As Nokia promised, there will be more and more devices which will offer the free navigation (turn-by-turn, voice guided) in Ovi Maps. Now they added the e66 (in my opinion still the best Symbian device ever made) and the very popular e71. You can download the latest version at Nokia Website for free. Besides the lifetime free navigation it also offers synchronisation with Ovi Maps online, where you can easily define routes, POIs, and do a lot of other stuff. All it requires is an Ovi account which you most likely already have, if you use Ovi Store.
In total, Ovi Maps is now free on 14 different Symbian devices and it is very nice to see, that even older ones are not forgotten yet. Maybe Nokia slowly gets the point of consumer satisfaction after getting hit hard by Android and Apple.
April fools! No need to read on!
You like your iPhone/iPod Touch? You like the AppStore and its huge amount of apps? Paid Apps? You think it costs too much to try them all? No Problem, there is an app for that. Well, not really an app, more a method to download everything for free. Directly to your iDevice, without any legal issues. A Californian Hacker Group, known (or not known until now), called RIPLA found a way to bypass the iTunes Account login, when downloading from the AppStore. It works on ANY iDevice, it does not need to be jailbroken or be modified in any way.
As original description is quite long and the Groups credits should stay intact, i will not post it, but you can download the original PDF here.
Enjoy your Apps, this is the greatest news since the announcement of the iPhone.
There is no device that has more Twitter apps than the iPhone. The most popular are Tweetie and Echofon and you can find many free, but also paid clients in the AppStore. Most of them are, sorry for that, rubbish, so paid apps have their right to exist. Since March 20th there is Tweets – Twitter for the rest of us and it seems to be damn good. Some details and a video that shows how to use Tweets are following now. Of course the app is not perfect yet, but those are points that should be gone very soon, i guess.
You have 8 icons on the launcher screen by default: Home Timeline, Public Timeline, DMs, Mentions, Profile, Trends, Nearby and Search. If you follow lists on twitter, these are shown as icons too. If a screen is not enough for all icons, a second one is generated. You can get there by swiping, like you do in the iPhone menu. The best thing is, you can place your icons the way you want. If you want, for example, all your favorite lists on the main launcher screen, you do it the same way as if you just want one icon on the main screen. You can also easily unsubscribe lists by just deleting the icon.
The Settings screen. You have a lot of options to customize the behaviour of Tweets. First thing is the Font Size. On lowest level you can see 4-5 tweets on a page where you can only see 2 if you chose the biggest setting.
Next point is the Retweet Style. After the official introduction of Retweets, which was not the variant users have been using before, App Designer had to do something. So you can decide which way you want to retweet. Either the classical way (with comment, as your own tweet) or the official way like you do on the web version of Twitter. It is a general setting, so you can´t decide from case to case which style you want which is a bit sad.
The option Name Display is self describing, either lets you display the username or the name the user put in the Name field.
“Avatar Touch opens” has a lot of options of what should happen if you touch someones avatar. You chose if you want to see his Timeline, his Profile, his Followers, his Followings, his mentions (where he was mentioned), his Favorites or his lists. Again it is a prechosen option, selecting those by a long press on an avatar would have been better.
The function “Open to launcher“, if activated, always takes you to the launcher screen, no matter where you have left the app. If it is deactivated you start where you have left.
There is also a “Screen Rotation” setting. There are 3 options: “always”, “never” and “Compose and Web only”. Always does not really fit as the important launcher screen always is in portrait mode. That´s kind of unlogical and should be fixed, in my opinion.
Autoload Replies can be turned on and off. I don´t get the point of it but it is present there. Save Photos can be activated too, which means, if i tweet a photo it is automatically saved to the library.
The two Theme Options are just cool. First, there is a black Theme (which was taken out on my favorite client echofon) and second, you can use the themes based on time. If you want a light one through the day and a dark one in the night, you simply set which time is night and you get the right theme based on that.
The next settings are for external services, you can set your account details for Instapaper and ReadItLater to collect your links. For Image Hosts you can chose between Twitpic and yFrog. Also the url shortener can be chosen, you can use Trim.ly, U.nu, Kl.am, Is.gd and Idek.net. Why bit.ly isn´t there (best would be with account settings) is a mystery, i just hope it will be there in a future version.
The last two options are not really options. There is Manual which shows you how to use Tweets, and there is Support request where you can directly contact the Tweets team.
The timeline navigation is rather simple. By touching someones avatar you get where you decided you want to in the settings, on long press you can follow / unfollow the user, check the profile or send him a DM. Links are opnened in an internal browser. If you click on a Twitpic link, the Twitpic page gets loaded instead of downloading the image, like other clients do. If you long press a tweet with reply you see the original tweet. That´s quite nice but it would be better to see the whole conversation (if there are more replies). Short press on a tweet shows the options Email, Favorite, Translate, Retweet and Reply. That´s well done as everything happens directly in the timeline.
When composing a tweet you have the options Shrink tweet, Add Photo, Shrink urls, @dd user. Shrink Tweet shortens the input text by deleting letters (ths instead of this for example). Strange option, but it is there. The others are self describing.
Before the video, here my final statement: Tweets is a well thought twitter client with smaller points which aren´t perfect but could be in no time if the developper wants to. The handling and the menu transitions are great, great enough to stand in one line with the “big” ones. I will use Tweets a few more days and then, as it looks now, ban echofon from my iPhoone. The price of $ 2.99 is worth what you get. Definitely Tweets is not just another twitter client but a real alternative to Tweetie and Co.
Today, YouTube released a new version of their mobile App for Symbian and Windows Mobile. It supports, finally, account login and search suggestions. You can download the new version either by pointing your phone browser to m.youtube.com/app or if that fails (it will fail on N97) download directly from this site, after the video. Don´t forget to subscribe to MobilPresse´s YouTube Channel.
Many people are using their mobiles as alarm clocks nowadays, the old fashioned alarm clock is kind of retired. All mobile manufacturers include an alarm clock in their systems but nobody does it really good. Nightstand Weather Clock makes your iPhone alarm clock what it should be like. Many features and options make it a very customizable tool. What are the features an mobile alarm clock should have? And what features make sense even you don´t essentially need them?
As mentioned, the feature list is huge. But that alone doesn´t automatically make a good app. The app must work the way we want it to. That´s what Nightstand Weather Clock does and it does it very well. The menu and options are well structured, the look and behaviour is what you expect from being a menu on the iPhone. Nothing you can do wrong there but a lot you can customize easily. Never wake up again by a alarm tone that causes a heart attack instead of pleasing your ears in that most sad moment of the day. Wake up happily with the tune of your liking and check the weather directly from bed.
The features:
Alarms:
Sleep Timer:
Clock and Weather:
Wallpaper and Display:
No matter if used on the desk in your office or at the side of your bed, Nightstand Weather Clock makes your phone an eye-catcher. Especially the slideshow- and weather-feature makes it worth looking at it. If you use it together with a LayBag you will have a perfect nightstand alarm clock. The price of $ 0,99 is very low compared to what you get there.
Download Nightstand Weather Clock (iTunes Link)
If you remember, when the Nokia N97 was announced, it was told that Skype, the very popular VoIP Service, should be integrated. There was a huge discussion if Service Providers stopped it or not, whatever, that doesn´t really matter. What does matter is, that a Skype Symbian Client was released a few weeks ago – for 3rd Edition. Now, finally, Skype released a client for 5th Edition, finally, N97 users should be able to use Skype with a native client. But guess what, it doesn´t work on N97. At least not with the 21.x firmware. I thought it was the fault of my N97 but after asking on Twitter people told me that they get the same error. The app downloads and installs fine, then, when you fire it up, there are two screens you have to accept (Network connection and stuff) and after that, when the app should start, it just crashes. Ricky from SymbianGuru told me that there is a known issue with 21.x firmware when showing contacts, i can´t confirm that, because i don´t even get to this point.
I really hope, that Skype fixes that. I like clients that are doing ONE job, but do it good. I don´t need Nimbuzz or Fring, which have several services included, if i only want to use Skype. From what you can read around the web, the client does its job quite well, you can use your Skype credits and stuff, so quite a client i would like to use on the N97 which it was promised for…
Did you already try the Skype app on your 5th or 3rd Edition Device? What do you think about it?
To download (free of course) just point your mobile browser to http://www.skype.com/m.
