MyPhone – Turn your s60 to an iPhone!

This is a review of MyPhone from immmooo.

Review Conditions

MyPhone version 2.03.1 was installed on a Nokia E71, an S60 3rd edition FP1 device.

Installation

The .sis file can be installed using the Nokia Installer.
Upon installation, you can go to the website to register/pay or continue and use the trial version. The license is locked to the IMEI of the phone, which is the usual strategy followed by all vendors to prevent distribution of the software on the Internet.

First View

MyPhone is an iPhone shell for S60. But it does not appear to be a superficial skin with iPhone-like icons on the home screen. Read on for the complete review.

Main Features

MyPhone is almost a perfect emulation of the iPhone screen. When the application is started, you are presented with the iPhone’s locked screen. To unlock, instead of sliding the finger to unlock the screen, the D-Pad must be pressed. When the D-Pad is pressed, the arrow moves across the screen to unlock, which is a nice iPhone touch, pun unintended. The author of MyPhone assures me that it works very well on the Nokia 5800 touchscreen phone. So we can have the best of both worlds, and s60  touch phone with iPhone like UI.

When unlocked, you are presented with beautiful iPhone icons, each mapping to one s60 application. But MyPhone goes beyond just mapping icons. SMS and Missed Call events are notified on the MyPhone icons. There are 7 screens on my E71 and I can easily glide from one screen to the next by pressing the left or right soft key. The smooth glide of the screen to left and right is very elegantly designed and looks very iPhone-esque. The SMS, Call, Contacts and Lock icons are fixed at the bottom on all the screens.

MyPhone also provides one-touch access to each application on a screen using one of the numeric keys on the keypad or the *,#,0 keys on my E71 since its on landscape mode and there are 16 app icons on each screen. It supports 12 keypad number quick launch icons on my E71.  On a regular s60 phone, there would be just 9 icons and the keys 1-9 would be sufficient for one-touch access. The one-touch access is actually the most important feature of MyPhone, without which, the user experience would have been very dull. The Call function is exactly like the iPhone’s dialer and looks great.

The RSS and the Weather apps are very iPhone-alike. You should select the city that you want by typing it and the weather forecast for the next four days is displayed. The weather can be displayed is celcius or fahrenheit. 

Adding new RSS feeds is a breeze. When you select an RSS feed, the link with the subject is given in the RSS application. When “Read” is pressed, you’re taken to the link on the default browser to view the article.

Rearrange Application Icons

I can reorganize the Applications in MyPhone quite easily. Pressing the D-Pad when no application is selected will cause all icons to shake and wobble. This means they can be pulled out of that location. Just press the icon once, move it to a different location and press the D-Pad again to commit the movement.

Adding 3rd-Party Applications

There is a MyApp application that allows to configure upto 6 3rd-party applications on MyPhone. It required the actual name of the 3rd party application, e.g., “HandyClock.exe”, which can be obtained using JBakTaskMan or similar apps. I added a couple of apps and placed the icons in the first screen. That’s really useful to have. I have added the apps Handy Clock and HandyTaskman.

When editing text, while adding third party apps or looking up the weather of a city, a small icon appears to let you know that you are in editing mode. That’s a nice detail to have. But I noticed that if you click “Confirm” or “Done” while in the editing mode, the application crashes. Users should remember this. I am sure this will be fixed in future revisions of MyPhone.

Since MyPhone is only a flash lite based s60 application, you can’t always return to the MyPhone screen, if you exit out of an application abnormally, e.g. pressing the RED end button will exit any application take you to the native s60 Home screen. So I have created a shortcut to MyPhon on my right soft key for quick access to MyPhone. Having started to use MyPhone for all purposes, I need a one-touch access to MyPhone.

Handling

Using MyPhone is a delight. It has easy navigation and bright large icons that are appealing to the eye. MyPhone has a help file in pdf format that can be downloaded. There is also a help application on the mobile device that is useful.

Weaknesses

The screen lock of MyPhone uses s60’s keypad lock API. So if I press the lock application of MyPhone, 2 locks come in effect. After unlocking the keypad, I again have to press the D-Pad to unlock MyPhone. Ideally, MyPhone should disable s60 keypad lock and only have its own screen lock enabled.

The limitations that iPhone has with respect to multitasking carries over to s60 if you use MyPhone. If you want to multitask, you need to go via s60’s task list and not via MyPhone. But I would say that MyPhone is faithful to the iPhone design in that aspect.

Missed call event on MyPhone is shown in the Log Application icon. I would like to see it on the Call application icon.

There are some limtations, not weaknesses to keyboard shortcuts on the Home screen when running MyPhone. Speed Dial won’t work. Searching for Contacts using the keyboard on E71 won’t work. Other shortcuts like long-pressing the * button to enable/disable Bluetooth won’t work. But these should be accepted. The one-touch feature of MyPhone remaps the keys for its own use and override S60’s keyboard shortcuts.

But I wonder why Buletooth on event is not seen either on the Bluetooth icon or on top of the screen.

I would also like to see on the screen, when the next alarm is scheduled. But these features are from s60 and are probably not on the iPhone. A good mix of iPhone’s ease of use and S60’s comprehensive event display would be great on MyPhone.

Conclusion

Its pretty obvious that lot of work has gone into integrating MyPhone to s60 in such a seamless way that I could use MyPhone to access almost every application on my E71 with a single click. Navigation to various folders for accessing applications was completely eliminated.

I got hooked to MyPhone, not because of the beautiful icons but the One touch access to applications. It’s a great feature and has really compelled me to adopt MyPhone as my default shell for the applications on the phone. There are still some apps/features that I need to access on s60 directly but I guess those will also be eliminated soon.
The trial version is very limited in features. I strongly recommend purchasing the full version to get the best out of MyPhone.

MyPhone is available here and also here. Its a must have and I’ll give it a 4 of 5.

Tagged as: iPhone, skin, theme

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