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.

Introduction

Nokia doesn’t have a version of the Ovi Music Player for the Mac. Its a long time coming but Mac users are not completely left behind. There is still Nokia Multimedia Transfer, which allows you to do the following with your Nokia mobile:

• Transfer music & playlists from iTunes
• Transfer and copy photos and videos from iPhoto
• Sync bookmarks
• Transfer files from your Mac

Setup

The application is available in two versions, 1.4 .2 is for MAC OS 1.5.8 (Leopard) and 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard) and 1.3 Beta, for Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger). You can connect Nokia Multimedia Transfer via Bluetooth or the data cable. I used a Nokia 5800 Xpress Music for the transfer.

Music

You can transfer all DRM-free content from iTunes to your Nokia mobile. Protected music and audio books cannot be transferred. Once you select “Enable iTunes Transfer” in the Device Settings, all playlists, podcasts and music are now visible in Nokia Multimedia Transfer and you can choose what you want to transfer. Before transfer, you can choose to change the encoding, to save space on your phone’s external memory. But I prefer to leave the encoding undisturbed, but if you really want to save space, suggested encoding is Apple’s AAC 128 Kbps format.

Its important to note that this is music transfer, not sync. Sync lets you transfer meta data of your music files from the mobile back to your primary media too. The downside to not having sync is that play counts, last played and other meta data, that’s useful to create dynamic playlists in iTunes cannot be updated. I would ideally like to keep all my media content n iTunes and use multiple devices for playback.

Its a long way off before I migrate lock, stock and barrel to Ovi Music Player because its not in the same level as iTunes, as of today.

Album artwork, embedded in the mp3 file will be transferred but not album artwork created using iTunes’ get album artwork feature.

Photos & Videos

Nokia Multimedia Transfer also lets you transfer photos from iPhoto to your Nokia mobile. You can not only transfer photos but also Events, that are created in iPhoto. You can also choose to resize the images before they are transferred to the phone to save disk space.

In order to import photos from your phone back to iPhoto, click the “Enable this devices as a digital camera“. With this, whenever the device is connected, iPhoto is automatically started, if Nokia Multimedia Transfer application is open, and you can import the images to iPhoto.

iTunes and iPhoto videos can also be transferred immediately when the Nokia phone is connected to the Mac. Videos playable by QuickTime and are not copy protected can be copied. Nokia Multimedia Transfer also lets you transcode the videos before they are transferred, to make them playable on your Nokia phone.

Sync Bookmarks

With Nokia Multimedia Transfer, you can sync bookmarks between Safari and your Nokia internet browser. Bookmarks in a bookmark folder with your device name, say Nokia 5800, in Safari will be synced with the bookmarks on the device. When you change your bookmarks in Safari or on your device, Nokia Multimedia Transfer will synchronise your bookmarks on both.

Transfer Files

You can browse the contents of your device from your Mac and transfer files to and from the device using the Nokia Device Browser. I suggest that you use this only for files like application executables, etc and not media files. For media, use only iPhoto and iTunes transfer.

Conclusion

Nokia Multimedia Transfer is no where near a comprehensive multimedia desktop application for the Mac to sync with the Nokia device. Its a testimony of the market share of Mac versus Windows. Nokia obviously has a large team working full time for the Windows platform. Ovi Music Player, Ovi Suite and other applications run on Windows and they are more feature rich. But for a Mac user, Nokia Multimedia Transfer is better than nothing. Its still a good application, if you’ll forgive the lack of basic features like music sync etc.

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.

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.

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.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Review Conditions

The eBook, A Study in Scarlet from Offscreen Technologies was installed on a Nokia 5800 XPressMusic, an S60 5th edition device with Symbian OS version 9.4.

Installation

The eBook can be downloaded from the Ovi Store. Login and set your mobile to either of the 2 S60 5th edition devices to get a link to download the eBook.

First View

Its might seem odd that I am reviewing an eBook. But this eBook has captured all features that I am looking for in a pocket reader on my mobile. Read on for what makes it great.

Main Review

A Study in Scarlet, a standalone eBook is a Symbian OS application. Technically it is an eBook because its an electronic version of the traditional print book by the same name and author. But it cannot be read on any other platform other than S60 5th edition and cannot be read using any other eBook reader that runs on the same platform. Hence I have used the term a standalone eBook.

The tried and tested model for sellign and distributing eBooks is for a company to make the eBook reader application freely available for a specific platform and let publishers sell titles at varying prices. Mobipocket eBook reader is a good example. The iPhone has turned out to be a very good platform for reading books with its own native eBook reader available in iTunes. At the other end of the spectrum are dedicated devices for reading eBooks, like the Kindle and the Sony Reader. The model of selling standalone eBooks is somewhere in between. The casual book reader will not hesitate to buy standalone eBooks  since he doesn’t want to build a collection or replace his book collection with digital copies.

There is Table of Contents using which you can jump directly to one of the 13 chapters in the book. Unfortunately, there are no page numbers in the book. A horizontal scrollbar displays the chapter you are reading and can be used to scroll forward or backward but its not accurate.

The eBook reader remembers the page you were reading last before exiting the application. When you open it again, you are taken to that page.

The eBook reader disables auto lock so that you are not constantly distracted by the screen locking out.

Handling

There are two touch controlled buttons, ToC and Exit. The pages of the eBook can be moved forward by tapping the right side of the screen and backwards by tapping the left. The Page can also be dragged up and down. A hand pointer icon is shown when the pages are moved. An arrow shows up indicating whether you are moving back or forward in the book.

Weaknesses

Surprisingly, this eBook occupied nearly 14 megabytes of RAM on by device!! Given that the 5800 XPressMusic is not well endowed with RAM (just 40 megabytes at startup), this is an issue for me.

I would like to see page numbers, not just chapter numbers. But the application remembers the page, so that’s ok. I would like to have the option to bookmark pages and search for specific text. But I guess for the price of just 1 Euro, additional features means higher development cost and may not be profitable.

Conclusion

The eBook, A Study in Scarlet can be downloaded at the Ovi Store for free. There are 5 more eBooks in the Sherlock Holmes series that cost 1 Euro each. The eBook reviewed here is clearly a sample for users to try and purchase more eBooks from the Ovi Store. One Euro per book is an excellent pricing model and should be very attractive. Its a must have and I’ll give it 5 of 5.

Offscreen Technologies has a many cool applications in the Ovi Store.  Check them out too.

You can also get the eBook A Scandal in Bohemia for free here (couldn’t find it on the Ovi Store). This eBook is not exactly in the same format as A Study in Scarlet but its easy reading.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Review Conditions

Digia @Web 2.02 (beta) was installed in a Nokia 5800 XPressMusic, an s60 5th edition mobile device running Symbian version OS 9.4.

Installation

Installation is using the Nokia Application Installer. Digia @Web can be downloaded here.

First View

There are quite a few web browsers out there. In addition to the native S60 browser (which is new and improved), there are many popular ones like Opera Mini, Skyfire, Bolt, UC Browser and so on.

Digia @Web from Digia is the new kid on the block. Lets find out how the experience of browsing the Internet on Digia @Web is.

Main Review

Digia @Web is a full-featured web browser for the S60 touch device. It starts up with a Welcome page that has detailed instructions on how to use each function of the browser. The browser window layout is conventional, yet elegant. The top of the window has the Address pane. On the right is the control for zooming in and out of the text.  On the bottom is the Control pane. All the controls hide unobtrusively and expose a full screen when you start navigation on the web page.

Address Pane & Tabbed Browsing

The Address pane is always at the top of the page and is hidden automatically when it is not used. It is shown again when the Menu icon is pressed. I liked the auto-URL complete feature in the Address pane.

On the left of the Address pane is a small box that allows tabbed browsing. When tapped, it opens up a new window with a mini-box of all the other open pages. No other browser has implemented tabbed browsing so well. Its easy to use and you do not have to search for other open browser windows.

Quick Menu & Settings

A long press on any empty space on a page reveals the Quick Menu. The Quick Menu, in addition to providing the usual “About”, “Help” and “Exit Browser” options, lets you browse the web by “Enabling private browsing” and takes you to a “Settings” page where privacy and other General settings like home page, pop-up management, etc can be configured.

Control Pane

The Control pane gives you access to the functions to manipulate web pages. The Control pane is hidden and it comes up when the Menu icon, present at the bottom of the page is pressed. The Control brings up the Address pane, browser window navigation options, Next and Previous, Page Zoom scroll bar, New Page and Bookmarks.

Bookmarks

Bookmarked websites have a bright yellow star against them, similar to Mozilla. New bookmarks can be added by just bringing up the Control pane. The usual functions that come in a Bookmark Manager are available in Digia @Web.

Flash

Digia @Web handles Flash content very well. Playing youtube videos was a breeze.

Pop-up Blocker

Digia @Web has a built-in pop-up blocker too.

Handling

Digia @Web is simple to use and very intuitively designed. The automatic full screen mode is a delight to use. I didn’t have any problems and the user experience was great.

Weaknesses

I am disappointed that Digia @Web does not support RSS Feeds. That’s a potential deal breaker for me.

The Menu icon is really small and may sometimes be lost in all the text and pictures on the web page. And we could accidentally click a link instead of the Menu icon. It is clearly not designed for finger use but only for a stylus.

The browser crashed a couple of times when I tried to navigate to a secure web page. There were a few instances where I had to simply restart it. This could have been because of low memory on my 5800 too. But hey, Digia @Web is still at beta and there will be a few bugs to iron out and I am sure these will be fixed in later versions.

Conclusion

Digia @Web is built on top of Qt 4.5. It supports a full finger touch UI and renders a full web experience using the webkit browser engine. I enjoyed the direct page control using my fingers, multiple browser windows, URL auto-complete and automatic full screen browsing. The ability to view Flash content (e.g. Youtube videos) and the relatively fast rendering of web pages has made it stand out. Digia @Web is available only for the S60 5th edition devices. It is free, can be downloaded here and is good stuff. I’ll give it 4 of 5.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Review Conditions

Paint Studio 1.0.0 from Impetus Technologies was installed on a Nokia 5800 XPressMusic, an S60 5th edition device with Symbian OS version 9.4.

Installation

Installation is using the Nokia Application Installer. Its available in the Ovi store and you can get a URL via SMS to download it.

First View

Touch screen devices enable developers to offer exciting tools to draw, doodle and color on the screen using the finger or a stylus. An MS Paint like application on the iPhone was a huge success. The devices running s60 5th edition won’t be left behind. Paint Studio is one such drawing tool that leverages the touch interface quite effectively. Read on.

Main Review

Paint Studio is more than just a plain drawing tool. The basic features of any drawing tool like MS Paint are available in addition to good integration with other features of the mobile, like the camera, wallpaper and web sharing.

All the basic tools for drawing, i.e. the pencil, drawing straight lines, ellipses, squares, a paint bucket and an eraser are available. The pencil and the eraser have 3 levels of thickness. Paint Studio offers a 16-M-color palette. You can also redo operation and undo operations all the way to until you get a clean slate, which is very useful.

On the bottom left corner, the operation selected is displayed. In the image above, the eraser is selected. The border around this icon indicates the color that will be used. If the pencil is selected, the color of the pencil can be known by looking at the border of this icon.

Paint Studio carries clip arts for many categories and these make the drawing tool more interesting. The clip art categories are Greetings, Invites, Love, Frames, Vehicles, Animals, Homes and Objects. Pictures and frames aid in creating a finer canvas for the wall paper.

The most interesting feature of Paint Studio is that lets you edit images you have shot with the camera on the mobile. You can also pick an image from the photo gallery on the mobile and edit it.

Paint Studio also connects to the ‘Share’ function of Symbian to let you send pictures via text, email, Bluetooth or upload it to any Web 2.0 photo site.

Handling

Pictures are saved as .png files. The file sizes are small and are meant to be used only on the mobile. But they are only saved on the phone memory. I would like the option to save them on the external memory card too.

I had a real hard time exiting the application. The “x” menu option in the top right corner is probably less sensitive to touch but I could never successfully exit the application by pressing the exit button. I had to ‘close’ the application from the task manager all the time.

At 0.5 mega bytes, Paint Studio is a tiny application but takes up nearly 19.5 mega bytes of RAM at runtime.

The product guide and help file for Paint Studio is available at the site but the application is very intuitive and needs not guidance for use.

Weaknesses

I didn’t find any weaknesses in the application. Its actually fun to use.

Conclusion

My daughter of 5 years thoroughly enjoyed playing with Paint Studio. The ease with with she got familiar with the application and spent hours this weekend drawing various pictures demonstrated how well designed Paint Studio is. Its was a big draw among her friends too.

But I was surprised that there is no way to trial the application, even for a day. The only option is to purchase it.

Paint Studio is very good stuff and I will give it 4 of 5. Paint Studio is at the moment compatible for S60 5th edition devices and works great on the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music. It can be purchased at the Ovi store for $5.

Note: The link to the Ovi store will work only if you are logged in and the selected mobile device is either Nokia 5800 XPress Music or Nokia N97.

Review Conditions

MeCanto was installed on a Nokia E71, an S60 3rd edition FP1 device.

Installation

The MeCanto solution consists of two applications, one for the S60 device (now only available for 3rd edition) and a PC Client desktop application. I installed the PC Client on a Windows XP SP2. You also need to create an account with MeCanto on the web.

First View

There are different music solutions for the mobile. Mobbler streams msuic from Last.fm. Audials uses multi-various plug-ins to crawl the web and download music to your device. There is a new solution from MeCanto, which is a service for storing your music collection online and enabling access to it from anywhere. Read on.

Main Review

MeCanto streams all of your personal music collection from the cloud to your S60 device. To start with, you need to create a MeCanto web account  and then install the MeCanto client application on the desktop. Once you have logged in to your MeCanto web account from the MeCanto desktop application, it asks for the location of your music collection on your desktop. This collection is now uploaded to your MeCanto web account.

Then you can begin using the mobile application to listen to music. The sequence of operations to setup MeCanto is as follows:

Create Web Account –> Install Application on Desktop and S60 Mobile –> Identify Music Collection on Desktop –> Start listening to music on S60 Mobile.

But it doesn’t mean you have to wait for all of your 15 Gb of music to upload to your MeCanto account online to start listening to music. The good part is that you can start listening to your music collection on your S60 mobile device almost instantly. After you have identified the music collection on your desktop, the MeCanto web account is immediately populated with the details of your music collection. MeCanto smartly streams music from your Desktop to your mobile via the web until the upload is complete. The intermediate stream sequence is Desktop –> MeCanto Web Account –> S60 Mobile Device.

Those files that are uploaded are streamed from the web and those files that are on the desktop are streamed from the desktop. As a user, you don’t have to care about the difference.

As and when you add new music to your collection, its uploaded automatically to your MeCanto web account. If you want to listen to a song that’s not yet uploaded and your desktop application is turned off, you get an error message.

You can also specify your iTunes collection and files will be picked up from the iTunes Music folder. On the web account, you can create playlists that are made available on the mobile too. MeCanto has the options to Shuffle and Repeat tracks. You can also configure the upload speed limit. 10 Kbps is the default speed limit.

You cannot play music from your web account at the same time you are playing tracks on the mobile device. I got the message “Your account is being used by another computer (or phone), you have been logged  out”.

With MeCanto, I didn’t have to worry about memory space on my mobile, which is great. I can listen to all of my music collection if I have an unlimited 3G plan or a WiFi connection.

Handling

MeCanto is very easy to use. You just have to configure/setup your web account,  desktop and the mobile device the first time and you are set to go on a long road trip. MeCanto just takes up around 2 Megabytes while you are playing music. I had no problems multitasking with other applications like Nokia Messaging and Gravity.

MeCanto obviously doesn’t support uploading DRM files because they cannot be streamed to the mobile. If I purchased music via iTunes or Nokia Comes With Music, I shouldn’t bother with MeCanto.

MeCanto is vaguely similar “Files on Ovi”. Files on Ovi lets you access your desktop from your mobile via an SSL connection. MeCanto monitors the music folders on your desktop, uploads them to a server and provides access to these files to you. Both ways you are handing over control of your desktop to a third party vendor and that could be a security risk.

Weaknesses

Whether I created playlists or not, the MeCanto music player on my mobile device just could not do continuous play, i.e., play the next track after finishing the current one. After playing a track, it always stopped. I had to manually select the next song to play. That was a real pain.

I would like to know which songs have been uploaded and which are not yet on the web. So some play and some don’t when my desktop application is closed. There should be a flag against each song indicating whether its being streamed from my desktop or from MeCanto’s web servers.

The security risk of allowing Mecanto accessing my desktop may put off many people. My desktop is too precious and it is vulnerable to attacks when its accessible by a third party application. But then, that’s the service model.

Finally, I am a big user of track metadata like playcount, rating, track last played, etc and create smart playlists based on these metadata. While MeCanto lets me upload these playlists online, when I listen to music streamed from the MeCanto servers, these metadata are not updated. That’s a big weakness, for me but may not be important for many music listeners.

Conclusion

There are many music-on-the-cloud sevices around. You can take your pick – Audials, MeCanto, Mobbler – all of them are different in their own way but serve the purpose of listening to music on your mobile on the go. I liked MeCanto’s concept and it has been implemented quite well. But I’ll stick to my iTunes library and iPod for now. Its definitely worth a look and I’ll give it 3 of 5. Download MeCanto here.