The Nokia 95 decided to surrender ...
When the old Nokia 95 started to wave the white flag in surrender and demanded to be put out to pasture I started looking at the alternatives. I tried to approach the whole replacement project from a logical, head driven perspective but as everyone knows common sense and personal technology are never going to be bed fellows so logic went right out of the window.
The search for a new phone was limited by my policy of only going on a pay as you go tariff as I hold the belief, maybe mistakenly, that by going with a contract all you are doing is paying over the odds for your replacement phone in 18 months time. Had I been on a contract I would have gone with the Hero on the Android OS; heaven only knows why but it’s that geek thing!
The iPhone was out. I won’t have any truck with a company that acknowledges that it has put a kill switch into the system to delete any apps or maybe even content it didn’t agree with. Jobs went on record in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in the UK and adopted a faux moral high ground by saying it was a responsible thing to do; cohones! It was purely to protect your apps income.
The Blackberry was an option as was a Windows Mobile device (how I miss Pocket Informant) but because I had invested in some apps for the N95 I researched the Symbian sector and eventually opted for the Nokia 5800 touch screen device. Since then Symbian has gone open source so I hope we will see a flood of useful apps.
The list of software I have installed – to date! – includes:
Twitter: Gravity is the best Twitter client I have come across. It was good on the N95 but on the 5800 it shows what a truly slick piece of software it is.
Email: Emoze has been my salvation since the Nokia Messaging service started to have some serious hiccoughs. Read more about this on this blog here.
Google Calendar: I am trying to wean myself off Outlook as a way of syncing calender, contacts etc and came across GoogaSync which works only with the calendar but it is great, no duplicates, it works straight out of the box so to speak.
Phone Calendar: I am a great fan of the software developed by SBSH and am waiting for the touch version of its Calendar product which should be hitting the streets in a beta version in April. I have bought Handy Calendar but it doesn’t have as many of the features of the SBSH offering so come on Roy and Amit, no slacking 
Browser: I have used Opera’s mobile browsers for years and have never been let down. On the 5800 I am using the Opera Mobile rather than the Mini and the experience is excellent. Where’s Firefox Mobile – limited to N900 only.
File Manager: I like the freebie YBrowser from Dr Jukka but the paid for FExplorer Pro from SBSH is well worth paying a tadge under $10 for.
Office Suite: Okay you can call me a cheapskate but over Christmas there was a special offer on QuickOffice Premier so I snapped that up. I just checked and you can still get this for $20 – virtually half price. At the same time I bought the company’s PDF reader which was a waste of time as I cannot meanfully read anything on it. Some you win …
Security: My wife says I’d forget my balls if they weren’t in a sac, so one of the best investments has been SafeWallet, again from SBSH, which syncs a desktop module with one on my phone. Everything from financial data to software registration data is kept here.
What Symbian software do you have on your phone that you can recommend?
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