S603rd Edition Freeware

Nokia energy profiler can be used to see how much energy that is currently being used by the phone. This application is actually meant for developers to test their application’s power usage, but it can be useful for everybody.

When I am deciding whether to use an application that runs invisible in the background, I will test the power usage of the application. If the applications takes too much power, then I will usually decide not to use the application.

When this application runs, it will plot the graph of current power usage of entire system, it can not show power usage for an application. To test an individual application, you will need to close other applications. To see how much an application use, just see the increase from the average when you are not running any applications, and when you are running an application.

You can download this application from Forum Nokia

Sometimes Nokia doesn’t do "the right thing" immediately. For instance the ability to tag a picture with the current GPS Location is not yet available. If the ability to tag a picture with the GPS position is available you can upload your pictures to a photo sharing service, and it will display the location where you take the pictures in the map.

The Nokia already have Camera, GPS Data, and Map application, but it can not (yet) tag a picture with current GPS location.  To patch this deficiency, they have developed Location Tagger. When Location Tagger is running, it will try to acquire your location using GPS, and it will monitor the camera application to tag any pictures that you take.

If you are using flickr, don’t forget to activate this feature in this URL: http://flickr.com/account/geo/exif/

You can see an example picture that I took from my apartment tagged with Location Tagger: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yohanes/2481793711/

I like listening to audio books using my iPod, because it can remember the last played position of a file, and I can easily seek to chapters and locations using the scroll wheel. Using built in media player in Nokia phones to listen to audio books is definitely not fun.

Fortunately Nokia have built a tool to listen to audiobooks. It uses AMR-WB format which will compress speech audio files to a very small size. You will need a converter tool (also provided by Nokia) to convert your audio book to the format accepted by Nokia Audiobooks.

The navigation function for reading audio books is much better compared to the built in audio book, and you can use bookmarks to mark a position in the book.

You can download some free audio books from LibriVox.

You can download this application from Nokia Beta Labs.

You might ask why would you want a radio application when you already have a built in FM Radio in your Nokia. The answer is simple: you can listen to radio stations in other countries via Internet and you don’t need a wired headset to listen to the radio (the FM Radio can not be used with bluetooth headset only). The Nokia Internet Radio is not the same thing as S60 Internet Radio (which doesn’t work very well for me).

You can browse radio stations by country and by language, and you can also search or add stations manually. By default if you are using Wifi or 3G connection, high quality stream is preferred, but you can lower the quality through the settings to access radio stations where the servers are in far away countries.

As you may have guessed, this application requires large amount of data to be transferred while you are listening to the radio. If you don’t use free wifi and doesn’t have unlimited data plan, you shouldn’t try this program. Also remember that sometimes your unlimited data plan only works in home network, and may not be applicable to another country that you are visiting.

You can download this application from http://europe.nokia.com/A4668051

Nokia PC Suite can backup/archive your SMS messages to PC, but it’s a Windows only application. I am using Linux, and my wife is using Mac OS X, so we need an application to archive our SMS. There are some commercial applications (such as SMS Diary or MessageStorer), but I don’t want to buy that kind of application. As a developer, I have many Symbian Series (Series 60 2nd edition, Series 60 3rd edition, Series 80, UIQ 2, and UIQ 3 device) buying $10 application for each of my device will cost me $50.

I also found a freeware called SMSExport (which is produced by http://m-internet.com) from some Russian site. The software is no longer listed in the official website mentioned in the about page of the application, so I don’t know the latest status (whether it is still free, and will it be supported in the future). SMSExport can only export SMS to many individual text files.

So after thinking about it, I decided to write my own program to export my SMS and release it as a freeware. I called this application MsgExport. For now this application can only export SMS (not yet MMS). It can export to HTML (UTF-8 Encoding, so it should support any characters), and Text. When exporting, it will create 2 files, one is ordered by contact name, and the other is ordered by date. If you have memory card in your phone, it will export to E:\SMSLOG, and if not, it will create the file in C:\DATA\SMSLOG\. The filename contains current date and time. If you cancel the application, it will stop at the point when you press cancel (the messages that are already exported will not be deleted).

In the future, I am planning to port this application to all of my my Symbian phones.

You can download MsgExport here.

Your comment and suggestions are welcome.

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