Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Review Conditions

HandyPaint from Mobivio Solutions was installed on a Nokia 5800, running Symbian^1.

Installation

Installation via the Nokia Installer or by directly opening the .sis file on the Nokia phone.

First View

HandyPaint from MobiVio Solutions is a powerful and easy drawing tool for your Symbian S60 smart phone. It has a plethora of functions, which you’ll read about in this review.

Main Review

HandyPaint has all the features of a standard drawing tool, but each feature is implemented with better design and is well thought through for best user experience. It can be used to draw, edit pictures captured with your camera’s phone or edit screenshots.

Advanced Drawing Tools

Standard tools supported include pencil, a large palette of colors, straight lines, curves, rectangles, ellipses. It also includes a polygon shape. In all, over 30 tools are supported. A resizable toolbar is present on top of the canvas that can be used to pick the tools you want to use.

The curve drawing tool, lets you change the curve shape on the canvas by providing various editing points on its entire length. By touching one of the points, you can easily shape the curve to fit your needs. This is a nice feature that provides rich drawing abilities on a mobile device.

The rectangle, ellipse and star tools have a further tool options which can be brought up by a long press.

A long press on the square tool brings up 4 drawing options for rectangles – outline, filled rectangle, outline rectangle with rounded edges and filled rectangle with rounded edges.

Similarly, long press on the ellipse tool gives you options to create filled circles and ellipses or outline circles and ellipses.

The toolbar gives 12 Pen Sizes of varying width with which you can draw pictures. HandyPaint also has unlimited undo / redo which is very useful.

Customizable Tool Bar

The toolbar can be docked anywhere on the canvas. It can be dragged around and placed at different places so that it doesn’t come in the way of drawing or editing a picture. It also auto hides itself from the screen as you begin drawing on the canvas. The toolbar can also be resized to rearrange the buttons in two or three rows. Its also translucent so that the image behind it is not fully hidden from view.

Anti Aliasing

MobiVio describe their drawing as anti-aliasing drawing. This is supposed to give excellent drawing performance because the lines, circles, curves and ellipses on a drawing are extremely smooth without jagged edges, like other paint tools. I did observe that the quality of the drawing is better than most other applications.

Zoom on the Canvas

HandyPaint provides a zoom in / zoom out for the canvas which is very useful for viewing and editing minute parts of an image. When the zoom button is clicked in the tool bar, the zoom bar is displayed on the canvas. Zooming in and out is a smooth experience.

Pan on the Canvas

When you touch the hand button on the toolbar a thumbnail of the picture or image you are editing is displayed on the bottom of the screen and you can pan in and out of the canvas to specific parts of the picture to do minute drawings. I set the zoom size to 200 and then pan to one part of the image so that I can draw it in greater detail.

Multiple Image Formats

HandyPaint supports multiple image formats like Bitmap, Jpeg, Gif, Png. Bitmaps and Jpegs can be saved as low, medium or high quality which will vary the size of the image.

Save Work in Progress

To save work in progress and open the image later for editing, HandyPaint support a native image format called hpf. Files saved as .hpf can be reopened again for further editing. This is a useful feature for the serious image editor who is not constrained by the small screen.

Color Palette

HandyPaint offers a huge color palette with an advanced color option where you can select the RGB mix to get unique hues.

Text Styles

You can add text to images just like other Paint applications.  Different font styles like Bold, Italic, Underline and Strikethrough are supported. But I found that the text box doesn’t resize itself to the length of the text. So if you create a small text box and create a longish word, only the later part of the word is displayed. It was a little painful to fit the text into the text box.

Camera Images and Screenshots

HandyPaint lets you import images captured with your camera phone and also take screenshots and edit them.  It gives you 10 seconds to choose the screen before capturing it. Its not as efficient as Screensnap but useful nevertheless.

Handling

HandyPaint is great to use. I didn’t have any problem getting around the application, find out options and learning about all the features. Its very user friendly but a very feature rich application. The casual user may find it a little demanding to start with but will get used to it as time goes by. The pull up menu from the bottom, borrowed from Android is a great space saver and is eliminates the boredom of S60’s hierarchical menu structure.

Weaknesses

I didn’t find any major weaknesses in the application from a feature list point of view. HandyPaint took up close to 10 Mb of RAM and when I operated the Screen capture utility, the RAM usage increase further. The difficulty in fitting text into the text box can be removed in newer versions.

Conclusion

HandyPaint is a highly feature rich drawing tool for the Symbian^1 platform and its probably the best as of today. HandyPaint can be downloaded here for a trial or purchased for $14.95. Its good stuff and I’ll give it 4 of 5.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Review Conditions

PhoneTorch 2.0 was installed in a Nokia 5800 XPressMusic, an S60 5th edition device with Symbian OS 9.4.

Installation

Installation is imply via the Nokia Application Installer available in the Nokia PC Suite. You can also transfer the .sis file to the mobile’s memory card and start installation directly from the phone.

First View

I always thought flashlight applications for the mobile phone were overrated. There is a wow factor and the first impression is always good but I wondered if they’d be really useful when you really need a flashlight to search a car key dropped on the road at night or finding your seat in a movie theater. Read on.

Main Review

PhoneTorch uses 2 light sources on your phone – the LED flash and the LCD display. The LED flash of the Nokia 5800 is quite bright and I found that it functions truly as a low intensity flashlight and is very useful. I used it in both the use cases I mentioned above and it proved useful. The LED can be turned on and off from within the application.

The LCD display lights up the entire 3.2″ display with the color you want. You can change the color of the display too. The light intensity of the display can be reduced or increased.

PhoneTorch also lets you send out Morse code using the LCD display. You just have to type the text, like SOS, and it send out dots and dashes by short and long bursts of LED light.

PhoneTorch can be configured to autostart on your phone. The hardware Camera key can be configured to be a shortcut key and can be used to turn on / off the LED flash.

You can set the application resume the light state when you last quit it. Which means if you quit the app with the LED on, the next time you restart it, the LED comes back on, without you having to turn it on. That reduces the number of taps you have to make when you badly need some light.

Handling

PI found PhoneTorch to quite fast showing now latency when I opened it to start the flash light. When the app goes to the background, you can use the hardware Camera key to turn on and off the LED. This is thoughtfully done so that once again, key presses or taps are reduced. But you cannot open the camera when PhoneTorch is running, because it hijacks the hardware Camera key.

But I found that ScreenSnap, the screen capture application overrides PhoneTorch too! So when you have ScreenSnap and PhoneTorch open, pressing the Camera key

Weaknesses

Obviously, keeping the LED flash or the display turned on for many seconds will drain the battery in a flash. Its not really a weakness, but something one should remember when keeping the LED flash turned on for many minutes and complaining that the battery on the device is poor. Notice the power spike in the image below, when LED flash is turned on.

Conclusion

I found that the design of PhoneTorch was well thought out. Quick access to open the application and toggle the flashlight easily are two use cases which have been given paramount importance and implemented perfectly. With simple controls, great ease of use, PhoneTorch is good stuff and can be purchased here for $2.99.

PhoneTorch is one application that silently stays in a corner and shows its value at the most important moment.
PhoneTorch with all its functionality is supported in Nokia S60 5th edition, 3rd edition FP2 and Sony Ericsson Vivaz, Vivaz Pro and Satio. Older vesions like N95 are also supported, but with limited features. Its a truly useful application and I’ll give it 4 of 5.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Mini Review

TviderLite, is a fancy little Twitter client created exclusively for tweeting multimedia status. Now, you’d ask, why would I want to have a separate client for multimedia, when I can use, for e.g. Gravity which supports posting images via TwitPic, TwitGoo, Yfrog, img.ly, Posterous and MobyPicture? But does your twitter client post and instantly clicked picture, captured video or audio clips to a public timeline and also your own Twitter timeline?

With a beautifully implemented user interface, Tvider is a refreshing new Twitter application that I find quite impressive, in what it does.

Read on.

Tvider has four ways to update your status – InstaPix, InstaVideo, InstaAudio and MemWiz.

InstaPix lets you capture a picture and tweet it.

With InstaVideo, you can capture a video, from within Tvider and instantly plays it back to you so that you can decide to tweet it or not.

InstaAudio records is a voice recorder that tweets audio message to your timeline.

When you playback the video or  audio, Tvider also displays the length of the clip in seconds. That gives me an idea of how long it will take to actually tweet the clip online. Tvider obviously maintains its own server to host the public timeline which will contains hundreds of thousands of images, video and audio clips. So the multimedia is of the smallest resolution possible. I don’t see this as a real issue, considering that more and more multimedia creation and consumption is via the mobile’s small screen.

MemWiz, which I find to be a name that’s not related to the function it does, lets you pick a file and tweet it. But in reality, it only lets you select images to tweet. But the additional benefit is that you can add a comment along with the picture that you wish to tweet.

Tvider.com has a public timeline to which you can login with your Twitter handle.

Download

TvideLite 1.4 can be downloaded from m.tvider.com. TviderLite only supports Multimedia tweets, as explained on the tvider blog.

The premium version of Tvider supports Text and Multimedia tweeting, viewing tweets and other operations like DM, Replies, follow, unfollow, etc which are the standard features of Twitter, But Tvider premium, is only available for subscribers of two service providers, Airtel and 3 Networks. Mobile subscribers of other networks cannot get Tvider premium!!

TviderLite and Tvider are currently available only for S60 3rd edition devices. I tested TviderLite on my Nokia E71, a Symbian 9.3, S50 3rd edition FP 1 device.

Conclusion

TviderLite is perfect for travel blogging and for sharing instant emotions to people across the world. I enjoyed the simplicity of its user interface. Its good stuff and I’ll give it 4 of 5.

Mini Review

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Everyone enjoys great wallpapers on my mobile phone. How often have we changed the wallpaper on the phone with every new image we have captured on our mobile phone? I have spent countless hours searching all over the web for images that are of the perfect resolution and are unobtrusive on the home screen so that the shortcuts are not hidden.

ThinkChange.cn have come up with a cool free application Free WallPapers that lets you go to their website directly from the mobile phone and download wallpapers. One might ask, “What’s so special?, its just another download page for wallapers.” The unique part is that its a single portal for great wallpapers and you don’t have to search all over the web. You also don’t have to download wallpapers to your desktop, resize them and check compatibility before setting the images as wallpapers. Every aspect of setting a wallpaper for the mobile can be done via the application from your mobile and all you need is a WiFi or GPRS/3G connection.

There are 7 categories of Wallpapers  Cars, Cartoon characters, Classic, Design, Flowers, Nature and Universe. Each category has atleast 15 wallpapers, giving a collection of over 75 wallpapers for you to pick from. I also found that the wallpapers were perfectly resized for my Nokia 5800’s screen size.

The ease with which you can download and install wallpapers is also amazing. You are only 4 steps away from setting a new wallpaper. In the application, connect to the internet, pick a nice wallpaper and download/install as your wallpaper.

Download

Free Wallpapers can be downloaded here.

Conclusion

Obviously, Free WallPapers gives ThinkChange.cn a great opportunity to get eye balls to their own site where they can serve advertisements of all their premium products. This approach has been common on the web and as long as the advertisements are not very intrusive and the site serves great wallpaper content, I don’t mind the ads.

Free Wallpapers is great stuff and I’ll give it 4 of 5.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Review Conditions

SPB Quads was installed on two devices, a Nokia 5800 XPressMusic, an S60 5th edition device with Symbian OS 9.4.

Installation

Installation is simply via the Nokia Application Installer available in the Nokia PC Suite.

First View

Realizing the potential of the Quadronica, which is one of the brain training modules in SPB Brain Evolution, SPB has created an entire new game SPB Quads, based on the same theme. Lets check it out.

Game Play

SPB Quads is a classic arcade game, with multiple levels, that rapidly increase in complexity.

The entire screen is filled with 600 tiny cubes of various colors. The objective of the game is simple – collapse rectangles with four corner cubes of the same color and gain points. You get more points if you collapse larger rectangles. When you are racing against time to collapse as many rectangles as possible before the countdown completes, the adrenalin increases to great levels and it makes for addictive gaming.

Bonus points can be gained with six different types of bonuses – Item Freeze, Atom Bomb, X2, Dynamite, Time Freeze and Eye bonus.

The game offers two modes – Ever Mode which is the endless strategic and Time Mode which is time limited.

Rectangles can be collapsed by touching the opposite corner cubes or 3 out of the 4 corners.

Graphics and Animation

Quads comes with great animation. The cubes on the game screen have a three dimensional effect and the rectangles collapse with a blast towards the bottom of the screen. The bonuses are all animated to attracted. If you don’t pick a rectangle for a few seconds, Quads help you by pointing to a rectangle.

Music Score and Sound Effects

Pulsating music plays in the background as game sound effects for collapsed rectangles and bonus points add to the overall sound effect. There is no complaining in this department.

Interface

Here’s another example of how the menu driven UI model of S60 can be avoided to create an excellent user experience and navigation. I thoroughly enjoyed playing SPB Quads.

The game is both finger friendly and stylus friendly. I had no problems using both forms of input.

The interface to enter your name gives a weird keyboard that makes you search for various alphabets and numbers. It could have been the qwerty keyboard for ease of use and familiarity.

Publishing scores online

The curiosity of finding out how good you are, not just among your friends but anyone who has played SPQ Quads, on any platform, all over the world cannot be avoided. SPB maintains a database with all the highest scores where you can check and publish your scores. There are quite a few maniacs out there with scores that are phenomenal.

Weaknesses

SPB Quads doesn’t allow multiple logins to be created. When you finish playing, you can pick a user name and upload the highest score. It would have been great if you can set a user name before you begin and have multiple use names.

Conclusion

With uncomplicated but engaging game play SPB Quads is good stuff and I’ll give it 4 of 5. SPB Quads can be downloaded here for $9.95.

Mini Review

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

How often do you find a cluttered application folder in you Symbian S60 device with too many applications that you had installed over several months? I am usually lazy in removing applications from my phone because its a tedious affair, picking each application one by one and removing it manually. ThinkChange obviously have had this problem and have released a free BatchUninstaller application for Symbian S60 devices that removes multiple applications in one shot.

BatchUninstaller lists all the applications installed on the phone with a check box against each of them. You can select the applications you want to uninstall and click “Delete Selected” to remove the applications in one go.

Be careful to select only uninstall 3rd party applications or Nokia applications that you installed on the device. BatchUninstaller displays all internal system applications also.

Download

Batch Uninstaller is a free application and can be downloaded here.

Conclusion

For a heavy user like me, Batch Uninstaller is a boon. For any lay user too, Batch Uninstaller helps to save time. Its good stuff and I’ll give it 4 of 5.

Mini Review

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Cellular phone radiation is about 20 times greater when a new call is connected than when you are in a conversation. VibrateCall from ThinkChange helps to reduce this voluntary exposure of the brain to microwave  emission from mobile phones.

VibrateCall can be configured to vibrate, the moment a call is initiated on your Nokia Symbian S60 device. It continues to vibrate until the call is answered. The moment the call is picked up, the vibration stops. This lets you keep the phone in the hand until the call is connected through and you don’t need to place your phone near the ear.

VibrateCall is also useful, especially in noisy environments, where we tend to press the mobile phone harder to the ear, trying to figure out when the other part picks up the phone.

The intensity of vibration can be increased or decreased. You can also set this application to auto-start at boot up.

The downside is of course the battery drain because often, we don’t terminate the call after two or three unanswered rings and the vibrations tend to go on for a long time.

Download

VibrateCall can be downloaded here for $4.99. There is also a special offer from ThinkChange for 6 top apps at $15.

Conclusion

VibrateCall is simple idea but highly useful. I find it indispensable. Its a must have and I’ll give it 5 of 5.

Mini Review

Cool Home Screens – nUnLock and FingerPrint from ThinkChange.

nUnLock

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

nUnLock is a cool home screen for your Nokia Symbian S60 5th edition device. It has an iPhone like screen lock with a”Slide to Unlock” option at the bottom of the screen. All notifications are displayed on the home screen See everything you need at first glance: easy-to-read time, month, date and day display and  important indicators of the phone status. The status indicators are phone lock status, radio signal bars and battery level indicator with a + sign if the device is charging. It also displays Bluetooth connectivity but does not display WiFi connections.

nUnLock lets you configure the background image on the screen. If no custom image is provided, it picks a good scenery. Apart from customizing the background image, you can also customize the slider sensitivity, font color of the text on the screen, transparency and various time,date formats. The text “Slide to Unlock” is also customizable.

You can unlock your Nokia phone with one smooth slide of the finger. But you still have to first unlock the screen by pulling down the mechanical lock-unlock ‘lever’ on the side of the Nokia 5800.

Download

nUnLock can be downloaded at ThinkChange’s nUnLock page.

Conclusion

nUnlock is a fine replacement to the home screen which displays of all useful events. Its good stuff and I’ll give it 4 of 5.

FingerPrint

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

FingerPrint, as the name suggests gives the appearance that you will use your fingerprint to unlock the phone screen and its quite authentic!  You can play the tick with friends and anyone who picks up the phone to play with it. When the FingerPrint screen pops up, you need to touch your finger to the screen to be “scanned” for your identity, there will be vibration and beep sounds during the scan.

It actually works based on the how many times the finger print scanner runs the fake scan on your finger as you keep touching the screen. If you have set the unlock condition to 3, the screen is unlocked after the scanner runs past the finger 3 times. So actually, the phone does not unlock depending on whose finger it is, but on how many beeps or vibrations happened since your finger touch the screen.

Download

FingerPrint can be downloaded at ThinkChange’s FingerPrint page.

Conclusion

FingerPrint works fine as a home screen as well as an application for pranks. Its worth a look and I’ll give it 3 of 5.

Review Conditions

RaviteQ’s imaging applications, ImageStudio, Collage and FaceSwap were installed on a Nokia 5800 Xpress Music, a Symbian S60 5th edition device.

Installation

ImageStudio, Collage and FaceSwap are available at the Ovi Store and registered users will get a URL via SMS to purchase the full version or download a trial.

First View

This post reviews all the 3 imaging applications ImageStudio, Collage and FaceSwap for the Symbian S60 5th edition mobiles, which are based Scalado CAPS imaging technology for the best imaging experience.

Main Review

ImageStudio

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

ImageStudio opens up the image gallery and lets you pick the image that should be manipulated.

There are many image manipulation options.

Image Filters – Emboss, GrayScale, Milky, Negative and Sepia. This option changes the image and lets you save or discard the changes.

Cliparts – There are over 50 cliparts for you to choose from.  The cliparts can be moved around the image.

[edit] You can also zoom and rotate the cliparts in any way you want after adding them to the image.

Rotate and Flip the image – 90 and 180 degrees, Vertical and Horizontal

Image Enhancements – Brightness, Contrast, Sharpness and White Balance

Frames – There are 10 frames to choose from.

Resolution – The resolution can be changed from 2048x 1536 to 1920×1440 to 1600×1200 to 1280×960 to 800×600 to 640×480 to 320×240.

Text – Text can be added anywhere on the screen. I couldn’t change the font type of size though the font color can be changed.

For every change, there is an undo option that lets you incrementally undo changes. But once you save an image, you cannot go back and edit it, e.g. after saving the Text, I cannot change its color or delete it.

Once you are finished modifying the image, it can be sent via SMS, Bluetooth or uploaded via Nokia Share Online. It can also be used as a Wallpaper or a Contact image. Remember that the image is not backed up before you start editing it.

Overall, I enjoyed using ImageStudio. It can keep you engaged for hours in manipulating images with the various options. I did not see any visible degradation of the image in anyway when it is saved.

Collage

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Collage lets you put together multiple images into a collage that can be used as a wall paper or in a photo frame. There are many themes and backgrounds that you can use. Its a simple but very eye candy and you can create many enjoyable wall papers with simple images snapped with your camera phone.

The creation of a Collage is quite simple. In a 3 image collage, you have to click 3 images, one after the other to select each frame. The screen guides you with indications of which frame you have selected – 1/3, 2/3 and 3/3. Once all the images are snapped, you get the collage.

FaceSwap

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

FaceSwap aims to let you superimpose faces of your friends and family over funny pictures. But the application has taken a slightly different method. Instead of superimposing previously snapped pictures, the camera view finder actually makes you pick the funny picture you want to superimpose and shows it in the camera. Just like in photo studios where you put your face over a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger. So the face is actually fit into the image when you snap the picture. While this allows placing the face correctly on the image, I found the size of the face to be incongruous with the actual picture.

There is nothing more to this application but its fun while it lasts.

Handling

All of RaviteQ’s applications had very user friendly interfaces and easy to use menus. Usually one or two taps do the trick. Particularly, ImageStudio was a pleasure to use.

Weaknesses

I didn’t find any weaknesses in these applications.

Conclusion

I actually spend hours on these applications manipulating images and having fun.

RaviteQ is the only development partner to license the Scalado CAPS imaging technology in stand alone applications. Unlike other paid-only applications, RaviteQ have published trial versions and full version of the applications in the Ovi Store. RaviteQ’s applications are good stuff and I’ll give them 4 of 5 overall.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Review Conditions

AdvanceSMS S60 from Killermobile was installed on a Nokia 5800 Xpress Music, a Symbian S60 5th edition device.

Installation

The .sis file has to be installed using the Nokia Installer, like all native Symbian applications. AdvancedSMS is compatible with all S60 3rd and 5th edition devices, right from the Nokia N95, E71 to the 500 XpressMusic and the N97.

First View

AdvancedSMS is an SMS utility that provides powerful messaging features to Symbian smart phones.

Main Review

AdvancedSMS is built over the native Symbian messaging application and it uses the native app for sending and receiving messages. It provides many powerful features over it.

Schedule SMS

Text messages can be scheduled for a later date and a specific time to one or more numbers. The best part is you can select multiple numbers from the address book. Advanced SMS automatically changes the Contacts list to a checkbox list from which many contacts can be selected!

The scheduler throws a warning if you don’t enter a message or pick a time in the past. You can also send the message to an email id!! But an email id has to be setup in the messaging application for this to function. AdvancedSMS does not connect to any external email app like Nokia Messaging Service or Profilmail to send emails out.

Manage SMS

The much touted SMS scheduling is all very good but I liked the Manage SMS feature the most. You often receive many spam texts from special numbers or short codes that advertise services. Phone beeps for these messages are very distracting. AdvancedSMS’s Manage SMS feature lets you handle such spam texts quite easily. These short codes are usually not in your Contacts, so you can enable an SMS filter for messages from “All Non Contacts“. For this filter, you can set various actions, like not play any SMS tone, Auto Reply and Auto Forward.

You can add numbers or group from Contacts, from the Phone Log or enter them manually. I like the ‘All Non-Contacts’ option the most because these are the texts that I want to ignore.

But remember that these ‘unwanted’ messages don’t appear in your message inbox but in the SMS Logs of AdvancedSMS. This is not really a problem because if you want to move it back to the inbox, just select Restore and this message is removed from the SMS Logs and moved to the inbox. You also get a new message notification!

Full Screen Message Display

AdvancedSMS also presents a full screen display of all incoming messages. This is a cool feature. AdvancedSMS lets you configure the number of seconds the full screen display remains on the screen.

Export SMS

AdvancedSMS lets you export messages in the Inbox or Sent items in the Symbian messaging application. Messages are stored in the CSV format. You can also send the exported csv file as a text file to another number or email it.

SMS Log

The SMS Log displays all the messages that were filtered. You can view or delete the messages here or restore them to the native Symbian Messaging application.

Configuration

AdvancedSMS can be configured to Auto Start at boot time. It alerts the user about unread texts among various other aspects of managing messages.

Handling

AdvancedSMS has no issues in user interface and I had no trouble finding my way around it. Its well designed and easy to use.

Weaknesses

I didn’t find any weaknesses in AdvancedSMS.

Conclusion

AdvancedSMS is a worthy enhancement to the native Symbian SMS application. There are very many practical features that it provides, which you don’t realize are valuable until you actually get to use them. AdvancedSMS 14-day trial can be downloaded or purchased at the Killermobile store for $10.

AdvancedSMS is Good Stuff and I’ll give it 4 of 5.