Symbian in Motion

Five Apps I Couldn’t Live Without; Part 3

by Zach at 8:00 am | May 23rd, 2008 | Category: Application Reviews

SlingPlayer Mobile by Sling Media

In terms of using my handset for entertainment purposes, my needs begin and end with SlingPlayer Mobile (aside from music of course). I’m not much of a gamer - in fact I think the only game I have on my handset right now is mBounce’s “The Big 2″, a Chinese card game. I can’t even read a word of it but I always did enjoy that game as a child so I play it from time to time. So when it comes time for me to get my entertainment on, I look to SlingPlayer Mobile.

Again, for the full skinny on this awesome app you can check out my review. It lets you stream your home TV, DVR, Tivo, etc directly to your S60 handset as long as you’ve got an internet connection handy. The quality is surprisingly clean and the content is as varied as your TV service provider’s catalog. WiFi and 3G are optimal of course but I have gotten it to work fairly well over EDGE in portrait mode. There is a hardware element as you’ll need to install a slingbox between your cable / satellite box and modem, but the entry model will only run you $130. Well worth it - especially now that baseball season is in full swing! Also if you have an N95 NAM here in the US, SlingPlayer Mobile can be downloaded and used for free from the Download! catalog. Sweet!

SEVEN by SEVEN Networks

There is absolutely no question that above and beyond all other functions, I use email more than anything else on my handsets. More than SMS, more than web and most definitely more than voice calling. As such, it is of the utmost importance that I have a solid email app on my phone. Ease of use, quality of the product, reliability; these are all important factors.

For a long time I settled on Emoze’s solution and even recommended it in my article on AAS a while back. Since that article was written however, SEVEN has made a lot of changes to their product and after just a few days of testing I knew it was now the best available solution for me. Emoze is still the fastest - by far - but the limitation to one account was a big problem for me. At one point in time I was using Emoze for my exchange account, the S60 email client for two IMAP accounts and ProfiMail to pole three POP accounts because ProfiMail doesn’t support IMAP idle but the S60 email app only supports automatic retrieval for two accounts. Ridiculous, I know.

Sure there are still a few issues with the SEVEN email solution, but nothing is perfect. The latest version of SEVEN’s beta is truly terrific though. I have all six of my main email accounts loaded up and it handles them in stride. Exchange, Lotus Notes, POP, IMAP; it pushes them all to ensure your email is in your hands in a timely fashion, regardless of protocol. It syncs my contact with exchange, supports a variety of great functionality and to be frank it’s essentially the only available solution that meets my needs at the moment.

So there you have it. There were plenty of additional apps that came close to making the cut but I wanted to keep the number at five to avoid going on for days. These five have a special place on my handset though and without any one of them my S60 experience would be extremely lacking.

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