Toothpaste flavour crisps, that bloke who has sex with his car, dogs & cats.. living together.
Some things are just wrong.
If you enjoy deep, soul-scarring wrongness or if you just like watching the faces of Apple zealots slowly change into horrified gapes you might like to download Vista Perfection for the iPhone.
Once installed on a (jailbroken) phone, Vista Perfection takes the lovingly crafted, intuitive interface we know and love and replaces it with a (frankly spot on) rendition of the Windows Vista Aero interface we, er, don’t love as much.
Seriously, it’s like entering a parallel universe where black is white, right is wrong and Windows is any good at all.
It’s enough to make Steve Jobs cry.
I’ve no idea of the legal status of this. Skinning is one thing, but this seems to have gone out of its way to accurately ape Vista right down to an authentic-looking loading screen and what are surely ripped off versions of the icons.
I suspect that all it will take for this to bite the dust is a Microsoft lawyer to spot it and fire off a cease & desist letter during his or her lunch break, so get it while it’s hot. You pervert.
Nokia Beta Labs isn’t just there for the Symbian things in life. As well as pumping out bleeding edge S60 apps at what seems like a rate of twenty or so a day, Nokia have also released experimental PC software - usually novel takes on their synching apps or ways of controlling you phone from the desktop.
Nokias Music is at first glance a bit of a departure, given that it is an iTunes-like music player and organiser that lets you manage your digital music collection and hook up to a wide range of MP3 players. You can knock together playlists and rip CDs directly to connected devices.
Obviously, this primarily intended to e used with Nokia phones like the N81 and N95 but perhaps leaving things open will convince a few people to give a music-oriented smartphone a try - particularly when Nokia rolls out more phone-oriented features like Nokia Music Store integration.
Nokia Music PC Client is a 63MB download for Windows Vista and XP with service pack 2, available here.
If you fancy a change of scene while you are waiting for the new versions of Windows Mobile, why not use JGUI to give your version 6 handset a Vista makeover?
JGUI ’skins’ your phone and replaces the start page with something not unlike a Vista desktop - complete with little widgets for weather reports, the clock and an RSS reader.
The app is designed with landscape-mode Windows Mobile devices in mind (although it should still work if you have a portrait-mode phone, it just might look a bit more cramped). The freeware edition only skins your start page, while the full ($19.95) version skins the whole OS and comes with free updates.
It looks great, as you can see from this video (which features an unbelievably sl-o-o-w commentary that sounds as though the reviewer’s batteries are running down)
Nokia have released updates the firmware (the built-in software that runs the phone) to both the N81 and N95 8GB devices.
The N81 update provides improvements to Wi-Fi performance and management, memory handling and camera stability, while the N95 8GB receives bug fixes to Nokia Maps and the integrated web browser.
The updates can be downloaded using the Nokia Software Updater - or at least it can if you have access to a PC running either Windows 2000, XP or Vista. Mac and Linux users are out of luck, as are people who just don’t own a computer.
Aren’t Nokia always telling us that our phones are computers nowadays, anyway? As both phones have wireless internet access and 8 GB of storage, surely it should be possible to download this kind of update straight to the phone without a PC acting as middle-man?
