Top 20 S60 mobile applications

Here is a list of 20 Symbian applications for S60 based cell phones which can be called the Top 20 based on the popularity and usage. The views presented in this post are my own & do not reflect,in any way, the final judgment on any aspect of the product on a general scale. So Here we go..

1. emTUBE : This is a very useful & one of the most awaited S60 applications by ‘Apple-devoid’ youtube-crazy people, since previously this feature was available only on Apple iPhones. The emTUBE, made purely for Symbian 60 operating system based mobile phones, allows you to watch Youtube videos on your mobile phones.

The emTUBE offers you to handle youtube videos in the following ways:

• Search: Youtube videos from mobile(provides additional options such as search limits,filter)
• Play: Youtube videos on mobile
• View-n-play: the Featured,Top Rated & the Most-Watched youtube Videos on mobile

2. Google Maps : It needs no introduction. This ground-breaking application by google not only revolutionized the face of web but is also creating new landmarks in mobile phone technologies.

Google Maps now works natively on S60 and even supports the built-in GPS on the N95. To try this application visit http://www.google.com/gmm from your S60 based mobile phone.

3. Epocware Handy Calendar : This is a powerful, Symbian 60 based mobile calendar which offers you more features than what a normal mobile calendar does.It offers multiple views - Day, Week, Month, and Task.Here you can open or preview any task or appointment from the Day and Task views. The Month and Week views show all of your meetings and events at a glance, and include busy bars or dots that help you to estimate your day loads. This application also offers you sorting of the tasks on several different criterias, like due date, subject or priority. More at www.epocware.com

4. Nokia Chat : Nokia chat is a useful chat application for S60 3rd edition based mobile phones. It is a Contacts and GPS-integrated chat and location-sharing system that allows selected friends to know about your whereabouts in real-time.

The Nokia chat application is currently in Beta stage & can be downloaded form Nokia’s official website.

5. Nokia Theme Scheduler : Now you can schedule your themes on your Symbian 60 based mobile phones with the Nokia Theme scheduler application for S60 based mobile phones.

It let you schedule your themes either automatically on the basis of your active profile or by setting the timer to change the theme after your set time duration.Cool huh..

6. Nokia Profile Scheduler :

Similar to the above Theme Scheduler, this profile scheduler by Nokia allows you to change your profiles automatically with timer scheduling.

7. EQO Mobile VoIP, IM & SMS : is a freeware multiple chat applications that allows you to chat, text & voip with a number of IM clients like MSN, AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, QQ, ICQ and Jabber.It allows you to have multiple chat sessions form different sources simultaneously. It even provides a Social phonebook which shows who is online before you place a call, send a message and/or start a chat session.

This S60 based mobile application also allows you to have long distance calls through VOIP, thus cutting your telephony costs up to 95% ! It is a must to have application if you are a frequent traveler or have a large number of online friends.

8. Palringo : This new S60 based mobile application allows you to instantly exchange text, photos and vocal IMs with an individual contact or even a group.It supports all the major IM clients viz. AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, MSN, and more.Its multiple platform architecture allows you to manage your conversations on both your PC & your mobile phone as well.

9. GSync :This cool S60 mobile application by PSILOC allows you to automatically archive all your SMS and MMS messages on a Gmail account. The messages appear as email and messages exchanged with the same people are grouped into threads. This application is available free on a 10 days trial offer.

10. Mobile Web Server (beta) : Now you can gain access to your mobile’s personal data from a remote web server by using this useful Symbian Mobile Web Server (beta) application.

Not only this, it also allows you to browse contacts, calendar entries, send SMS messages and create your own mobile web pages and blogs from your PC.More at mobile server(beta).

11. smartSignalTest : This 30 day trial S60 application, provided by smartphone-solutions keeps a continous vigil on your phone’s signal power, wherever you go & alert you by beep/vibration if the signal strength goes weak. A good companion for frequent roamers.Isn’t?

12. Quick Office ver 4.1 : This document management application allows to create,edit,manage your Microsoft Office documents right on your Symbian 60 based handset. Here are a few screenshots of this useful application:

13. Qik : This is another web2.0ish revolutionary Symbian 60 based application which allows you to live stream videos from your S60 compatible mobile to directly on the web. Now no need to worry about the limited storage space.Just install Qik, capture or streamlive a video to your friends like Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc.

14. Opera Mini : The popular web browser Opera is doing a good job in mobile application too. This light-weight mini mobile application offers a user-friendly interface for browsing internet on mobile.

15. Pocket Express : This small S60 based application provides you access to a wide range of rapidly changing content like news, sports, weather and lots more on your mobile phone

It basically provides content on 7 major areas which are as follows:

- Global news stories
- The latest sports information
- Weather forecasts
- Stock price movements
- Entertainment stories
- Horoscopes
- Travel information
More at www.handmark.com

16. Memory Up - Mobile memory & RAM booster : This powerful Symbian 60 application is a mobile RAM booster as well as a JVM (Java Virtual MAchine) management tool. It analysis the RAM by running some J2ME programs as well as some hidden programs that automatically allocate & recover occupied RAM & boost system to its best performance.

17. Jaiku’s Social PhoneBook - is a S60 based mobile social phonebook application that displays real time status of presence and location of your contacts.

However it has gone quite old now, since its launch two years back in 2006, but still this social phonebook application is been appreciated in mid-segment, S60 2nd edition based mobile phones such as Nokia 6260, 6600, 6620, 6630, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, 7610 and N70.

18. Yahoo! Go - Yahoo Go is another S60 based mobile application that lets you access several Yahoo services like Yahoo Email, weather & flickr.

19. ebuddy : The mobile messenger ebuddy is S60 based mobile application that allows you to do Instant messaging with friends using the four popular IM clients viz. Gtalk, MSN messenger, AIM & Yahoo.It is a light weight application that can be extremely helpful during low battery levels.

20. Frozen Bubble for S60 : This is a very interesting bubble game for S60 based mobile phones & comes free under the GNU public license. t features 100 full levels (from the original frozen bubble release), nice graphics adjusted for the S60 screen size (240×320) and sound effects from the original game.

Tun your celphone into a wifi hotspot

Tired of tethering your laptop to your cell phone to connect to the internet when you have multiple devices that need to connect? I have the problem where I can't tether at all. The solution is here! You can turn your cell phone into a wireless hotspot with a few simple tools.

First gather your cell phone with wifi and make sure you have an unlimited data plan, otherwise you might be stuck with a $5000 bill. Next download one of these simple software solutions to convert your device into a wireless access point: WMWifiRouter, JoikuSpot Premium and Light, WalkingHotSpot. With these software applications ranging in price from free to $29.99 you'll get lifetime licenses with every single one. Difference in software relate to operating system compatibility; WMWifiRouter is for Windows Mobile devices, whereas JoikuSpot is for S60 devices, and WalkingHotSpot supporting both OS's. Lastly be sure to check whether your wireless carrier allows internet sharing, as some do not.

This is great news for any wifi enabled device, allowing for downloads and more on the go fun. Check out the links to see if your device is compatible. Not willing to purchase the software just yet...there are also free trials for your convenience.

JoikuSpot Light - Connect to internet via Laptop using your celphone

JoikuSpot Light is an awesome piece of freeware which allows you to tether your mobile phone’s 3G capabilities and turn it into a wi-fi hotspot. Bascially, it gives you a dead-simple way to connect your laptop or pc to internet via cell phone.

Not only does this mean you’ve got a wi-fi hotspot in your pocket - this also means you have less hardware to lug around if you want to use your laptop and connect to internet through mobile. No more Bluetooth/Cable/USB dongles. Everything’s now 100% wireless.

Joikuspot currently runs on the Symbian platform, which means it caters for the higher end Nokias (N and E series) as well as a few of Samsung’s higher end phones. Of course, all phones supported share the same criteria which is that the device has to support data transfer (eg. 3G, EDGE, HSDPA, GPRS), and the phone has wi-fi capabilities (needed to broadcast the wi-fi you create).

It’s extremely simple to set up and easy to use. All you need to do is run the program on your phone and voila - instant hotspot. You can even hide the mobile app in the background on your phone as you go about your daily business.

Some of my favorite features include:

Encryption support – Joikuspot is incredibly secure and supports WEP including 128bit key generator for your security. This ensures that you maintain control over who uses the wifi generated from your phone, and to ensure your session is fully secure.

GPS Compatibility – If you feel generous enough to operate your mobile hotspot without a password and you want to share it with the world, Joikuspot allows you to sync up with your GPS (if your phone has one) and broadcast your location to the world on Google Maps.

Battery threshold – This feature shuts down Joikuspot when the battery level is too low. As you can imagine, intensive 3G AND Wifi usage will drain the battery extremely quickly. You can set it up so that it shuts off at a certain battery level so you never have to worry about empty phone batteries when you need to make a call.

Multiple connections – Joikuspot allows you to share your bandwidth with others or multiple devices at the same time so several people can share a single connection.

Auto reconnect – Works in the background to automatically reconnect every time a data connection is lost. This is crucial for a seamless experience.

Joikuspot comes in two different flavors. Joikuspot Light supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols, which is enough to handle most casual users covering basic browsing, web based email as well as Instant Messaging. It doesn’t however support some of the more enterprise and businesslike features like Outlook and corporate email.

Joikuspot Premium however supports ALL protocols allowing users to use Outlook, YouTube, Web radio, FTP, VPNs, Skype and other programs requiring specific protocols that practically covers everything anyone would ever want to do on the web.

The premium edition costs 25 Euros ($35) once off (which is incidentally still cheaper than paying for wireless laptop broadband), and also has special bulk licensing options for corporate use, but for most users (like me) – the free light edition is good enough.

This software has also been making waves in the international arena having recently been voted by Forum Nokia as 2008’s Star Developer, an award handed out to recognize the most unique and innovative applications developed for mobile phones based on the Symbian OS.

Of course before you use this to turn your cell phone as a wireless modem, ensure that you’re on an unlimited data plan because the data usage is understandably intense for this application. As for me, I wirelessly hooked up my iPod touch to my phone, so I’ve now got a device which gives me the internet experience of an iPhone 3G… at a third of the price.

Mobile Internet Pricing

Its finally official Globe Telecom are offering 5php/15 minutes in internet browsing through the consumers mobile phone unlike before its like Php0.15/kilobyte charge which is pricey. Globe is totally competing with Smart. For internet browsing, Smart Telecom charges P10/30 mins, which is proportional to Globe's new P5/15 mins rate.

***I hope this is a wake up call for Smart Telecom since almost everything in comes of landline and internet providers are really offering low low prices nowadays . I hope they will lessen their Smartbro monthly rates and of course their pricey Smartbro wireless internet which is way to costly for the general public.