Act quickly! Free game for E71 and other S60 users!

Only today SymbianGear offers special 100% Halloween discount for a game entitled “Stolen in 60 seconds”. It’s available for many S60 devices including Nokia E71. Go, register, or login and use discount code STOLEN100 during check out! Enjoy!

Nokia N85 – one more cool S60 device!

What’s new on mobile market? Nokia N85! Its symbol suggests N81 as its predecessor, nevertheless the N85 is often perceived as smaller, smarter and lighter successor of N95. The device is a double slider phone and offers only a few features less than current Nokia flagship product N96.

A new member of N-series is focused mainly on multimedia features: music, video and gaming. It offers 5 Mpix camera with optics by Carl Zeiss, assisted GPS, N-Gage client and HSDPA supporting data transmission up to 3.6 Mbps. The N85 will be launched at the end of this month on selected markets, including UK. Please check detailed review of Nokia N85! Do you think it will be one more successful phone after N95 and E71?

[Update]: Skyfire for E71 available now!

Very promising and awaited mobile web browser Skyfire, which is in its beta testing phase, soon should be available for Nokia S60 devices (N and E series)! In today’s announcement E71 has been mentioned as one of supported devices..

“Nokia users, we support more phones on the Symbian Series 60 (3rd edition) platform. We’ve added the Nokia E62, E71, N75, N80, N81 and N82 phones to the existing roster, which included the Nokia E61i, E61, N73, N76, and N95 phones.”

Unfortunately previous and current beta tests are still closed for US users only. As my US carrier card is no longer valid I won’t be able to test it in Europe :/

[Update]: As you may see in readers comments, for the post before an update, test version of Skyfire is available not only for US testers! All you need to do is register your profile on Skyfire web page, input any mobile number (I tried successfully with my outdated US pre-paid card) and download it to your PC. After installation and first start up Skyfire crashed my phone actually, but now seems to work fine.

If you have Skyfire on your E71 please let me know what version it is? Mine shows 0.61.0.6746 so I think it is not yet announced 0.8 release. How about yours?

What can’t your E71 live without?

We all get our phones with default applications installed by Nokia or some 3rd party partners. We all then have Real Player, Sports Tracker or bar code reader in it. However, the power of Symbian, as a real operating system, is that you can quickly and easily add applications which make the phone customized for your needs. This week I have read an interesting article about top ten freeware applications for N82 posted on the Nokia N82 blog. It prompted me to take a look at my E71 after a few months of usage and check what I installed. What are the apps I can’t live without?

Because of hardware disparities such as lack of built-in accelerometer, the top ten for E71 will be different. You won’t find ShakeLock on my mobile. Due to compatibility differences, you won’t see me playing any of N-Gage games either. However, E71 with its full keyboard is open for other possibilities. That’s why you can see me in a bus chatting with Nimbuzz instead of texting. I have Gmail and as well as WidSets on my phone, but I definitely wouldn’t put those programs in my personal top ten. OK, so I’ve created my own E71 top ten, not only freeware apps.

1. FM radio (native)
2. Web Browser (native)
3. Quick Office (mostly Excel)
4. Media Player (& podcasting)
5. Sports Tracker
6. Nimbuzz (Skype client)
7. Nokia Maps
8. Splash ID
9. Location Tagger
10. Screenshot (for blogging purposes)

Now, some comments from my side. As you may see, I took into consideration default applications but I didn’t t include native calendar, alarm clock or e-mail application as those really are a must be in a modern phone. Anyway I’m interested if you use other software instead of those original features. For example Nokia Email or Microsoft Exchange? I’m very curious which of those applications you use as well. Actually I hope you will post your own favs or even top tens in here! I believe this could help all of us customize our phones by finding  yet unknown applications lost in constellations of Symbian software.

Minor updates of software for E71 and other S60 devices

During last few posts I have been writing about big changes of popular applications, like Yahoo! Go or Gmail. This time more information about smaller updates of other useful software for E71 and other Nokia S60 devices.

Splash ID has been updated recently to version 3.40(1) which has fixed a bug related to the previous builds’ fix, but this time affecting the Record Info screen instead of the List View screen.

Mobbler – last.fm scrobbling client with improved UI since yesterday is now marked as 0.3.1.

Fring for all Symbian S60 phones has been updated to version 3.3.6.15. The changes involves: partially updated GUI, FAXL 3 support and other minor bug fixes.

Palringo in version with version 0.97.14 offers totally redesigned user interface. The application, available now for Nokia N81 as well, handles properly UTF-8 and UTF-16 characters coding and can be hidden in a background with a single red button press. Previously it was closing Palringo completely.

One more IM application – Nimbuzz is finally mature with version 1.00 offering some user interface changes and feature of setting personalized IM status.

I hope you will enjoy new versions. Anyway if you encounter any issues, please share this information with us. I personally observed that a new Palringo version is not automatically overwritting previous one.

GMail 2.0 on E71 – one step closer to.. Outlook?

I’m sure some you won’t like comparing GMail mobile application to Microsoft Outlook, but the truth is that Outlook is quite good mailing application. GMail mobile is now much closer to this definition. New GMail 2.0 released last week is no longer only webmail access to your single GMail account. It offers: support of multiple e-mail accounts (both GMail and Google Apps), basic offline access to you latest mails (those displayed in on the phone screen). It allows composing new e-mails offline and sending them automatically in a background. You can create and use defined mobile e-mail drafts as well. In general the application for Java supporting phones and Blackberry devices works more stable and gives more user friendly keyboard shortcuts.

I personally have it on my E71 as a search engine and backup of my main e-mail account, but now with multiple accounts support I think I’ll use it more frequent. Please check interesting E71fanatics.com post about new GMail, or view official GMail blog movie about it. The application itself is accessible under m.google.com/mail supporting 35 languages.

Nokia Maps zooming shortcuts for E71

Do you find shortcuts suggested for zooming map in/out on E71 as a nightmare? I do. Pressing function key and then * (U) or # (J) is not very useful with E71’s full keyboard. I remember it worked fine on my N80 but not on E71. Timi from the phoneomenon.com blog posted very useful hint for all Nokia Maps and E71 users. Instead of keyboard shortcuts suggested by icons on right side of the Maps workscreen you can use upper arrow key to zoom the map in or backspace key to zoom it out! It really works!

Yahoo! Go 3.0 for Nokia E71

Yahoo! Go 3.0 is finally available for Nokia E71! If you are a user of any Yahoo! services (like Flickr, or Yahoo! Mail) try Yahoo! Go. If you use version 2.0 update your application. You may easily overwrite version installed previously on your mobile, or try a new installation. New version offers new features, better performance and more pleasant user interface. What exactly is new in version 3.0? Please check here.

To download Yahoo! Go 3.0 please visit http://get.go.yahoo.com with your mobile browser, or go to: http://mobile.yahoo.com/go

Pixon M8800 – one more all-in-one phone by Samsung

Samsung introduces one more multimedia touchscreen device – M8800. The device also known as the Pixon has 8 Mpix camera with advanced photo features, fastest available 3G (HSDPA) connection and A-GPS module. Is it one more competitor of Nokia E71? I don’t think so, as the device doesn’t have WIFI in it. Surely it will be attracting people considering buying Omnia and INNOV8 devices by Samsung, Cybershot C902 by Sony Ericsson or even iPhone 3G.

You can find a nice review of the Pixon posted at the dialaphone.co.uk blog. It is well described there and you will find comparison to other multimedia all-in-one devices. New Samsung M8800 will be available in Mid-October or early November.

New Nokia Sports Tracker (v1.82)

Hi all Nokia Sports Tracker fans! Several days ago, one of readers – Oliver posted here a comment about newest version of NST available at Nokia Research Center. Finally I had some time to check it on my E71! I think it’s worth checking especially if use NST as a regular user!

New version (1.82) is available for Nokia devices with Symbian v3.1 (like N82, N95, E71) and v3.2 (N79 and N85). In comparison to previous version, still downloadable from official Sports Tracker page, the new one if free of freezing issue, plus it gives few improvements. The most important is an option to download and display a map background for your recorded track. Be careful because it uses more data transmission and it needs a memory card present in your phone. Unfortunately it is not yet using maps available on your phone with Nokia Maps application.

Download new Sports Tracker from this page.