Rating: 
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.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s my only application having both editing and saving function. Now I know how to use my phone to write a text file: print it in Handy Paint, save as bmp file, copy into PC, and recognize. Neither preinstalled application nor iSilo have editing option.
The difficulty in fitting text into the text box has been fixed in version 1.12
Oh, sorry. I found it.
Good! Where to download it?
Yes! Just i am looking for. Great App!
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