GLOBAL –  We’re always on the lookout for new and interesting apps for our mobile devices, and especially free stuff. So we’ve been spending some time trawling through Nokia Developer’s Projects site. Projects is a site that allows developers to host and manage work-in-progress applications for Nokia phones, especially suited to collaborative and open source projects. You can read about projects in progress, look at the source code and discuss the apps with the developers.

In many cases, you can also download the application files. And at this point, we need to issue a due warning. Projects is a site aimed at developers, not consumers. A lot of the projects you’ll find are unfinished and buggy. You could conceivably break your phone. Don’t download anything if that prospect worries you.

It does worry us that we might end up having to wipe our Adam’s phone, but we’re really far too curious for our own good. Some of the apps-in-progress look quite astonishing. Take a look at the description for Smart Shopper, a fledgling app for the Nokia N900 and N9 phones, for example:

Application for assistance on shopping trips. Helps quickly create and edit shopping lists. The most interesting feature of the application is the reminders, that use the geographic coordinates of the shops. All the known shops, for which there are shopping lists, could be tracked by GPS. And you will be reminded when you walk near one of these shops.

Terrific idea. What about DJ TurnTable:

DJ Turntable is a Qt Quick application that allows the user to scratch audio with the turntable and play predefined background beats, or create their own beats with the drum machine.

But the one we actually downloaded and installed was AirSwype, an app that’s pretty certain to make you look silly, but is great fun all the same. It shows you a shape and you have to replicate the shape by moving your phone through the air. It then gives you a percentage score depending on how precisely you managed to make the shape. If you manage 70 per cent accuracy or more, you can go on to the next (harder) shape. It’s fairly simple at this stage, but it manages to succeed at something many mobile games fail at: it’s fun for a group of people to play.

Projects is a fun playground, but it does contain some hazards, as we’ve noted above. Which ones have caught your eye?

image credit: xJasonRogersx