Merry Christmas! Hang on while I open this gold envelope..
In no particular order, the 5 best Symbian apps of the year are:
Essentialy a showcase for the GPS and accelerometer combo that is finding its way into all of Nokia’s high-end mobiles, Sports Tracker sits in your tracksuit pocket and quietly logs your progress during a run into a personal training diary, taking into account your pace and how far you have travelled.
The app started life in Nokia’s Beta Labs but has now been officially launched together with a set of well thought out web services that enable you analyse your training data, plot performance graphs and publish your progress on your blog.
An excellent example of a simple app made much more useful via a light sprinkling of quality web support.
Using your mobile to hop channels on the idiot box is a nice boon to couch potatoes, but irRemote’s huge database on other remote-controllable devices means you can turn your S60 smartphone into a a single controller for your telly, your DVD player, your stereo.. even your air conditioning can be operated from a single device that you can then use to ring up and order a pizza as your muscles waste away.
Customisable interfaces for each device and an active user community helping to find even more ir-equipped targets round out a simple but useful app.
Fring
A new version and some nifty new features made Fring easily the best mobile VoIP client. Adept at dealing with a plethora (yes, a *plethora*) of instant messaging protocols, Fring puts you in touch with contacts via Skype, Jabber, SIP, Google Talk, AIM, MSN among others - all presented through an attractive, well-thought out, interface.
The new Auto-roaming feature lets you switch between wifi and 3G/GPRS effortlessly and fun extras like the FringMe Google Maps widget are icing on an already tasty cake.
Another surprise gem from Nokia Beta Labs, this audiobook player comes with a converter (windows only - although open source alternatives are available) that turns bulky audiobook CDs and MP3s into ultra-compressed (but optimsed for voice reproduction) AMR-WB files. Combine those with a slick audiobook player, complete with bookmarking and chapter browsing features and the result is a great way to while away a long tube journey. Now, if only the basic Nokia headphones were worth tuppence..
2007 was the year of YouTube and here at Pocketpicks we saw quite a few YouTube players pass before us.
emTube was by far the best. For a beta app it has a surprisngly slick interface and given a decent wifi connection will play streamed movies just as well as a desktop browser.
You can download movies to a memory card for later, offline, viewing and view details such as author, rating and playing time. There is also a favourites/bookmarking feature for quick access to selected videos.
As a grace note, the Nokia N95 version provides iPhone-tastic autorotating via built-in accelerometer support.
Great picks! I’m new to Symbian and have a few of those installed — emTube is a great timewaster! Gonna check out irRemote now!