Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Mini Review

Koinup, the virtual world social network, has introduced 3D Wallpapers to adorn your Symbian home screen but with a difference. The 3D Wallpapers application is the 1^stmobile application entirely dedicated to “avatar art” i.e., screen shots of virtual worlds like Second Life, World of Warcraft, Aion, Avatars, breathtaking 3d art and virtual Landscape photography images.

The 3D Wallpapers users will have the chance to browse and pick selected collections of avatar artworks created by 3D artists, and hundreds of amazing videogame and virtual world screenshots, fantasy artworks and fanart.

The purpose of 3D Wallpapers is to raise awareness about a new generation of artists that use 3D and virtual worlds as their own canvas. “Virtual worlds influence the way we perceive reality, by changing our aesthetic taste” says Edoardo Turelli, Koinup co-founder and CTO.

Download

3D Wallpapers can be downloaded in the Ovi Store. I installed 3D Wallpapers on my Nokia 5800, a S60 5th edition device running Symbian OS 9.4.

Conclusion

Koinup gives a refreshing new look to wallpapers and has a collection of hundreds of images in the 3D and  fantasy art categories. The images are of the correct resolution for your mobile’s screen. The wallpapers used in this review is only a small sample of the hundreds of wallpapers you can get for your mobile device. Its definitely worth a look.

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.

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: 3 out of 5 stars

How would you like to escape from a boring conversation group or from some who just can’t stop talking incessantly without realizing the emergency you may have? While such situations should be handled by a firm response without the aid of an external agent, sometimes, ByeByeCaller from ThinkChange does come in handy.

When ByByeCaller is started, you get the message “There will be a fake incoming call in 10 second(s), Activate?”. When you press “Yes”, 10 seconds later you get an incoming call that rings long enough for you to disentangle yourself from the situation you are in. The Activation Delay can be configured – so that the fake call comes in a few seconds later or sooner.

The Fake Name can be changed too, to something you want – like “the boss” or “the wife” or something that shows how important the call is. The funny thing is you could even configure the Network from which the fake call originates.

But I couldn’t stop the ringing after I activated the fake call. I had to wait for it to die out, which about a few seconds but I would have liked to stop it with the Red button if I wanted to.

Download

ByeByeCaller can be downloaded here for a trial or purchased at $9.95.

Conclusion

ByeByeCaller is worth a look. It might be highly useful for some people and not useful at all for others. The need is very subjective. The application has a simple implementation and good usability. I’ll give it 3 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.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Mini Review

We have already reviewed SPB Brain Evolution at BestofSymbian last year. It was a cracking application for brain training, with puzzles and quizzes that test your speed and accuracy. SPB Software have now introduced version 2.1 for the Symbian S60 5th edition touch screen devices and with awesome UI and intuitive menus.

Brain Evolution Game Play

Brain Evolution’s theme, puzzles and quizzes have been faithfully retained in its new avatar on the S60 touch phones. While the challenges are the same, the user experience has been revamped completely and its highly enjoyable.

First you have to go through a mandatory Brain Marking exercise, followed by Brain Training, which has 12 modules, with modules opening up based on your progress and scores. Each game has 4 difficulty levels, Easy, Medium, Hard and Maximum. The Brain Marking exercise is a guided start-to-finish test. When you select Brain Training, games that you need to play more are recommended to improve specific skills.

As you play and reach specific scores, the next difficulty level is opened up. Braining training is restricted to two modules every day. You could continue to play on but scores from the 3rd module onwards doesn’t count for that day.

World wide high scores for the Last 7 Days and Overall, for individual challenges as well as Brain Power/ Brain Marking is available. The application retrieves this information from a database that requires a WiFi or a GPRS/3G connection.

UI Overview

Here’s an example of how you don’t have to use the built in menu structure of S60 5th edition but design a completely new menu layout. The application’s UI is something similar to the Qt based Symbian^3’s UI, which was first introduced in Nokia Beta Labs’ Gig Finder application. The menus are at the top of the screen with a one touch operation. The tree-like menu structure is completely done away with. On the top left is the new Menu icon and on the top right is the Exit button.The Menu icon is used for minimal operations like volume setting, backlight, registration of the application, help, etc. Essentially you don’t have to use it after the initial setup of Brain Evolution.

The various other menus, like Brain Training, Marking, Facts, Profiles, etc are managed by an - Android-like – pull down menu from the top center of the screen. OK, Cancel and similar acknowledgement tabs are large and finger friendly.

Download

Purchase or download the trial of SPB Brain Evolution 2.1 here.

Conclusion

SPB Brain Evolution is a great way to improve skills and in its much improved avatar for the S60 5th edition phones, its Must-Have. I’ll give it 5 of 5.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Mini Review

Once in a while comes an application, that’s innovative on functionality but brings amazing innovation and elegance in implementation and usability. StickNotes Touch is one such application.

StickyNotes Touch brings the classic Post-It notes that is ubiquitous in every workplace.

At the bottom left is the New Note menu. Just drag it to the open area and a new note is created. Tapping the New Note menu changes the color of the note.

New notes appear like real Post-It notes lying on a table and they can be dragged around the screen and placed over other notes. The animation when you drag a note is great.

To keep it simple, the application does not allow erasing the notes but you an add to an existing note. Just like the real Post-It notes. You can delete the notes and create a new one but cannot erase stuff that’s already written.

Download

StickyNotes Touch from Offscreen Technologies can be downloaded from the Ovi Store.

Conclusion

Offscreen Technologies have once again shown how to implement true touch oriented applications that don’t mess around with menus, scroll bars and myriad options that make the experience onerous. Of course, as the functionality of applications increase, configuration options are inevitable and that will be a challenge I would like for Offscreen Technologies to tackle with innovative ideas. StickyNotes Touch is a must have and I’ll give it 5 of r.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Mini Review

SBSH Whitelist, as the name suggests lets you create a golden whitelist of contacts from whom you want to receive calls and messages for your S60 5th edition devices.

The application state can be turned On/Off so you have the flexibility to set a very strict whitelist and turn it on only when absolutely necessary. On the other hand, if you have a very select Contact list (which is unlikely ) you can turn on SBSH Whitelist to allow only calls and messages from Contacts in your address book.

SBSH Whitelist gives you the option to choose from 4 options – Reject all incoming events, Reject calls only and allow SMS, Mute calls/reject sms or Silent calls only.

It worked efficiently, occupying less than 1 megabyte of RAM when its running in the background.

Download

SBSH Whitelist can be downloaded here for trial or or can be purchased at $9.95.

Conclusion

SBSH Whitelist is able to fend of worthy competitors for Symbian devices like Best Blacklist and Handy Blacklist, though its a little late to the party.  It does adequately with the limited feature set.

An automatic scheduler that switches on the rules for incoming calls and messages based on calendar events and profile settings would have made a killer app.  But it still has some novel features like blocking skype aliases or messages from specific SMS servers that make it a compelling competitor to the many other similar applications.

SBSH Whitelist is worth a look and I’ll give it 3 of 5.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Mini Review

The Symbian Foundation has released a new theme for Symbian S60 5th edition devices, like the Nokia 5800.

The theme is quite obviously based on the symbian.org theme. The Symbian Foundation has adopted a consistent and innovative design for all its websites and this has been extended to the theme also.

It has an unobtrusive background of various characters and objects that are  form a part of the symbian.org theme. Built-in applications of OS / S60 UI get a new icon that gels with the overall theme. The theme sticks to just two colors, white and yellow.

Download

The Symbian Foundation Theme for S60 5th edition devices can be downloaded here.

Conclusion

The Symbian Foundation theme is zippy and responsive and does not slow down the user interface. Its a must have and I’ll give it 5 of 5.