The Nokia Guide

I AM RICH iPhone app available for the Nokia N800/N810

By now most of you are aware of the $999 dollar “I AM RICH” app for the iPhone, if not, it’s basically a $999 application that displays a red gem (supposedly a Ruby) with a "secret" text saying: “I am rich I deserv it I am good, healthy and successful” Now you can have the N800/N810’s version of the app and add some serious bling to the Internet Tablet. Interestingly called “I AM FREE,” you can get the app for the unique price of only $0. However It does lack the secret mantra or the I AM RICH app’s startup animation, but hey considering the $999 price difference between the two apps I’d say it’s a steal! Get your I AM FREE app here.

Below, a look at the original IAM RICH app.

Join Maps with Photography: Urbanista Diaries for all!

Remember The Urbanista Diaries? Basically a blogger global relay race where one blogger is dropped off somewhere in the world where he or she encounters challenges along the way. The bloggers than had to use the N82 + Sports Tracker combo to document and share the experience as well as using it as a tool to find his or her way to the next blogger who will continue the journey. A few key parts to the Urbanista Diaries has been the N82 + Sports Tracker which helped to pin-point your location using the N82’s built-in GPS and Sports Tracker that recorded all of this in real-time and later uploads it to the web. We can’t forget about the full-size map on the Urbanista site and of course the Urbanista Widget, which displayed your route and pictures on an interactive map. Personally I found the widget handy s you could easily place it on your site or blog and your readers keep track of your location.

Nokia has now released this widget to all, allowing you to customize the look and place it not only on your site or blog, but also on your profile in various social media sites. But the biggest change however is that this time you don’t follow The Urbanist Dairists, but anyone with a Sports Tracker account. You can choose among 20 different colors and even give the widget a name. You are asked to enter the Sports Tracker username you’d like to follow and currently you can choose between Facebook or Blogger widgets. But where is the Wordpress, Typepad and MySpace support? And wouldn’t it be cool if they could create an app specifically for Nseries devices? Or how about a Vista Side Bar Gadget? These are what I think are essential things that they kind of forgot about and I hope they add them fast. The final result can be seen here on the left, with our own customized The Nokia Guide Widget.

Despite the lack of support for Typepad, I used the Blogger app and that worked just fine. Despite these small shortcomings, the addition of having a customizable widget as an add-on to Sports Tracker is excellent idea showing the different evolutionary directions Location-aware application are going. This should be a fun way of keeping track of what friends and family are doing, but also a great way to share your travels or even your daily routine with others. The Widget can be downloaded right here.

New Competitor to ShutUp: FlipSilent

While Samir’s ShutUp was scheduled for release this month, it has yet to make an appearance. But luckily we don’t have to wait any longer as another application with similar “turn-to-silence” functionality has appeared in the form of FlipSilent from the guys over at the Symbian Blog. FlipSilent is a pretty small  app which uses the built-in accelerometer of devices such as the N95, N95 8GB, N82 and N93i. All you need to do is just flip the phone to make it go into the silent profile, hang up the phone call or both. For a pretty small app it’s fairly customizable and features:

1) Flip Over
    - silent profile: make your phone go to the silent profile
    - Hang up Call: Hang up the call when a call is coming in
    - Both: Do both mentioned above  — DEFAULT
2) Flip Back:
    - previous profile: use the profile you used before — DEFAULT
    - Silent profile: remain in the silent profile
    - Standard profile: use the standard profile
3) Auto Start
    - No: start without the phone boot
    - Yes: Start with the phone boot with the configuration interface
    - YES & Hide: Start with phone boot, and goes into background

I’ve been testing the app for a few hours now and it’s pretty impressive and simple in operation. It’s truly one of those things to impress friends and family. One thing I miss though is the ability to set the sensitivity. It would also be nice if the developers could allow you to use other actions other than “flipping”. Maybe shaking or doing a half-circles to achieve other task. For more informance head on to the Symbian blog.

Back to the past: Nokia 5500 apps can be used on N95 and N82

Remember the sporty Nokia 5500? Remember it also had an accelerometer? That sounds very familiar, very much like a certain dual slider and its twin in candybar shape that we know. I revisited the Nokia 5500 page and I didn’t really think about, but the much talked accelerometer,debuted a long time ago in the 5500. This means that all N95 and N82 accelerometer should work on the 5500 and the other way around. So this means that the Nokia 5500’s Groove Labyrinth works just fine on the latest devices. I installed it on the N95 8GB it works ok but uses only half of the screen, oh well. Sticking with the accelerometer based labyrinth-type games theme, Teo over at Symbian Freak has uncovered another one of these games that uses the built-in accelerometer. It seems this accelerometer thing is really getting popular and it doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon.  If you come across any app or game that uses the built-in accelerometer, let  me know.

Finally a way to take picture with no sound and no flash: cCam!

The guys o
ver at the Symbian-freak have found a neat little program that many were looking for. The current situation is that only the EURO based S60 phones can mute the shutter sound, even so it still fires the flash. cCam (pronounced "see-cam") comes just in time, it’s a camera capture program that features no shutter sound and no flash light and also saves images to the default memory card image directory. cCam is completely free and can be downloaded here. Do remember that in some countries taking pictures without somebody knowing might be illegal.

Mobile Weather for S60: the ultimate weather app?

Our friends at Allaboutsymbian have posted a good list of weather forcaster apps and services for S60 3rd edition. But they seem to have forgotten what to me is one of the best weather apps for S60 3rd edition and the only one I have installed on my N95. It’s called Mobile Weather for S60 Smartphones and is a native S60 application and so far works great. It shows you a detailed view with information about the current weather of a location. This view contains the current temperature and weather condition, the wind direction and speed and the time and date of the last update. Only downside is that the XML API used for Mobile Weather provides a forecast for the current today and the next day only. It can however create a list of locations you like to know the current weather for. All locations in the list can be updated together. The overview list shows the current weather of all locations in the list. It also has native support for devices like N93 and N95 that can switch from landscape to portrait and is easily the best free weather app and comes very close and in some cases even beats the ones that aren't free. Mobile Weather for S60 can be downloaded here. What other cool weather apps have you found?

Pidgin a better IM client for the Nokia N800?

In a previous post I talked about two must-have apps for the N800. Well, one of them was GAIM. I’ve been having so many problems with it that I was kind of hoping something new would come. In the past few days I’ve had GAIM close down several times on me indicating some stability issues. Tried re-installing the firmware, nothing. I also have 128MBs of RAM installed on the N800 so it couldn’t be a RAM problem. But thanks to Thoughtfix from the TabletBlog I found about Pidgin, a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client for the N800. It supports AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC,SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo! and Zephyr. It seems that it’s from the same guys behind, so the interface is kinda similar. I especially like the fact that the SEND button is large, perfect when I’m not using the stylus. Only thing is that the enter key does not work in when the keyboard is enlarged. All in all it works great and it didn’t crash yet. Instructions to install Pdigin can be found here. Let me know what you think of it.

A great alternative to Nokia Sensor: MobiLuck

A while back I was wondering what happened to Nokia Sensor. While we wait for Nokia to port Nokia Sensor to 3rd edition, Mobile Diva Darla Mack seems to have found a great, albeit not a free alternative: MobiLuck. The idea behind it similar Nokia Sensor, basically it’s bluetooth socializing application.
You can:

-Detect all nearby Bluetooth devices. Your cell phone rings or vibrates when it finds one.
-Send messages and photos for free to friends or strangers with no need of their phone numbers.
-Hear when you receive a Bluetooth message and reply to the sender!
-Send your profile and receive profiles from other MobiLuckers including their photo.
-Send MobiLuck to other people so you'll meet more and more MobiLuckers.

More info can be found on the Mobiluck website
I would also like to take the opportunity to tag Dan from the Dan Mobile Blog.

Must haves for the N800: Mozilla and YouTube!

Right after the recent firmware goodness for the N800 there are more exciting updates! This time more news comes in the form of two new applications. Let’s start with the first one. While the latest update adds Flash 9 and has increased flash performance especially for YouTube, you still can’t watch them full screen or save them for later viewing. Konttori, owner of the Thoughts blog has made is own solution called UKTube. UKTube allows you to view smooth full screen YouTube videos on your N800.
What do you need? 1) Python 2) Mplayer and lastly UKMedia Player and UKTube. Just remember to install Python first, followed by Mplayer and then UKMedia Player and UKTube.
The second must have app for the N800 is Mozilla-based Browser(developer version) for the Nokia N800. It features:
1. Mozilla Engine - provides support for the latest web standards and is flexible and extensible, and is based on mozilla.org’s current Gecko layout engine which will be version 1.9 when it is released with Firefox 3.0
2. AJAX Support - allows rendering of modern sites that use AJAX (e.g. Google Maps, Google Docs, Meebo, etc.)
3. RSS Previews - takes advantage of native support for XML to render RSS feeds
4. Add-ons - support for a number of Firefox and Mozilla add-ons allows you to enhance and personalize your browsing experience
5. Certificate Details - view certificate details for secure connections by pressing the lock button

Now I tried it and just be aware that it completely replaces the current browser. I will have look into how this can be changed. In the mean time you can get the Mozilla browser here. (Use your N800's browser to get it) There’s also an official webpage for the Mozilla browser that worth having look at, head on over to the official Mozilla browser page.

New Windows Live Messenger client for S60 3rd edition!

Remember the MiMM Windows Live Messenger? Many S60 users were asking for a good Live Messenger client and at the time the MiMM Windows Live Messenger was perfect: clean and simple interface that looked and acted a lot like the PC version. I was disappointed though when I found out that it only worked for a few months, even when you would try to pay and register it would not work. Apparently it was developed by MMIM Technologies, a Chinese IM provider and was only intended for the Asian market.
So today I was surprised to see another Live Messenger client popping up on several blogs and forums. This time it’s an official version of Microsoft Windows Live client (v1.0.614) for Symbian S60 3rd edition phones and integrates Windows Live Hotmail, Live Contacts, Live Search, Live Spaces and Live Messenger with your S60 v3 mobile device. Some of the features of Windows Live Client include:
-Synchronize Hotmail/MSN email and contacts with your mobile phone,
-Add a personal display message like the PC version of WLM,
-Send and receive files images, sound clips and voice clips
-Play voice clips sent by others
-Phone vibration when someone sends a buzz/nudge
-Sort contacts by online status/display name.

Tried it and works extremely well, especially like the fact that I can finally access my hotmail as it automatically creates a Hotmail email account in Messaging and synchronizes it with your hotmail inbox.
If don’t have it yet there are two ways to get it. For the PC here, or get it on your mobile, enter this Web address on your phone: http://file2mobile.com/get You will be asked for a key. Enter this key: 853651

What new features did you like? Also is this just a trial version like the MIMM Live Messenger client?