Hot in the heels of the first release, SPB Mobile Shell has released an update, version 3.5.5 which has many improvements, the most important being efficient RAM utilization.

Memory optimization (10M less RAM usage)

There is sufficient RAM now to run many applications in parallel, especially Maps, Skype, or the Music Player.

Media player widget

The new Media player widget lets you play and pause music without having to open the Music Player.

4 free themes for Symbian

SPB has created 4 new free themes for SPB Mobile shell which can be download here. All the themes are stand alone .sis files which can be installed separately. The themes are color based, and there are Red, Green, Black and Blue themes. I installed them on the C drive, thinking they will integrated with SPB Mobile Shell, but these are the usual themes for S60 UI. I must say, the themes are really beautifully designed. The icons are changed, the background looks nice. You can use these themes even without installing SPB Mobile Shell. See images below.

But the theme isn’t fully displayed in SPB Mobile Shell’s home screens. SPB Mobile Shell continues to use its own image for the home screens and the themes don’t appear on the home screen! I can see the themes on the top and it doesn’t look very nice. I’d like to use the themes on my home screen too. Ideally, the themes must be setup from the home screen and they should be available on the home screen too. See the images below where they don’t fit well in the home screen.

Operator Name Widget

The operator’s name can be setup as a widget on the home screens but I wonder how useful this is.

Shortcuts to the most used files

You can now setup shortcuts to almost all files in your Symbian phone on the home screens. This is very useful, for frequent files like documents, etc. Essentially it works like the Desktop, on a Windows machine where we keep recent files or files that we need to access most often.

New Memo/New Anniversary items in organizer menu

In the Organizer, you can now create a new Anniversary without having to create a new contact or or open up the native Calendar application.

Customized Call Button

The Green Call Button can now be configured to open either the native Dialer or SPB Call Log. The SPB Call Log is a much improved version of the native Log application. It stores entries for several days and you can do many operations in the SPB Call Log, like saving the number as a new contact, call, email or send SMS to the contact.

Landscape/portrait orientation control

SPB Mobile Shell 3.5.5 also lets you fix the screen orientation to only Portrait or Landscape, thus disabling the accelerometer. You can also set it to “auto”, which means as the device is tilted, the screen rotates automatically to landscape mode or portrait mode.

Conclusion

In our earlier review of SPB Mobile Shell, I complained a little about RAM utilization. This update improves the situation greatly and also adds many useful features. Its worth the upgrade.

Here are some tips to restore factory settings.

*#7780# - Restore factory settings – resets all the settings to the default ( you will not lose any data) Make sure you back up your data as you will lose all of it when you perform option 2 or 3 on this list. The default code for ALL operations listed here is 12345.

*#7370# - Reformat your phone (just like out of the box; Most newer Nokia phones at least N series, E series and s60 5th edition based phones have UDP – User Data Preservation so not ALL data may be lost. Still it is a good idea to always back up your stuff).

Hard Reset – Perform this as a last resort, only if nothing else works. If the phone is not showing any activity, proceed with hard formatting , turn off your phone, hold the following buttons while pressing the power button. (the default code is 12345 - hold the following buttons *, 3 (number button) and talk/green key. Turn on the phone and do not release those buttons until you see the Nokia boot up screen. Once you feel the phone power up, you can let go off the power button while still holding all three buttons.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic – Use the following buttons to do a hard reset – GREEN/RED/CAMERA keys pressed all at once on power up and do not let go until you see the handshake screen. This will only work on 5800’s that have firmware version 20… and up. I have done this a couple of times when the phone bricked and it worked like a charm.  I always install the apps in the Memory Card, so they are retained after the master reset. Any apps installed in the C:\ is deleted.

Nokia N97 (unofficial version but works) – Press SHIFT /SPACE BAR / BACKSPACE while holding the power button. Again do not let go until you see the handshake screen. If these codes are not working the only thing for you to do is contact your Nokia Care Center/Service for assistance.

Congratulations to the winners of the Epocware Review Contest. We would like to thank the readers for the response to the contest.  We are delighted to announce the winners:

1. Ricardo
2. Haritia
3. Arek
4. Kiyo21
5. Mountain Thief

You will soon be contacted by Epocware. Have fun.

Epocware is giving away 10 free licenses to the best reviews of Handy Tools by the loyal readers of BesofSymbian! All you have to do is download the 14-day trial of Epocware’s Handy Tools and write a review of any of 13 utilities in 150-200 words and post it at BestofSymbian within the next 15 days.

We will draw the winners of the 10 free licenses randomly on Wednesday, November 26. So hurry!!
Apart from the 10 lucky winners, who will be presented with Handy Tools Pack that includes 13 utilities, all the participants will get a 40% discount on any Handy application they purchase from the website.

Epocware’s bonanza for Best of Symbian’s readers!!

Epocware is giving away 10 free licenses and 40% discount off on any Handy applications purchased to the readers of BesofSymbian!

Click here to download Epocware's Handy Tools Pack

All you have to do is download the 14-day trial of Handy Tools Pack and write a review of any of 13 utilities in 150-200 words and post it at BestofSymbian within the next 15 days.

We will draw the winners of the 10 free licenses randomly on Friday, November 27. So hurry!!

Apart from the 10 lucky winners, who will be presented with Handy Tools Pack that includes 13 utilities, all the participants will get a 40% discount on any Handy application they purchase from Epocware. The best deal would be to get a 40% discount off $129.95 on the Handy Tools pack.

Don’t forget to leave your email to avail the discount offer.

In this second part, we are going to explore applications which convert videos for playback on Nokia S60 5th edition mobiles, specifically the Nokia 5800.

In Part 1, we reviewed SmartMovie,  a commercially available from video player for playback on the Symbian device.

We will look at three applications for video conversion. All these applications were installed in a laptop running Windows XP SP2 with 1 Gigabyte of RAM and a 1.66 GHz processor.

1. Videora Nokia 5800 Converter
2. Handbrake
3. Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter

Videora Nokia 5800 Converter 5.00

Videora Nokia 5800 Converter can be downloaded here. It supports H.264 VGA 1024kbps Stereo/128kbps and MPEG4 VGA 1024kbps Stereo/128kbps formats.

Conversion of an avi file of approximately 800 Megabytes in the H.246 format takes approximately 45 minutes but when encoded with the MPEG4 format takes nearly 2.5 hours. Videora has different versions for N97, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, and various other mobile phones and iPods.

There are two modes you can choose for conversion, Simple Mode and Power Mode. In the Simple Mode, you just have to specify the file to be converted, the location on the hard drive where the converted file has to be stored and you are on your way.

Successful playback using the RealPlayer on the Nokia 5800 was a hit or miss. RealPlayer played back some files successfully back but it failed to play a few files. To find that playback failed after waiting for more than an hour converting the video is quite frustrating!!

Handbrake

Handbrake is an open source multi-threaded video transcoder that accept practically any type of video as a source. It supports many video formats that can be picked using various built-in presets that are categorized under Apple, Basic, High Profile and Gaming Consoles. I picked the Basic category and the Normal preset under this category for my conversion.

An avi file with running time of nearly 2 hours takes over 2 hours. The video codec was H.264. In the output settings, you can select the format of the output file as M4V, MP4, AVI, MKV and OGM. I’d prefer MP4. An avi file converted to M4V format failed to play on the S60 device. I didn’t try any presets under the Apple category.
Successful playback was once again a hit or miss. Playback of videos converted using some presets, like the Classic failed. Pick the Basic category under the Normal preset and it works!

Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter v0.32

The Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter is home grown application from Nokia available in Nokia Beta Labs that converts videos to the .mp4 format and works perfectly well with all Nokia phones.

It doesn’t confuse you by giving a myriad options of video and audio formats to choose from. The Video quality can be chosen from one of the 4 options that a layman can understand, Low, Good, Better and Best. Of course, each option corresponds to a particular bit rate of audio and video and a encoding at specific frame-per-second (fps). The bit rate for the Low video quality is 200 kbps video, 64 kbps audio at 24 fps. The bit rate for the Best video quality is 860 kbps video and 128 kbps audio at 30 fps.

It takes over an hour to convert videos but the time it takes to convert a video and the size of the video also varies based on the video quality. Choosing the Low video quality means the smallest video converted in the shortest time. Playback on the Nokia 5800 was always successful when converted using the Nokia Internet Video Converter.

Conclusion

Overall, my experience of converting videos to play on the Nokia 5800 was not very pleasant. What irked me most was how long I had to wait for videos to be converted to the required format. And I’d come to know only at the end of the whole process that playback wasn’t successful.

The applications throw you a whole bunch of options that are overwhelming. I would like to try out each one to determine which is the best, but video conversion with each option would take at least an hour. You simply can’t think of loading your S60 device with a couple of movies at the last minute, when you embark on a trip.

I’d recommend Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter for its simple interface and 100% success rate.

More thoughts on video playback on the device

Videos playback using RealPlayer was a pleasant experience on my Nokia 5800. Frame loss was low and did not interfere with my visual experience. If you try to fast-forward, it takes a few seconds for full resolution to set in in the new playback position.

RealPlayer does not remember playback positions which is painful because navigating to the right point of the movie is cumbersome.

Video playback is a huge battery draining task for the mobile phone. Prepare to recharge your S60 device within a day if you are going to watch a whole movie.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Review Conditions

The Nokia 5800 XPress Music, an S60 touch device with a large 3.2” bright screen and a 3.5 mm audio jack is well suited for watching long clips and movies. I set out to find out the best solution for watching videos on this mobile device.

Installation

All applications that I set out to review and evaluate are native Symbian applications in the .sis or .sisx format. Video converters are Windows applications that are compatible with Windows XP SP3.

First View

A worthy solution should have the following features:

1. Ease and speed of converting videos to a S60-friendly format
2. Video Players on the S60 mobile device – good quality playback and support for many video formats
3. Ease of transferring content to the mobile
4. Easy availability of content

In Part 1 we will look at SmartMovie Player from Lonely Cat Games.

Main Review

Converting videos to a mobile-friendly format

SmartMovie Converter

SmartMovie supports the Video Playback Formats 3GP, MP4, FLV and AVI formats. It comes with a Windows-based desktop application called SmartMovie Converter and a video player called SmartMovie Player for the S60 device. The desktop application optimizes, resizes and and prepares videos in MPG or AVI formats.

The SmartMovie Mobile Video Coverter It supports 4 video codecs – uncompressed, Divx 6.8.5 codec, Xvid Encoder and XviD MPEG-4 Codec. Choosing one of the four options are quite a challenge for the uninitiated.

I used SmartMove to optimize a 500 Megabyte AVI file using the XviD MPEG-4 encoder. SmartMovie lets you choose the Nokia mobile device for which the video should be optimized and has presents for each device. For the Nokia 5800, the video bit rate is 224 kbps and screen size is 320 x 180. The audio frequency is 16000 Hz at a bit rate of 40 kbps. Video conversion to avi took about 25 minutes and a file of size just 145 Megabytes was created. Playback quality was great.

Next I used the XviD encoder. The results were similar. It took about 25 minutes to optimize the file and the new file was 254 Megabytes of size. Playback quality was great too. Remember NOT to open a file as Read-only when you are going to encode it.

Divx 6.8.5 codec is an optimized version for PCs with multi-core processors and so I didn’t bother to use it since it will not give a better video for the Nokia 5800, which is a single core device.

For converting DVD formats to play on the S60, the SmartMovie DVD Guide recommends that the VOB file should be converted to AVI using other tools like DVDx before using SmartMovie to optimize, resize and prepare the video for playback on a mobile device. SmartMovie retains the file format after the optimization.

I also tried transferred an avi file directly without optimizing it using the SmartMovie Converter. Playback and audio was good but the audio and video was grossly out of sync and it took several attempts to get them to sync.

The SmartMovie Converter clearly prefers avi files for optimization but didn’t handle all avi files well. It threw a conversion error and crashed with many avi files. Overall, it was a hit or miss. SmartMovie Converter optimized some files but failed to convert many others.

SmartMovie Player

Playback on the SmartMovie player was smooth with little frame loss.  I found that there were minor out-of-sync issues on videos optimized using the SmartMovie player too but they could be fixed using the AV Sync option.

It has simple animated controls and a nifty seek option that shows a preview of the frame you seek.

SmartMovie Player lets you sync Audio and Video by introducing a delay or by increasing playback speed in multiples of .02 seconds. You can adjust brightness, contrast and saturation.

Handling

SmartMovie Player responds to touch well. The volume can be adjusted by just moving the volume bar up or down. A slider is available at the top of the screen to forward and reverse the video using the finger or stylus.

Weaknesses

Like I said earlier in this post, conversion of AVI files was hit or miss. Some conversions failed while some succeeded. I sorely missed the function in the SmartMovie Converter to transfer videos to the s60 mobile device immediately after conversion.

Conclusion

SmartMovie Converter converts videos at a very fast rate. Twenty five minutes for a full length movie is quite good. But lets find out how other video converters fare in this regard. I had very few problems playing video using the SmartMovie Player. The SmartMovie Player lets you play 60 minutes of free video before it locks out.

SmartMovie could enhance user experience greatly in this regard. SmartMovie can be downloaded here.

In Part 1, we reviewed the SmartMovie Video Converter and SmartMovie Video Player.

In Part 2, we will continue exploring other applications that convert videos for playback on the S60 mobile device in various supported mobile video formats. We will also look at other video players available.

In Part 3, we will talk about transferring content and availability of content.

Before I begin, let me tell you that I love my Nokia 5800 XPressMusic. Its a very fine touch device. Its extremely feature rich and a delight to use. I admire the length Nokia and Symbian have gone to retain compatibility to older S60 versions, which is critical for application developers to easily port existing apps quickly on to the new S605th edition.

But my rant is not about Nokia’s and Symbian’s current strategy for touch devices. Its about all the brouhaha over touch screen phones nowadays. Its almost as if you are not a half-decent handset maker if you don’t have a touch device. Non touch devices have gone out of fashion. But I don’t think touch screen is the ultimate feature in mobile phones. Sure, its feels great to swipe your hand across the screen to get it to unlock but there are many use cases for the consumer where a touch screen is just not the right choice. Here are a few that come to my mind.

1. Battery – The power user expects the phone batteries to last for more than a few days. But touch screen phones, with large screens consume lot of battery power. We know the pathetic battery lives of the iPhone and the G1. They don’t even last a day. And haptic feedback is very power hungry. I have it turned off in my 5800 to gain a few more hours of battery life.

2. Writing Email, text or short notes using an on-screen keyboard is very cumbersome, to say the least. A full qwerty keyboard is still the best. And school kids love the number keypad.

3. Try a one handed operation on your touch device. Its not very elegant to reach across the screen using the thumb on an iPhone. On the 5800 XPressMusic, its great but there is another problem of not finding a key.

4. Try doing an action without looking at the screen, for e.g. picking up a call. It just doesn’t work and over several years, we have gotten used to receiving a call by pressing that green key in the most familiar location on the device.

5. Touch screen devices, with their large screens are far more expensive to make – low end users who only want to make phone calls and text won’t just bother.

6. Actions with just one or two clicks are effective on a touch screen;  But anything more is a real pain. Try adding an address for a contact in the address book. Or try adding a calendar entry, say set the meeting to 7:45 PM. Not pleasant at all.

7. Accidental touch and activation or termination of apps and calls is inevitable. And its quite annoying. Sure this happens on other devices too but not as often as on a touch screen device.

But what’s a touch device great for?

1. Its great for consuming media – YouTube videos are great because of the large screen. I enjoy watching moves on my 5800 XPressMusic. It is a pretty decent experience. Browsing through my music collection or flicking through photos is nice, even without kinetic scrolling on the 5800 XPressMusic.

2. Games that use the accelerometer or respond to the touch input.

3. Browsing the mobile web is best experienced on a touch screen device – clicking through links with a touch is fantastic and multi-touch is quite amazing.

The Ovi store is abound with applications that use touch technology very well but don’t occupy you seriously for more than a hour, at most. They have an entertainment value and a wow factor but I haven’t seen any serious application that I’d use for more than just time-pass, which only suits best for a touch screen and not on any other device. I am excluding games here because a touch screen mobile device is probably the best platform for the casual gamer.

My view is that touch screen mobile devices of different form factors will occupy a decent percentage of the handset portfolio of every mobile device maker but will not be the only type of mobile device in future. There are still consumers out there, the non-geeks who just want to talk and text and read email.

Unfortunately we have not been able to post review in the last few months, since we have a lot of other things to do. Perhaps it could still take a while until we can offer new software reviews to you, we would like to say sorry about that.

As we got several inquiries of software developers to write reviews of their software and we didn’t have enough time to, we would like to give you the opportunity to get great software for free. All you need to do is writing a review, including screenshots – we will provide software and licences. We are also looking for experienced writers who would like to promote themselves or their own blogs trough writing a guest article.

Don’t hesitate and contact us – write a comment or an email!