Symbian in Motion

Sorry guys, I completely forgot to mirror this post. I’ve been so busy at CTIA (despite the fact that it’s incredibly lackluster). You’ve been waiting for it… I’ve been waiting for it… And now it’s here!

Admit it, as much as you love your Nseries you would gladly trade it in this second for a QWERTY S60 handset that was just as capable spec-wise. It’s ok, so would we. We know it’s coming down the road but we need something to tide us over in the meantime. T9 is terrible as far as text input goes, but there are a few other options. Our favorite by far is Adaptxt. It’s been around for a while on Windows Mobile devices and a few months ago S60 users got their first taste of true predictive goodness. For those who don’t know, Adaptxt is an intuitive text entry system that not only predicts words for you, it learns how you write and predicts the current word as you type, the next word, phrases and even sentences. It really is a fantastic app. The initial release had some issues that lead to the application being pulled for a while, during which time Keypoint tweaked the app to work a lot better with third-party applications among other things. The result is a brand new version arriving just in time for CTIA. The new version is dubbed beta but don’t be fooled, our tests have gone very well for the past few days. What’s more, Adaptxt is a payware application but while the new release is in beta it is available for free during the trial period. Not for the standard seven-day trial mind you, we’re talking a full 90 days of free Adaptxt love. Granted, you’ll know you can’t be without it after 24 hours but hey, free is never a bad thing.

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In an announcement today by Tommi from Nokia Beta Labs, Share Online 3.0 has graduated from Beta school to a full fledged application. I want to congratulate the Nokia Beta Labs guys on creating this application. Personally it’s one of my daily applications I use regularly to upload and view my pictures on Flickr.

Share Online 3.0 allows users to keep up to date with their Flickr and Vox accounts on the go. Sharing your pictures on Flickr and having the ability to blog directly to Vox are great features which has kept this application going and eventually allowed it to be a success. With the latest release it also now supports Ovi, Nokia’s new sharing service which let’s you upload and share pictures, videos and music using your handset. The new version also integrates a new addition to your active desktop screen displaying any new activity on your Flickr, Vox and Ovi accounts respectively (see screenshot below).

Do note that Ovi is only supported in the following countries:

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Laos, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South-Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, U.S.A., Venezuela, Vietnam.

You can download the new application and find more information on the Nokia Sharing and Blogging site.

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A quick little release from the guys at the Nokia Beta Labs, our resident S60 innovators; Nokia Text Messenger Beta. A nifty little application which displays your SMS messages from your device on your desktop via a little widget. The application is only compatible with Window Vista users and requires Nokia PC Suite 6.85 or later.

Handy installation instructions if needed:

1) When the installation is complete, right-click the Windows Sidebar area. Then, select Add Gadgets from the menu that appears, and a window with all the available gadget applications opens.

2) Double-click Nokia Text Messenger to add the gadget to Windows Sidebar.

I won’t touch it as I won’t be touching Vista with a 10 foot pole, but if you are running on Vista give it a go and leave us some feedback.

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The odds are pretty good that your S60 device came with a light version of Quickoffice preinstalled and you may or may not use it. Quickoffice is great for viewing email attachments and provides S60 3rd devices with functionality that is an absolute necessity for any smartphone. But what happens when you want to actually create or edit a document, spreadsheet or presentation?

Quickoffice Premier is the best-selling solution for an Office-like experience on your S60 3rd smartphone. I would say that I use my phone about 80% of the time for pleasure and 20% of the time for business but during those times that I am using my device for business I couldn’t live without the full functionality of this app. Let’s get right to it:

Word Documents

This is probably the functionality that I use the most with Quickoffice Premier. The document editing (DOC, TXT, etc) in the latest version of this app is simply wonderful! It provides you with just about all of the important functionality that you would find in MS Word. Of course it is limited in some respects due to the nature of S60 but you have more than enough options to edit and even create a very respectable document.

Formatting options, image and table insertions, and editing options - it’s all there. The latest version of Quickoffice Premier even includes a very good spell check function that makes use of a dictionary that can be downloaded for free!

Excel Spreadsheets

For the business user, spreadsheet functionality is absolutely essential and Quickoffice delivers the goods. It’s as close to a PC Excel experience as I’ve seen on a mobile device to date. You can change colors and format cells quite easily and even add advanced formulas. Of course the app also allows you to zoom in and out as needed to compensate for the relatively small screens on mobile devices.

My boss seems to be a bit slow when it comes to spreadsheets so every now and then he sends me things to edit and distribute for him. I can’t tell you how nice it is to know that when I receive urgent items from him I don’t have to race to a PC anymore to take care of his requests. I can just open the spreadsheet in Quickoffice, quickly and easily make any required changes and then shoot it right back to him for review or to the customer/partner who needs it. It really couldn’t be easier!

Powerpoint Presentations

Just as with spreadsheets, my boss really doesn’t know the first thing about Powerpoint presentations either. It’s amazing that someone can get so far in life in a tech-based industry and have zero skills when it comes to what is now basic PC functionality. Well these days when he emails PPT presentations to me in a panic, I don’t even break a sweat or get out of my seat at the bar. I can view his presentation and edit it to my liking in no time flat before delivering it back to him or anywhere else for that matter.

Quickoffice Premier offers plenty of additional benefits as well. Advanced integration with Mail for Exchange 2.x for example allows for a much more streamlined email attachment experience. The app provides integrated attachment viewing as well as the ability to reply and attach the current document/spreadsheet/presentation to an email right from the Quickoffice Premier options menu. There is also quick and easy access to recent files right from within the main app window. As a business user you really can’t afford to be without this app. Beyond that, iIf you want to get your hands on an app that will take your S60 3rd device a tremendous distance closer to providing a near-PC experience then look no further.

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When I first read about the Active Notes feature on the Nokia E90 I was jealous. There are so many times that I would have liked to make a note that included an audio file or picture but for some reason Nokia only provides that functionality on the Communicator - until now that is! Active Notes is now available for all S60 3rd devices so now there are only 999 reasons to envy the E90 instead of 1,000. ;)

In the screenshot above you can see that there are a variety of objects that can be inserted inline into your notes. You can also choose Insert new to engage the camera, video recorder or audio recorder and create new media on the fly.

The Link note to call feature shown highlight above is awesome! It lets you create a note and then assign it to one or several of your contacts. If enabled in your settings, Active Notes will automatically pop up the note whenever a call with the relevant contact(s) is engaged. This is a very useful feature for me as it gives me an easy way to collect key points and ideas several days before a call, and then access them easily and automatically when the call is made.

Below you can get an idea of just one of a million other scenarios where this app is useful:

Here I’ve inserted an image of an apartment I like, recorded a memo with some notes, inserted the Contact entry of my Realtor (which I can click on to call him) and entered some text. Now everything I need to see, hear and do is in one place that is nice and organized.

There is some functionality that the app is missing of course; for example I would love to be able to set a reminder alarm that would call specific notes to my attention (just like tasks in the built-in organizer). I would also like to see it interface with the calendar and Active Standby but we non-E90 owners can’t have it all I suppose. All the same, this app has been helping me out a lot lately and I highly recommend you give it a try. Download it here.

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