If you use the Internet from your phone but are unlucky enough to pay for your 3G usage you probably like the idea of using a wifi-enabled mobile like the Nokia N95. This works great, but it can be a hassle having to reconnect every time you want to go online in a different place and it is easy to forget and use your 3G instead. If you are in a foreign country this can be a VERY expensive mistake.
Psiloc Connect offers a simple solution with the kind of conection management that you would think your phone would do by default. Certainly, if I were a Nokia developer I would be kicking myself for not thinking of this first.
The app does all the hard work for you - just give it a list of wifi access points (or tell it to discover some) and it will try each in order of strength, only falling back on your 3G connection if the wifi fails. If you are really worried about your phone bill, it can be set to ignore the 3G option and just use wifi.
Psiloc Connect is available here for around 10 euros, with a free 10 day trial.
Over at (of all places) Lastminute.com, there is a team of obviously bored-yet-talented programmers who own a couple of Nokia N95 phones.
At the recent Over The Air 48-hour codeathon at Imperial College, they came up with Phone Fight - possibly the world’s first and only Bluetooth/Accelerometer-powered virtual swordfighting app.
Armed with your Nokia blade, Python for S60 and the Phone Fight app you can challenge your frineds to duels, complete with clanging sound effects.
All very silly, and could perhaps use a lightsaber mode, but fun nonetheless.
Here is a quick YouTube vid of an epic phone battle:
Location based information service WHERE has launched a client for Nokia smartphones.
WHERE uses the inbuilt GPS receiver to pinpoint your location and offers over 60 widgets that identify local services and ’stuff’ like restaurants, petrol stations, landmarks and even local weather and earthquakes.
WHERE also includes the mobile friend finding widget BuddyBeacon. BuddyBeacon shows the location of any friends nearby and lets you share your location via social networking sites like Facebook.
The app is a free download for Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia N95 and Nokia N82 phones.
Anthony, over at the FRESH PLASTIC blog, has spotted that 3 are selling Vuzix Video Glasses on their accessories site.
Vuzix glasses are the kind of gadget that lets you walk the fine line between cool and ridiculous - you might even say they are ‘polarising opinion’. Ho ho. Thank you, I’m here all week. Tip your waitress.
A thin pair of sunglasses with integrated LCD display and headphones, they will let you watch video from any compatible device with only a slight risk that someone will see you and mutter something derisive about Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I tried a pair of these a few months ago on a video iPod and the picture quality is great - the ’screen’ appears to float in front of you and you can just about see around/through it to avoid walking in to things.
What is interesting about this from a Pocket Picks point of view is that, although they will work with any AV-out capable device, 3 are pushing them for use with mobile phones like the N95.
While these definitely make watching films easier, I’m not sure if they will take off in a big way due to the embarrassment factor. Who knows, though? A common complaint about mobile video is the titchy screen, so perhaps train carriages will soon be stuffed with silent, shade-wearing movie fans.
Nokia’s Mobile Web Server is an app that until now had fairly niche appeal - a mini web server that lets you access the contents and services of your phone via a wifi connection.
This may sound a bit like Nokia PC Phone, but where that app ties your phone to a Windows PC, running the server app on your phone makes it accessible from any browser.
Nokia Beta Labs have decided to make the web server even easier to use with My Mobile Site Widgets. Despite its dull name, MMSW is a great looking collection of desktop mini-apps that run as part of the Yahoo! Widgets Engine.
There are widgets to show your phone’s battery level and signal strength; an SMS widget that can read and send messages to your contact list; a drag’n'drop call widget that can accept numbers from anywhere on the desktop and a photo gallery that plucks images directly from your phone’s memory card.
The widgets require a system that can run the Yahoo! Widget Engine (Windows XP, Vista or ac OSX) while the mobile web server has been tested on the Nokia N80, N93 and N95
Nokia released a port of the popular scripting language Python back in 2005 in an attempt to stimulate development for the S60 platform and provide a way of rapidly prototyping apps.
Since then, the language has really taken off with amateur developers. Its easy to learn and there are several powerful libraries of code around that make it relatively easy to write apps that use advanced features like the Nokia N95’s accelerometer.
One developer, Ariek, has made a name for himself writing apps that make ‘interesting’ use of this particular feature. We have previously covered his spirit-level hack pyPoziomica, but he is also responsible for the mobile magic trick pyMoneta, which has to be seen to be believed.
More usefully, pyGenerator is a simple speaker testing app and ListSMS lets you export your text messages to a text file.
Here is a look at perhaps his most useless app to date - pyPiwo, the ‘beer generator’.
The Filter is a free S60 3rd Edition app that offers a clever way of navigating your mobile music collection.
The app will scan your handset for any playable music files to create its database and then let you scroll through a list of artists, titles or genres to build up a playlist of tracks.
The clever part is the ability to select an artist and push right on the joystick to search by recommendation. This feature searches through your collection to find similar artists. So, as in the example given in this video, you can select ‘The Strokes’ and get a recommendation that Beck, Doves and The White Stripes would go well with them in a playlist.
Actually building a playlist can a one-click process, although that does assume that you want all tracks by that particular artist. The developers recommend that you have a least 200 tracks on your phone in order to get the most from the app. Nokia N95 8GB users, start your engines..
This year it seems like the Nokia NSeries devices have been breeding like rabbits. We have the N81, N82, N95, N95 8GB and N73, and now the daddy of them all has emerged – the N96.
Pics have appeared on Flickr, originating from a Chinese source of a real-life, actual N96 handset – apparently not a mock-up or render, but actual pictures.
Jusding by the pictures, the N95 is a dual-slider with a button-less top screen (presumably for touch-screen controls?). It also has a navigation wheel like the N81’s with media controls. The OS is apparently the S60 3rd edition FP2 (i.e. Symbian OS 9.5).
Camera-wise it has a five-megapixel camera with the now ubiquitous (on NSeries at least) Carl Zeiss optics. Interestingly, there’s a stand on the back of the N96 for easier media viewing
There’s no official news on this device yet, but judging by the success of the N95 (and its 8GB incarnation), this could be the big handset of next year.
[Via Intomobile]
Previously on PocketPicks.. we reviewed the S60 YouTube viewer YTPlayer. It was pretty good, but required Flash Lite 3 and was really only a beta version that the developer is no longer working on.
emTube seems much more like the real deal. It is written in Nokia’s development language du jour Open C, which lets it access the phone hardware directly and run much faster than a Flash app.
Unlike many other mobile YouTube players, emTube actually plays YouTube movies directly, rather than converting them to a new format. The app allows you to download a copy of a movie to a memory card for offline playing and will also play other flash movies stored on your phone.
As well as the usual search and favourites facilities, a nice touch is the support for the Nokia N95’s accelerometer - just rotate the phone by 90 degrees and it will switch to landscape mode, iPhone style.
emTube is a free download, but the author is asking for donations if you are suitably impressed. Go on, it’s nearly Christmas..
ExtGPS is a free app that lets you use your GPS-equipped phone as an external GPS device.
Why would you want to do that, you ask? Well, although there are a lot of new apps for Symbian mobiles that let you take advantage of GPS, these are quite limited in functionality compared to the heavy-duty Geographical Information Systems available for the PC and Mac.
The trouble is - PCs and Macs tend not to come with GPS as standard. If you already have GPS on your expensive new smartphone, having to buy another little black box so you can use it with your laptop is a real kick in the teeth.
Enter ExtGPS . Run it on your Nokia N95, N81, E90 or 6110 phone and your PC or Mac can use your phone’s GPS functions via a Bluetooth connection - leaving you with the cash to actually buy one of those expensive GIS systems.
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