It’s clear that a mobile phone is more than just a tool to make and receive phone calls. It’s not until you start to personalise it that it becomes a very personal necessity. Each person has his or her own needs and that’s where apps come in. From reading through your comments on Top apps for a Symbian^3 owner, we’ve rounded up your favourite apps that are essential when setting up a new smartphone for the first time. We’ve removed the apps that were already suggested in the story itself, now here’s the top five – in order of popularity amongst you.
Ovi Maps
Even though Ovi Maps comes preinstalled on all Nokia smartphones, you see this as an absolute essential app. Who wouldn’t agree? Free walk and drive navigation forever, plus it works exactly the same when your phone is in offline mode. For anyone eager to trial out the new versions of Ovi Maps, the team over at the Nokia Beta Labs currently have v3.07. We remind you that anything in beta stage may be a little rusty around the edges.
Opera Mobile
If you fancy browsing the Web from your mobile phone then the Opera Mobile Web Browser makes for a great experience. Pinch zooming makes it easy to get those closeups and the menu bar at the bottom of every page makes navigating through different tabs and back to previous screens really simple.
Nokia Bubbles
Transforming the screensaver on your lockscreen, Nokia Bubbles is a fun way of interacting with your phone. When installed, this app will sit inactive until you press the menu key when your phone is locked. When this happens a selection of bubbles will float around the screen, each with a different icon inside them. They represent a different function of your phone and pressing on one or moving it to a ‘drop-off point’ on your screen will activate that function. Very clever stuff. Nokia Bubbles is currently unavailable for download from Beta Labs as the team are busy performing some fixes to allow it to work with the new Qt 4.7.3. Keep checking there for updates, though.
JoikuSpot
When you’re out of the office and have an important document to edit and send on to your work colleagues, it’s very frustrating if you’re nowhere near a WiFi access point. Rather than searching for a local Internet café or a library, your can turn your phone into the much-needed WiFi access point. Your laptop links up to your phone via WiFi and uses your phone’s 3G connection to pass data to and from your other device. There’s a handy menu in this app that allows you to see exactly how much data is being transferred, so you can ensure you don’t use your data allowance.
There are two versions, a free one and a paid premium version – costing £8.00
Nokia Sleeping Screen
The screensaver on your Symbian smartphone is good, it does the job. It tells you the time and date when you need to know it. Nokia Sleeping Screen does exactly the same thing, but in a slightly different way. Rather than the very bright white digits which is often painful to look at in the middle of the night, when your half asleep, the numbers are toned down to a very simple dot-matrix style that’s very easy on the eye. There’s a selection of screen savers to choose from and the night screen saver can even be programmed to turn and off at certain times. There’s some nice animations that occur too when the phone is charging, when you miss a call and even when your calendar reminds you of a meeting.
So is this the perfect combination of apps for any new smartphone owner? With so many different apps available, it’s hard to decide.