Symbian in Motion

There has been a great deal of buzz around the s60 community since Six Apart and Nokia announced their cooperative tool that allows users to post photos, videos, and even sounds to their Vox blog from their S60 3rd device. Personally I think this is great and I’m happy that more and more mobile blogging services are popping up. What most blogs that I’ve come across aren’t mentioning however, is that Vox is NOT restricted to the few newer devices listed on the main Nokia page on the Vox website. In fact, users can post to their Vox blog from many Windows Mobile 5, Palm OS, and s60 1st/2nd/3rd devices.

Enter Vox Mobile. Vox Mobile is a signed app that in my opinion is a far superior option compared to enabling and configuring Vox as an open online service. Vox Mobile allows you to view and create photo, video, and audio blog entries from one central app. As you can tell from the name of my blog, I like apps…

Vox Mobile makes posting to your blog much more efficient. From the options menu you can choose either to take a new photo/video/sound and build your post around it, or you can select Add to browse the appropriate gallery and import your photo/video/sound.

Once you’ve selected the multimedia focus of your new post you can enter a title, body, and tags for your post.

From there it’s as simple as simple as choosing Publish and waiting a few short seconds as Vox Mobile connects and publishes your new post.

See the result of the example images above in my Vox blog.

For whatever reason the installers are not terribly easy to find on the Vox site - which is really what prompted me to post about Vox despite the fact that you’ve already read about it 50 times. Now go download this great freeware app and get blogging!

Download Vox Mobile for s60 3rd

And here is the well hidden download page for all platforms

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One of the more unique applications that I’ve come across recently is an interesting little app by bit-side GmbH, developer of various mobile and PC applications. PanoMan is an intelligent app that allows you to use your camera-equipped S60 3rd device to take panoramic photos. Using what bit-side refers to as an “innovative, fully automatic stitching-algorithm,” it allows the user to rotate in place while it captures their surroundings. We’re not simply talking about wide angle here - we’re talking up to 360º panoramic images!

The app opens to a stylish and professional looking interface with a view finder window at the center. Pressing the joystick up/down allows you to scroll through the few available settings - resolution (2200×240 or 1280×120) and storage (phone memory or card memory). “Trigger” starts and stops the image capture function. PanoMan also comes equipped with its own image browser which allows you to browse through your image gallery and even send pics via bluetooth, infrared, or MMS.

Operation is very simple. Once the desired resolution is selected, just line up the beginning of your shot and select Trigger with the center joystick key. As you rotate you can watch in the viewfinder as PanoMan stitches frames together until you press the center joystick key again to end the capture. After a few seconds of work your finished product is displayed and you can choose to save or discard your new panorama.
In terms of use and image quality I’ve had mixed results. It takes a few tries to learn how fast to rotate to get the best quality. In poorly lit rooms or cloudy weather I’ve had a great deal of difficulty producing an image that isn’t blurry. This is certainly due in part to the camera itself.

On sunny days I’ve had very good results. Usually I take each picture several times and rotate at different speeds to ensure that one of them will come out well (it’s impossible to tell until you transfer the picture to your PC). The example below was taken outside of my office building and represents just under 180º of rotation. You’ll notice some light areas in front of the tree due to the sun.

(click on image for full view)
Here is another example, this time of a vertical panorama.

(click on image for full view)

PanoMan is great for sunny landscape shots and panoramas of open areas. I should mention that it is quite heavy on your processor though so for best results make sure that all other apps are closed. I’ve found that PanoMan operates very smoothly with at least 12MB - 13MB of free RAM. I would certainly recommend that you download the PanoMan demo version and have some fun. The full version is very affordable and can be found on handango. Try having a friend stand about three or four yards/meters away and then use PanoMan to follow them as they circle you for some interesting results.

;)

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Before I get started on this entry, I’d like to give a big thanks to Tommi at Nokia for mentioning me on his blog. Tommi works in the s60 application development unit at Nokia and pens what is surely the most widely read s60 blog on the net: Tommi’s S60 Applications Blog. I’m sure that you already subscribe and read it religiously but if you don’t, you should! S60.blogs.com gives us all a great insight into the minds of various Nokia team members and provides constant information on the many events and developments that surround the s60 ecosystem. So thanks Tommi!

With that, I’ll move on to the first “Tips & Tricks” installment of my blog. Every so often I will provide what I hope to be some useful information that will help you get the most out of your s60 3rd device. I’ll also try to cover some of the topics that I see constantly questioned on the forum over at mobile9.com and elsewhere. One such topic is a problem that appears to be common to all s60 3rd devices.

Many people have experienced a bug where they will install a theme on their device but when they try to remove it using the Application Manager there is no entry for it. I still see this problem on the latest N80IE firmware and on newer firmware for other devices as well. Don’t despair though, as long as you install your themes to your memory card there is an easy way to remove those unwanted themes.

1. Connect your device to your PC in ‘Mass storage’ mode - or insert your Mini SD card into a card reader and connect it to your PC.

2. Once your PC recognizes your card a new drive will appear under ‘My Computer’. Open it, and browse to \private\10207114\import.

3. Browse through each of the folders in this directory to find the theme you would like to remove. The MBM, MIF, and SKN files in each folder should each be named after the theme - so if you want to remove a theme called “MyTheme”, look for “MyTheme.mbm” etc.

*Note that you may see some MBM/MIF/SKN files named simply “themepackage.mbm” etc. In this case, simply open the SKN file in Notepad and you will see the actual theme name in the first few lines of text. Here is an example:

In the example you can see that the actual name of the theme is N80 Simplified v2 (created by teddymustupo).

4. Once you’ve found the folder containing the theme files you’d like to remove, simply delete the contents of the folder (don’t delete the folder itself).

Now put your card back in your phone you’ll notice that the theme is no longer listed under themes and you’ve freed up some space on your memory card.

Note that in newer devices, theme folders/files are located in two different directories: [!:\private\10207114\import] and [!:\resource\skins] - delete the like-named folders from each directory to remove themes.

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It seems that when the S60 team was developing their 3rd edition platform they left out some functionality that is typically standard with many other mobile phones. Don’t be mad at them though; you can’t fit every kind of cheese on one pizza! Besides, that’s why we have great third-party developers like MobiFun Soft.

Remind Me is an app designed to just what you think it would do… Remind you! MobiFun Soft has taken the simple ‘missed call beep’ that we have all known since the dawn of the cell phone and fed it a generous dose of steroids. Remind Me can notify you of missed calls, new voicemails, new sms messages, and new emails.

Reminders can be tones, vibration, and light alerts or any combination of the three. Don’t worry, the customization possibilities go way beyond that! For each of the four reminder categories, Remind Me allows you to choose which profiles will get each reminder, designate the time period between reminders, and designate the length of time the reminder should repeat. You can also specify a unique tone, vibrate option, and light alert style for each reminder category. Beyond that you can even choose how many times the phone should vibrate with each reminder and which lights on your phone should flash!

As an example using the Missed Calls reminder - I have it set to play a tone every two minutes for two hours and flash my display light every 30 seconds in my “General” profile. Then in my “Vibrate” profile I have the Missed Calls reminder configured only to vibrate two times every two minutes and flash the display light so that I am not disturbed by tones while in a meeting.

Rounding off the options in this great app are features like the ability to define the volume setting for each reminder tone (or make it profile dependant). You can also create a schedule so that Remind Me is active only for a certain period of time each day. I have it set to deactivate each night at 10:30pm - because if I miss your call or sms after that time I probably didn’t want to talk to you! Then every morning it starts back up again at 8:00am.

Remind Me has undergone the Symbian signing process so it starts automatically each time you power up your mobile. It also uses very little system resources which is a big plus on my N80 where the battery life is lacking to say the least. In the end I really couldn’t find anything bad to say about Remind Me, which is perhaps why I chose this great little app for my first review. It is reasonably priced, easy to configure, and most importantly it is very useful. If you don’t believe me give it a try for yourself by downloading the demo version.

To wrap up my first review here I have a little present for those of you who tend to take your mobile a bit too seriously (like me!). Here is a link to a few reminder samples that I created for my own personal use using the AT&T Labs’ online text-to-speech demo. Now when you miss a call your mobile will say, “You have one missed call”. In the zip file there’s one WAV for each of the four different reminder categories…

;)

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Welcome to my blog and thanks for stopping by! My name is Zach and over the coming weeks and months I’ll be reviewing various applications and games created for the Symbian S60 3rd Edition platform. A quick background on me: I’ve been a mobile phone enthusiast for over 10 years and I’ve owned somewhere between 40 and 50 phones. My interest really peaked when I began hacking Motorola phones a couple of years ago and since then I’ve come back to Nokia - thanks to the S60 platform. I am currently a forum administrator on the internet’s most popular free mobile content site mobile9.com (name - EchoZulu) and I am fairly well known on some other forums as well for writing guides and doing as much as I can to help people.

I will be reviewing freeware and payware on this blog and I’ll always include links so that you can download the app (or a trial). If you know of an app that you would like me to review, please by all means contact me here or over on the mobile9.com forum. I will try to update this blog on a weekly basis or as close as I can get. I may stray from time to time with some tips and tricks but I’ll always try to provide you with useful information.

Why S60 3rd? In my opinion it’s the best smartphone OS currently available, that’s why! S60 is versatile and desirable and its capabilities are limited only by its applications. You can browse the internet with the wonderful S60 3rd browser, or stream internet radio stations with a simple open-source app. You can make VoIP calls or stream television channels or even use TomTom to navigate cross country. So enough with the boring intro stuff… Let’s check out some apps!