your friends and shows your presence to them. With this app you can also show your friends what music you are listening to, your current location or your call status. The location feature is pretty nice. You can mark the place where you are at and share it with your friends. On the app itself the name of the location will be shown. It is also possible to let your friends view your location on a map via Nokia Maps.

At the moment Ovi Contacts only allows you to add contacts from Google Talk but not the other popular IM clients like MSN, Yahoo, ICQ etc. Because of this the app is somewhat limited but since it still is in development this can change pretty soon.

Some features that are missing are for example group chat and transfer of data like pictures and such. Even if it isn’t a very good IM client at the moment it is definitely heading into the right direction. It is a very nice app to socialize with your friends.

Like with all web based mobile applications it is recommendable to have a data flat which covers the bandwidth usage of Ovi Contacts even though it uses very little bandwidth.

To download it just visit the Nokia Beta Labs.

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Nokia E55 App Review: Handy Taskman.

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

handy taskman 1 eng Nokia E55 App Review: Handy Taskman.Handy Taskman from Epocware is very useful application for S60 phones. A taskmanager is a very essential tool for a multitasking device. With Handy Taskmen it is much easier to manage all your apps that are installed on your phone. Besides managing your apps it also shows some basic info about the phones different memories.

A really nice thing about Handy Taskman is that it replaces the standard S60 taskmanager after it is installed on your phone. This way you can start Handy Taskman just by a long press on the menu button. The first thing you will see after starting this app is the process list which shows applications that are running on your phone. Apps that are running in the background are indicated with the typical blue Nokia arrow. On the right side of Handy Taskman you will see the current time and date, the amount of free memory left on your phone. This includes the phone memory, memory card and RAM. Each kind of memory has an indication bar which shows you how much memory is in use compared to the actual amount of memory that the device has. This can also be viewed under options in Memory details.

Under Option you also have the possibility to switch off all running programs or kill some of them. You also have the possibility to search through all the apps on your phone and start them which comes really handy when you have many apps installed on your phone.

Used apps will appear later on your process list so that you can start them directly from Handy Taskman. You can also add apps that you use very often to a favorite list so that you have a faster access to them.

Overall this is one of the only capable taskmanagers for S60 cell phones besides Best Taskman. It really helps when you have a device which has a low amount of RAM. Other than that it does a much better job than the native S60 taskmanager which seems just pitiful compared to this app. In my opinion it is definitely worth a buy if you have many apps installed on your phone.

Handy Taskman costs $14,95 and has also a 14 day trial version. Visit the Epocware Website to buy this app.

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Nokia E55 App Review: Google Mail

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

google mail 300x136 Nokia E55 App Review: Google MailIf you are an avid Google Mail user then the free GMail client for S60 3rd Edition should be of interest to you. It is a java based application which will allow you to receive and send emails via Google Mail a lot easier. Of course you can also visit the mobile version of Google Mail on the regular S60 web browser but using that browser can sometimes be a real pain. So the standalone Gmail client is a nice app to have.

After opening this app for the first time you will be asked to log in and after that you can begin to use the actual email client. The Gmail client has the option to pre load the email content so that you don’t have to wait too long to get a look into your in-box. The mails are sorted according to date which is pretty logical since the latest mails are the most relevant to people who are on the go.

Sending emails with the Gmail client isn’t hard to do. You have the possibility to search for a specific contact with the help of a search bar at the top. Writing the mails are also very easy since you get an extra window which takes up the complete screen while typing. It looks almost like the text field where you type your text messages or notes.

The fonts look very clear and are well readable. Navigating through the mail client is smooth and the user interface is pleasant to look at. Overall it shouldn’t be too hard using Gmail effectively.

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Nokia E55 App Review: Here and Now

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

screenshot0036 Nokia E55 App Review: Here and NowHere and Now is another creation of the guys over at the Nokia Beta Labs. The major task of this app is to show you what local events are going on and how the local weather will be in the next few days. Here and Now was released two months ago for devices based on S60 3rd Edition FP2 but after the last update it also works on FP1 devices. When this app is out of beta status Nokia is planning to preinstall it in the forthcoming Nokia devices. The Nokia beta labs also promise that the final version will include some more services than the two mentioned. Whether the new S60 5th Edition devices will also get this app is still unknown.

Here and Now defines your location via your network operator and the content for this app is provided by 3rd party companies. The weird thing about Here and Now is that it actually isn’t a standalone application. It is just a bookmark saved in the standard S60 browser.

The “app” is very easy to use and looks quite nice with its “soft” colors and icons which are mainly used in the events part of Here and Now. Each upcoming event has a different color. You will get info on the place, time and type of the event. Overall Here and Now doesn’t seem like anything special. It does things that other apps have been doing for a long time now. Maybe it will get interesting when Nokia add some more services like they promised.

You can download the beta directly at the Nokia Beta Labs. Like every other beta this one is also free.

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Nokia Game Services: N-Gage and Ovi-Store

Friday, June 19th, 2009

untitled 1 copy 300x204 Nokia Game Services: N Gage and Ovi StoreSince the Ovi Store service has started some while ago and games started to appear on it, some of the Nokia cell phone users wondered what actually would become of N-Gage which has been Nokia’s gaming service for quite a while now. Because of the availability of N-Gage on the N-Series and recently the E-Series (e.g. E55) and Xpress Music phones this gaming service became quite popular for mobile gamers throughout the last year.

At the beginning the Ovi Store mostly had non N-Gage games. But recently trials from N-Gage games are available on the Ovi Store. On the Ovi Store itself there are no indications of N-Gage while downloading the trials. They are available under the gaming category just like the other games. When you download the trials it will open N-Gage so that you can install them. Buying the game isn’t done over the Store but with the N-Gage service.

It looks like Nokia isn’t letting go of the N-Gage service just yet. But over the upcoming months it is quite possible that the Ovi Store will completely merge with the N-Gage service. The availability of the trials through the Ovi Store seems to be an indication just for this.

If Nokia manages to combine the N-Gage service and the Ovi Store successfully the end user should benefit from it. It should be less of hassle to try out and buy the game if it is within just only one service rather than split in two services.

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Nokia E55 App Review: Nokia Photo Browser

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

screenshot0305 Nokia E55 App Review: Nokia Photo BrowserThe Nokia Photo Browser is another great app from the Nokia Beta Labs. It is an experimental photo browser with many nice 3D effects. The photo browser was released at the end of March for the Nokia 5800 XM. But sometimes later it was also available for the S60 3rd Edition devices. Recently it got a major update with improvements and features. Sadly in the future releases the Photo Browser team will mostly focus on the S60 5th Edition phones. Still this app is already working very well on the 3rd Edition phones.

The browser looks very fancy because of the nice implementation of 3D effects. After starting the browser it will show all pictures on your phone in a grid view. It works in portrait and in landscape mode. To do this the photo browser uses the accelerometer. A smooth rotating effect is used during the change of displaying mode.

Pictures which take longer to load are simply displayed as blank images. Scrolling through the images is also very smooth and can be done very quickly. It looks just like the 3D pictures/video browser Cooliris which can be used as a Firefox add-on.

I already motioned that the newest release came with some new features and improvements. The improvements are better image zoom quality and better rendering and image processing speed. New features that come with this version of photo browser are a folder sorting option, a send function and an image rotating and deleting function. These features were really needed so that this app could be actually used as a real photo browser.

The Nokia Photo Browser is a promising app. It makes browsing pictures on your phone a pleasant experience. If you have an S60 5th Edition device you will get some very nice extra features over the S60 3rd Edition devices. Still as an owner of any current S60 phone you should have a look at this app. This photo browser is free and you can get it at the Nokia Beta Labs.

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Nokia E55 App Review: Google Mobile

Friday, June 12th, 2009

app 225x300 Nokia E55 App Review: Google MobileIt has been a long time since Google started as a simple web search engine. Over the years it became very popular and is now almost a synonym for a search engine. With its popularity Google grew very fast into a successful company. This is quite visible if you look at Google and how it is trying to create new services for many different platforms like desktop operating systems and mobile operating systems. It now even has a mobile smart phone OS and a desktop browser .The most well known services for mobile operating systems (S60, WM, Android, Blackberry OS etc.) are Gmail, Google Maps, Sync and most importantly the video sharing website YouTube which Google bought just about three years ago. Google’s effort to give their users a better web experience led them to create applications like the Google Mobile App for S60.

The Google Mobile App allows you to start a Google search without extra opening your phone browser which comes pretty handy since this way of using Google is much faster than starting up your browser then visiting Google and then searching for something. Since one week Google extended this app. Besides the search option it now includes other Google services like, YouTube, Mail, News, Photos etc.

After starting this app which you can do via a shortcut key Google Mobile connects itself initially to the internet so it can give you suggestions while you are typing.

To download this app just visit m.google.com on your phone browser. Of course the Google Mobile App is a freeware.

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Nokia E55 App Review: Bolt Beta

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

boltlogo 300x226 Nokia E55 App Review: Bolt BetaBolt is a browser for cell phones and is based on java just like opera mini. At the moment it is in a beta state but it looks pretty promising. Just like Skyfire this browser can also play flash videos. But the problem is that the resolution of the videos is limited to 176×144 pixels which look pretty bad on devices with a screen resolution of 240×320 or higher.

One very positive thing about Bolt is that it manages to avoid overlapping of page elements something Opera Mini doesn’t do. Articles on web pages with pics and text are rendered very nicely so that you don’t have to scroll around very much to look at them at the same moment. Sadly Bolt doesn’t seem to recognize bold and italic writings and renders them just like the normal text.

Like Opera Mini Bolt doesn’t support tabbed browsing. Bolt also has some other common things with Opera Mini like the mobile view and desktop view. The browser comes with a built in RSS reader which can be pretty useful. Other than that the beta seems to be stable and the browser is quite fast and definitely much faster than the S60 webkit browser. But Operea Mini is still faster.

Bolt is not perfect but since it is only in its second beta many things can change. For the better I hope. You can get it over at the Bolt website but you have to enter your name and email address first before you can download it.

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Nokia E55 App Review: Skyfire

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

screenshot0139 187x250 Nokia E55 App Review: Skyfirescreenshot0140 187x250 Nokia E55 App Review: SkyfireSkyfire is a proxy based web browser for smart phones. It has already been a while since the beta of this app was launched but now it is out of beta status and is available for all S60 3rd Edition and Windows Mobile (5/6) devices.

What makes Skyfire so special is that it supports Ajax, JavaScript, Silverlight 2 and most importantly Flash 10. This way you can watch videos on web pages like YouTube and Hulu without a problem. The browser also has Twitter and Facebook integrated making staying connected to your friends very easy.

In comparison to the built in S60 browser Skyfire is really fast since it uses proxy servers. The pages are rendered much faster and the videos are properly displayed. Zooming is done with the d-pad and works well. Other than that Skyfire has the basic web browser functions like bookmarks and such. Sharing URL’s in Skyfire is done via SMS. Overall the UI is decent.

Skyfire isn’t perfect but it has a lot of potential and is already a very good alternative to the S60 browser and Opera Mini. With future releases it should get better. The browser is perfect for people who visit many flash based web pages and don’t like the S60 browser very much. At the moment it is the only 3rd party S60 browser which can display flash content until Opera Mobile 9.7 and Bolt are released in their final version. Like Opera Mini Skyfire is also free. To download it just visit m.skyfire.com on your cell phone browser.

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