TamsS60 – the Symbian Blog

Apparently, some things never change – for example, the fact that paint will sometimes peel of gadgets. My now ancient Siemens SX1 had a memory card slot lid where the rubber came off, and Palm’s Zire 72 is now legendary for its lack of blue paint.

Anyways, our colleagues at Symbian-Freak.com now report that Nokia’s N76(aka the successor to my Nokia N71) has a similar problem with the chromed areas loosing the paint and revealing the plastic below. While Nokia’s press team apparently has acknowledged the issues, Symbian-Freak reports that their local service point feels different about the issue(and wants to charge for the fix).

Get images,… here:
http://www.symbian-freak.com/news/007/08/nokia_n76_fails_miserably.htm

How is your Nokia N76 doing so far?

Symbian phones have been able to multitask right from the beginning of the platform…even the now-outdated Siemens SX1 was capable of running multiple programs concurrently with ease. Pushing the menu button for a second brings up a list of running apps…and Handy Taskman wants to improve this.

After installing Handy Taskman, the small task list gets replaced by it. As a default, it shows a list of currently open programs and an overview of memory usage. The list’s font is smaller…more programs fit on the screen:

Handy Taskman offers more than just switching and changing applications. The close all option(accessible from the menu) closes all currently open apps with one tap.

The program also offers a list of last-used apps in a tab next to the currently running applications. This tab is very very useful and can save a few clicks:

As an additional gimmick, the product supports a ‘lookup list’ of all applications. This allows you to find applications by typing parts of their name:

Handy Taskman can give detailed memory status information, too:

Last but not least, the program allows exceptions to be defined. Programs declared as exceptions don’t get closed by Close all:

This review looked at version 1.06 of Handy Taskman on a Nokia N71. The program needs about 300k of RAM and cannot be installed onto a memory card.

Overall, Handy Taskman isn’t a tool for everyone…the native Task list works well enough for the average user. However, if you run multiple programs at the same time often; the time saved by Handy Taskman could well justify the 10$ investment!

One of the most useful features of a smartphone is its always-on capability that can be used to quickly determine all kinds of relevant data. Finding out a weather forecast has always been a very important thing for me – a dedicated program like Handy Weather can speed this up significantly…

HandyWeather’s main screen consists of a chart showing the weather forecast for the next 5 days for each of the selected cities(scroll left and right).

Pressing Center once allows you to switch to ‘night graph mode’. In night graph mode, the program shows a graph of forecasts for the 5 upcoming nights:

Today gives a bit of extra info on the weather of the current day:

Tap Current Status to see the ‘current status’ as of the last update:

Adding a city is easy. Handy Weather displays a list of countries; select one of them to see a list of available cities:

Forecasts can be sent to other users via email and SMS – this is a really outstanding feature I use very often to inform comrades about the weather:

Handy Weather can be customized widely via the ‘Preferences’ menu. It can e.g. be set up to work in celsius or fahrenheit scale:

The program can automatically update itself in predefined intervals, too:

This review looked at version 4.01 of the program on a Nokia N71. The program has worked reliably in the review period – no crashes,…

Overall; Handy Weather does exactly what it should – give a ‘basic’ weather forecast. The program does not give the fancy information given by programs for other platforms; but it gives you all important data you need… The price of 14.95$ is justified!