Learning by Doing » symbian

I signed up for the Ovi Ambassador program.

Mr. Gunn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:50:36 +0000

The main thing it needs is to pull in your existing content/activity, a la profilactic.

Poking my head into the echo chamber again…

Mr. Gunn — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:11:31 +0000

I’m still hearing the iphone talked about like it’s a developers dream, by the same people who talk about it like it’s some revolutionary device, when it’s really just a feature-poor lackluster piece of hardware using yesterday’s technology and today’s billion-dollar marketing budget.

Have you guys heard about this little mobile device OS called Symbian? You know, the one that doesn’t require its apps to be blessed by the device manufacturer and whose apps can be distributed for free, and using whatever distribution channel the developers like? The one which has already had tons of commercially successful applications?

You know, sometimes I just can’t shovel fast enough.

Slick is a good IM app for Symbian S60v3 devices

Mr. Gunn — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:36:10 +0000

It’s free and runs great on my N75, uses little data and is only 721K. It supports ICQ, Jabber, AIM, MSN, Yahoo and GTalk. I can confirm that the ICQ, Jabber, and GTalk protocols work. The ICQ protocol is difficult to test yourself, because it only lets you be logged in one place, so you can’t send a message from your desktop client to your phone, but it retrieved my contacts fine and showed who was online properly, so I assume that works too. Another nice thing about it is that it uses a small font, so the threaded message view is actually useful.

Slick is simple, fast, and functional. Eqo take note.

If you’d like VOIP functionality also, you can try Gizmo5, but I haven’t used it and the other two I tried, Eqo and Fring, were failures. Fring might be fine if all you’re doing is VOIP and using Slick for IM, but will probably run your battery down even faster.