"The need for a better Calendar application on UIQ 3 can be justified by the availability of 2 alternatives, namely AquaCalendar and Agendus. Both are highly capable applications and packed with features. However, the boys who brought us DreamConnect felt the holes were not quite filled yet. The problem with these third party calendar replacements is the design. Look at Agendus for UIQ 3, for example. It was ported from the UIQ 2 version with no effort from the developer to improve on the design and follow UIQ 3 design philosophy. The DreamSpring Team, led by Malcolm Lithgow, now offers us DreamLife, a solution offering not only calendar and todo replacements, but contact management as well, in line with their philosophy in providing a complete solution for Life Information Management instead of Personal Information Management." Read more here:
"WorldMate works on two levels. On installing, the majority of the functions are freely available. Updating to the pro version (which is $50 for a twelve month licence) will give you access to the latest additions to WorldMate 'Professional', namely the ability to manage your flight schedules, look up new flights and airline timetables, and to set up alerts when flights are delayed or cancelled.By telling WorldMate which flights you are booked on for your next trip, you will, if they are delayed or cancelled, get an alert sent to the application as soon as is practical. This is a perfect example of an application that is utterly useless 99.95% of the time, yet the one time it does work is when you realize you’ll be adding your flights for the rest of the annual subscription period, and, more than likely, be renewing it for subsequent years." Read more here:
"For this review I tested ROUTE 66 Mobile 8 Europe. The installation program on DVD installs the navigation application and all maps to a memory card. Since you cannot select which maps you want or don’t want to install, the Europe edition needs at least a 2GB memory card. The first thing the installation program does is format the memory card. It even does that when there’s enough space left on the card for the ROUTE 66 application and the maps. No problem for my brand new 2GB microSD, but a bit inconvenient (to say the least) if you want to install the application on a memory card that already has lots of information on it. After the format, the installation program transfers the applications and the maps to the memory card. At least that’s what it’s supposed to do, but instead formatting made the card unusable and the installation was unable to continue. According to the people at Route66, this problem has been fixed in the next release. [Hmm..... not a good start. And the DVDs are mass-produced, so it'll take a while to get the fixed version into the market - Ed] Luckily, the DVD also contains a folder with the name \MemoryImage. By simply copying this folder into the root of the SD card, the ROUTE 66 application is installed automatically the next time you insert the SD card in your phone." Read more here:
"Revival is a turn-based strategy game with its fair share of tactical and micro-management elements. Those who know (and love) Civilization from everybody’s favourite game creator giant Sid Meier, will probably be able to jump right into this game of exploration, building and fighting.Some might remember Revival’s first version as a java game – this edition is an upgrade in every possible way, a great entrant in this strangely abandoned genre in the (Symbian) mobile gaming world.The background story puts you in the shoes of an ever-so wise intergalactic emissary, whose task is to expand a small tribe into a great empire, one to defeat the planet’s other tribes and acquiring the ultimate prize, means of interstellar travel. During the (more than 40 hours) long campaign you have to battle through 13 missions, each with its various goals. Invading existing cities, building and developing new ones, sending workers to mine and hunt, amassing (and controlling) an army, fighting on land and water, advancing in science and technology, will all be an important part of your success.Balancing these different areas is no minor feat. You may choose to excel in one field over an other but you never know if your opponent’s strongest point happens to be your weakest.You have 27 continents on 7 different planets to conquer, a realistic economic model and a detailed tutorial to get you up to speed. As you upgrade your buildings, you can recruit more and more advanced units, while your older troops will keep on fighting and collecting experience points, thus improving their chances against superior units." Read more here:
"One of the most important functions that business people want in deciding their smartphone purchases is the ability to view, edit and manage office documents, which normally come in the MS Office DOC, XLS and PPT format. For Sony Ericsson UIQ 3 smartphones, this function is enabled by default with an application suite called Quickoffice. However, the application has not received any major update since it was first included in the first UIQ 3 smartphone, the P990. This resulted in some frustration when using Quickoffice in the real world. For example, embedded images in a DOC file are not displayed, only text is available for viewing. And to make matters worse, document integrity is something UIQ 3 users need to really worry about because most of the time, editing documents using Quickoffice UIQ is very risky and you will lose some formatting. All of the current Sony Ericsson UIQ smartphones includeQuickoffice v3.6, which is in fact very basic for today’s standard. The code base is actually about 3 years old and advanced features couldn’tbe added. One of the challenges of working with OEMs and delivering software into their ROM/firmware is the huge leadtime involved. For ROM shipment, there is a massive amount of testing/QA and localization that goes on - and for this reason OEMs are reluctant to 'rock the boat'. Once something is stable and 'done', they stick with it.." Read more here:
"A year ago we looked into the major changes brought about in the Feature Pack 2, as Nokia showcased this much-hyped update at 3GSM Congress in Barcelona. Back then the company’s staff claimed first FP2-powered offerings would debut and shortly after that, being slated for spring – that’s exactly how it came to pass, although with a delay of one year. Twelve months later, and still in Barcelona, we witnessed the first product running the FP2 – the Nokia N78. Drawing parallels with the world of touchscreen-enabled devices, we shouldn’t be off assuming that S60-based devices with touch-sensitive displays will be announced in a year's time, or, at least, will hit the market no sooner than that. Such a long development time is largely due to the issues concerning the integration between certain features and making all their gears spin together. But is the final product worth all the effort they have put into it? The answer couldn’t be more definitive – yes. The Feature Pack 2 continues the evolution of the S60, as it is not much of a revolution, really. On the other hand, it packs in all core features and stand-alone applications that have been popping up throughout this year, stepping up the system's basic functionality. Since the year to come will have this version of the S60 as the engine for most products, we thought that just listing all improvements over the FP1 wouldn’t be quite enough, that’s why we are presenting you with an in-depth review with breakdowns on every core feature, so that we won’t have to go back to the basics in our smartphone reviews." Read more here:
"midomi (there's that lowercase initial letter again - I wish companies wouldn't do this!!) is an established 'hum it and we'll recognise it' service that's been around the web for a while - but they've just launched a native S60 client, getting our attention at last. Essentially, thousands of people round the world have used their PC's microphone to record themselves singing some or all of songs that they like. Sometimes badly, sometimes in hideous accents and sometimes out of tune, but hey, at least they bothered. The midomi servers then produce a digital fingerprint of the way the tune rises and falls, its timing, and so on. Then, when someone else wants to track down a song they've heard but can't place, they hum or sing it into their own microphone and midomi finds a match and reports what the song is. In theory. In practice, I achieved about 50% accuracy, trying a dozen or so songs from hard rock to light pop, from the well known to the rather obscure. The mobile client itself is excellent, working over Wi-Fi and remembering the preferred access point. Handling of the microphone is good and there's a visual bar display on-screen while recording, so that you know if you're too quiet or too loud." Read more here:
"Developing the new platform, Nokia has taken account of its past mistakes. This way, the N-Gage II is not a specialist device any more, but a software shell that caters for the user’s gaming and communication needs. They have also altered the way games are delivered to end-users – all of the latest, and greatest titles are now available on the official page, from which consumers can download them directly to their handsets wirelessly, or opt for a more traditional manner (synchronization with PC). Once you have installed this software shell, you will see a dedicated folder on the memory card – game files moved into it will be identified by the N-Gage, and installed once you give it the green light. After this, it is all “try and buy”, meaning that you can play some game in the demo mode, figure out whether you like it or not, and then buy it without letting go of the handset. More importantly, you can pay with a credit card, so that once the transaction is finished, you will get an activation code to a specified e-mail address. The price has gone down too – now a full version of an N-Gage title, no valid-until restrictions, will set you back 15 Euros (price also depends on the license validity period)" Read more here:
"It's not often that I get to review an application that's nigh-on perfect in every detail. Yet Handy Weather is such a program - admittedly it only really does one thing (check the upcoming weather for a small number of locations) but it does it so smoothly and unobtrusively that it just had to earn a coveted Mega-App award. Available for almost every handheld platform in the world (really), Handy Weather impresses under S60, shown here, by not only working as a standalone application but also making its functionality available as a screen-saver. After installation of the week-long trial version, you're gently led into picking a home city (even medium sized towns are available in many countries) and an auto-update interval (the default is 8 hours, which is about right), then it's into Handy Weather proper. Version 5, reviewed here, has had something of a UI tweak and more emphasis is now placed on the 5-day 'Day graph', giving a one glance view at what's coming up, weather-wise. This does make getting to other views slightly more laborious, but it also means that newcomers get to the most important view immediately, so probably a good thing." Read more here:
"Yahoo and Nokia have a good relationship, with a number of joint projects, so the continued support from Yahoo for their mobile phone client, Yahoo! Go, is welcome. Easily downloaded and installed, simply by pointing your smartphone browser at http://get.go.yahoo.com/, the java application provides a single icon to click on for a number of Yahoo services. With a big warning on the download page that you ‘have to install this on the internal memory', the target audience (i.e. the non-Symbian geeks) might just wonder what to make of that - especially if they have an N81 or N95 8GB where, to their mind, all the storage is internal! The big change with Yahoo! Go 3 is that their widgets engine has been ported into the client. These widgets allow access services outside of the Yahoo portfolio - currently there are widgets for MTV News and MySpace. Yahoo is looking to release an SDK at some point in February so other sites can join in the fun. Of course, at that point they're going to have to explain to their users how to install their widget into the Yahoo! Go system - and that'll be a lot of hoops to jump through." Read more here:
"Maps 2.0 seems to be a complete rewrite of the product and, like most things with Nokia (and indeed with the computer world in general) is a case of four steps forward and one step back. And that reverse count may be higher if you're someone used to using the 'free' functions in Maps v1.x, since even basic route calculation now falls within the 'pay-for' domain. But I don't think it's fair to fault the Maps development team on this issue. They have as much right as the next programming house to try to make a profit and there were probably far too many people trying to get by on the free junction-by-junction keypress routing in v1.x and driving very dangerously as a result. With in-car navigation, voice guidance and automatic real-time route recalculation is the only way to go, if you want to stay safe. In fact, Maps 2.0 expands the remit of its navigation focus by including not only pedestrian route calculation but also a dedicated pedestrian mode, in which things work very differently. The cost, by the way, is less if you only sign up for pedestrian use, at 4 Euros for a month (say, for use on a business trip to a foreign city), and it's also worth noting that pedestrian routing is included in the 'drive' routing package, i.e. by signing up for the more expensive package (8 Euros for a month), you also get help when not in your car. (Note that these prices vary according to your region and that lesser prices are available for a week's use.)" Read more here:
"Opera Software announced that Opera Mobile 9.5 would be coming soon and would be shown at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. I had a chance to visit the Opera Software booth and spoke with a product manager who ran through this latest mobile browser on a Sony Ericsson UIQ device. You can see some of the features of Opera Mobile 9.5 in action in the video. The HTC Advantage I have been using for several months comes with Opera Mobile 8.5 preloaded in the ROM and is actually the selected default browser on the device. Opera Mobile 8.5 makes the device much more useful for me since I find Internet Explorer Mobile to be a weak mobile browser. However, there are still a few websites I need to visit that Opera Mobile 8.5 doesn’t fully support and I am hoping that Opera Mobile 9.5 provides this needed functionality and from the press release and seeing it in action I think this just may be the browser I need.Opera Mobile 9.5 has been improved with new zooming and panning capabilities, faster page loading, Flash Lite 3 support (up to OEMs and operators), and Opera Widget capable. Other features include tabbed browsing, landscape support, call phone number from a web page, send a link as a text message, and much more. The public beta should be available soon and I can’t wait to try it out." via blogs.zdnet.com
"A few weeks ago, I wrote an editorial commenting on how horrible browsing the Web is on most mobile devices. Amazingly, there's already a solution for this problem, at least for some users. It's called Skyfire, and it is far and away the best web browser for Windows Mobile I've ever seen.This application offers just about all the features you need to access "Web 2.0" sites, like dynamic Flash, advanced Ajax, and Java. It's good enough that your main limitation in browsing is going to be the size and resolution of your smartphone's screen, and Skyfire is even able to compensate for that.I was able to spend some time with an early beta, and I found I genuinely enjoyed putting this application through its paces.Internet Explorer Mobile is a decent web browser. Limited, but decent. So if Skyfire is going to be worth our time, it's going to have to be able to do things the default Windows Mobile browser can't. That's why as soon as I loaded it on an AT&T Tilt I went straight to YouTube.Skyfire acts generally like the iPhone browser. When you open a site, what you see is it shrunk down to fit on your smartphone's display. You can then tap on the screen to zoom in on sections of the page.When I went to YouTube, what I saw was the full site, not a stripped down version. I selected a video and the page opened, and the video immediately began to play, with full motion and sound." Read more here:
"All of the games and menus run under an intuitive and well-implemented keypad system, where you press the number next to a particular icon to access its function. For example pressing 0 (next to a red X or blue backwards arrow) always exits or goes back. Each gameplay screen contains a row of four icons at the top that have everything you need: Mute, High Scores, Restart Game (which also changes the picture or background) and Exit. Here are the actual games one by one: Math (yes, that's Maths to those of us who speak English english) is a sort of Space Invaders clone where you have to choose which alien to shoot based on whether its sum, multiplication or division matches the number currently on your craft. For example if your craft says 4, you could shoot aliens with 2+2 written on them. Memory is that good old memory game, where you have to match pairs of tiles on a grid by looking at just two at a time. The adult mode (with more tiles) matches pairs of animals, while the simpler child mode matches pairs of fruit and vegetables. The quicker you complete the grid, the higher up the score board you go. Puzzle is one of those sliding plastic puzzles where you have to unscramble a picture by moving one tile at a time into an adjacent space. There are five different pictures to solve, all of which are rather amusing. Earth is basically a geography test, where you have to match names to particular countries (states in the case of the USA) on a map of a particular region, or alternatively you can match capitals instead. You're given the name or capital to match, and then you have to select a country by number from the map. This is where we run into the biggest design flaw in the entire game: considering that almost all phones have a keypad, one would think that the logical way to input a number would be through the keypad. Alternatively, they might have let people jump to the country they wanted using the d-pad and a jumping cursor. Instead, we have to tediously scroll through a list of numbers with the direction pad, and do this 30 or 40 times until we've named every country in a region." Read more here:
"The application runs on all S60 3rd Edition phones, but you may find that real-time video playback is not possible on older devices. More recent devices such as the E65, N93 and N95 should work fine. I tested the application on the N95, there were a few stutters, but generally the video was smooth, and is one of the best mobile FlashVideo player implementations, in terms or quality, that I have seen. emTube allows you to watch videos as they are downloading - after an initial pause for buffering you can start playing the video as the rest of it downloads. As usual with video downloads, they're best done over Wi-Fi, and there will be longer pauses before playback on 3G and (of course) GPRS/EDGE. Aside from the basic video browsing and viewing functions, there's an impressive level of functionality in emTube, considering this is a first release. You can download a video to your phone's internal memory or memory card. emTube can be used to play back locally stored flash video files. You can also add a video to your favourites list as a way to quickly get back to videos you want to watch later. From the search page it is possible to access all the user videos of the currently selected video and you can also view videos related to the currently selected video. You can also view the video details, which includes a variety of information including title, author, duration, view count and average rating. " Read more about this great FREE application here:
"First there was Psion. The Series 3 (and then Series 5) range of palmtops had Word and Sheet built-in, terrifically powerful, desktop-class office applications. With the passing of the Psion era, Nokia, which had inherited the EPOC/Symbian platform, took the raw Word and Sheet code and adapted it for their Communicator line. Most (but not all) of the functionality was still there, but there was a feeling that a degree of simplification had taken place. By the time of the launch of the 9500, even spell check functions had been removed. And, to add to the problems, the old Word/Sheet codebase handled only Office 97 files and even these somewhat clumsily, since this had been added in since the heyday of Psion. In parallel to this, Quickoffice had become a major player in the Palm OS scene, offering an alternative to Documents To Go and suffering somewhat from Palm's deal to have a version of DTG in most handhelds. Not surprisingly, Quickoffice diversified to other platforms, first to Symbian/UIQ and then to S60. Nokia must have liked the basic Quickoffice 3 viewers, as they quickly licensed them and these have appeared in almost all S60 handsets produced in the last two years. Users could then upgrade the viewers to the full editing suite if they wished." Read more here:
" Here's the plot if you want it: You are Li-Nuggz, a magical creature that grew from a small apple, who now has to fight a dragon called Drago who has invaded your home island.As stated above, the basic aim is to split various bouncing objects into ever-smaller pieces without getting squashed by them. To help you, you have an unlimited supply of spears which will split any object it comes into contact with, and you can collect various bonuses including weapon upgrades, object freezers, bonus points etc. You have three lives (it says 2 on the screen but you're still alive at 0) and a set time limit to clear each level, which may or may not involve climbing ladders, jumping on platforms and using lifts. You can jump up, left or right, and you can assign all controls to whatever keys you want, so you should be able to find suitable combinations for any phone model." Read more here:
"SkyeQuiKey integrates itself seamlessly into the S60 3rd Edition active standby screen and leaps into life only when you use the number/alphabetic keys. As with standard predictive text practice, it scans for all possible matches based on the letters (or numbers) assigned to each key, within your Contacts store, within the application set (i.e. program names) and Web bookmarks. So, in the example above, typing '3283' (spelling out 'Dave') brings up an appropriate set of matches, and very quickly too, more or less as fast as you can enter the characters - very impressive. From the matches found, one keypress takes you to the right record in Contacts or you can create a new message or make a voice call directly from the SkyeQuiKey interface. Taking another example above, typing '673' ('Ope') instantly finds the Opera Mini web browser in its matches, which is what I was after, with a press on the d-pad launching it. Very slick. " Read more here:
"You play the game through a pointer, which lets you click on items, places and people to examine or interact with them. There's also an inventory permanently displayed on the right of the screen, which lets you choose or combine particular objects. You can leave your current location by clicking on one of the exit signs, which will either take you to an adjacent location or back onto the main game map. Once you're on the map you can go to a particular place by clicking on it.Puzzles are a mixture of straightforward logic and relentless exploration, with the occasional mad, twisted solution thrown in for good measure. Did you know that the best way to pick oily flowers is to stick a wooden wedge in some cow dung, and then stick the dirty wedge in the flower bed? The game's own responses and dialogue with other characters has a good knowing humour to it, which is quite amazing when you consider the game is being simultaneously released in English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Russian. We only reviewed the English version, hopefully the other languages are just as good (presumably the Greek one is excellent as CrazySoft are from Greece). Pay attention to the game responses and dialogue, there are many clues hidden away in there." Read more about this wonderful game here:
"The basic idea of Croker is to match up randomly-dealt playing cards into two pairs, three of a kind, a full house (three of a kind and a pair), or four of a kind. The higher the value of the cards in the combination, the more points you score with it. As you make matches your life force increases, as you deal new cards without matches your life force decreases. When it runs out, the game is over.To help you with your task, you can hold certain cards before asking for another random deal, much like a fruit machine. Unfortunately the instructions telling you to click on the "change" button are wrong, you actually have to press down on the d-pad while highlighting the "change" button.For some strange reason, perhaps just to be different, CrazySoft have used traditional playing card symbols on the title screen but the cards in the game have baffling illustrations such as bowls of fruit, light bulbs, bombs, apple cores, alarm clocks, piggy banks, dice, sunflowers, thimbles (I'm not making these up!) and frogs. There are no suits as such, the pictures just match a particular number. In practice, you're just matching up groups of numbers from one to ten." Read more here:
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" Here's the plot if you want it: You are Li-Nuggz, a magical creature that grew from a small apple, who now has to fight a dragon called Drago who has invaded your home island.As stated above, the basic aim is to split various bouncing objects into ever-smaller pieces without getting squashed by them. To help you, you have an unlimited supply of spears which will split any object it comes into contact with, and you can collect various bonuses including weapon upgrades, object freezers, bonus points etc. You have three lives (it says 2 on the screen but you're still alive at 0) and a set time limit to clear each level, which may or may not involve climbing ladders, jumping on platforms and using lifts. You can jump up, left or right, and you can assign all controls to whatever keys you want, so you should be able to find suitable combinations for any phone model." Read more 
"The basic idea of Croker is to match up randomly-dealt playing cards into two pairs, three of a kind, a full house (three of a kind and a pair), or four of a kind. The higher the value of the cards in the combination, the more points you score with it. As you make matches your life force increases, as you deal new cards without matches your life force decreases. When it runs out, the game is over.To help you with your task, you can hold certain cards before asking for another random deal, much like a fruit machine. Unfortunately the instructions telling you to click on the "change" button are wrong, you actually have to press down on the d-pad while highlighting the "change" button.For some strange reason, perhaps just to be different, CrazySoft have used traditional playing card symbols on the title screen but the cards in the game have baffling illustrations such as bowls of fruit, light bulbs, bombs, apple cores, alarm clocks, piggy banks, dice, sunflowers, thimbles (I'm not making these up!) and frogs. There are no suits as such, the pictures just match a particular number. In practice, you're just matching up groups of numbers from one to ten." Read more 
