Top 30 freeware for Symbian smartphones

Kicking off 2012 in a positive way, and heavily updated from the original feature, I've compiled a latest 'top 30 freeware' for all Symbian^3 smartphones. Excluding games, which tend to be a very personal taste. Hopefully this article is a great reference to point new Symbian users to, with everything from small utilities to major applications. And free, free, free.... Right, on with the roll call!

Originally commercial software, with a small amount of channels thrown in for free, this is now freeware, pursuant to this agreement new management, and so then worth grabbing. About a hundred channels of live TV, of international flavour, all available on demand on your phone? Sounds too good to be true? Not in effect - and quality's taking everything into consideration acceptable too. The channels can be somewhat niche, but at the time that adds a certain charm too - especially at this price point!

Straightway-generation Facebook client

'facinate' is a straightway-generation Facebook client and this has to be the easiest way to access the social network on your phone, far smoother and faster than Nokia's built-in Social client. With kinetic scolling everywhere, with media sharing and friend photo browsing, with homescreen notifications and with side-swipe views throughout, this is a must. It's freeware nevertheless does have some banner ads inserted here and there.

Also from Nokia Beta Labs, this takes advantage of the characteristics of OLED screens to provide animated screen saver functions for Symbian^3 phones even when the screen is 'off'. Clever stuff, and the graphic displays in this low power mode are fairly creative. And - show me another manufacturer being as innovative with OLED!

Amazing facility to be able to pluck music

Internet Radio is for all that an amazing facility to be able to pluck music and spokwn word content out of the 'air' on any phone, subject to your available bandwidth. Nokia's system has a good content directory and a nice system of favourites. This is as well ad-supported to a very subtle degree, with ads pointing back to the Nokia Store.

Made in the image of Opera Mini - or like as not it was the other way around! - Opera Mobile is more traditional as a web browser, in that it interprets web site HTML and scripting in the client itself, however with the added benefits over Nokia's Web of text selection and an up-front multi-tabbed interface. And, with a nod to Opera Mini's compression innovation, Opera Mobile has 'Turbo' mode, in which Opera's servers compress some of the original site code and content, squirting it through the air for decompression within Opera Mobile itself.

The Internet Radio theme

Continuing the Internet Radio theme, TuneWiki offers a lyric-based guide to your music collection and is able to play back Shoutcast Internet radio stations, giving you unlimited streaming content. Performance isn't quite as good in accordance with Symbian^3 as Nokia Internet Radio - it plays with high enough quality when in the foreground nevertheless it's fair to say that if you switch away and start loading up the processor at that time the music will stutter a little. Nevertheless - you get a lot of app for free, with only unobtrusive banner ads here and there.

DropBox is a staple of modern online life for many of us, as a quick way to back up and share content between devices and users. And cuteBox is a quick and smooth client for the service for your Symbian smartphone. Sensibly, it doesn't try and sync everything down all the time, it just gives you access and lets you upload new content.

If you've even the slightest interest in the inner workings of your Symbian smartphone, one of the first things you'll seek out will be a way of monitoring how much RAM is currently in use - yes, the OS manages RAM for you, nevertheless when it's running low it will for the time being give you a clue about why something's not working, or why something else keeps getting terminated. RamInfo puts the stat you need up front on your phone's homescreen. Simple, attractive and free.

Starting life as a 'fill-in' utility for functionality missing from other applications, this has developed into a full Facebook/Twitter/Linked-in/FourSquare client, with extras aplenty, including limited contact and calendar syncing. The homescreen is unashamedly people-centric, the interface is smooth and in many ways rivals the commercial Gravity client. A great choice for anyone who considers themselves a social networking power user.

Wealth of competitors

Despite a wealth of competitors and a somewhat murky past, Skype remains the service most people think of in the professional world when they look for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), instant messaging and group conferencing. And its latest version works a treat on the latest Symbian^3 phones, with a better interface than ever, better behaved background operation, lower resource requirements and better voice quality.

Shazam is a music recognition utility, with the free version limited to five attempts a month. It works by taking a ten second sample of music and creates an audio fingerprint based on the audio data's spectrogram. This fingerprint is at the time sent to Shazam's central network across your phone's data connection and at Shazam's end the fingerprint is compared with their massive database of pre-computed audio fingerprints. With surprising success, plus there are extra hooks into YouTube and the Ovi Store, if you fancy trying your luck furthermore afield than a simple identification.

PocketLock is a small utility that locks your phone when inside your pocket or bag, and unlocks it when taken out. It runs in the background and auto-starts with your phone - in theory, it means never having to tug on your keylock button ever again and many people are finding this indispensable!

Simple tap on your homescreen

From a simple tap on your homescreen, Vlingo gives you voice recognition and control, from sending emails to web searches to updating your Facebook status. The format of your voice instructions does need a little learning, however there's for all that plenty you can do and fairly smoothly, as long as you have sufficient data bandwidth for sending the voice sample off to Vlingo's servers.

These two fierce rival free VoIP and chat customers deserve a mention here, although neither have as a matter of fact received any kind of official manufacturer bundling endorsements and in this way have remained without any mainstream awareness. Unlike Skype, the biggest player in this field, which withdrew access to its IM services from third party customers last year, in other words unfortunately. So we've ended up in a divided VoIP world where there's Skype, Nimbuzz, Fring and many others, including Apple's Facetime.

Still Fring supports Yahoo!, Windows Live/MSN, AIM, ICQ, GoogleTalk, plus it has video call support, during Nimbuzz does much of the same nevertheless adds Facebook, MySpace and Hyve, so there's plenty of inter-service instant messaging for those on a quest.

Again, I'd like to emphasise that ALL the above are free to download and use. So if you don't fancy trawling the online stores for the best freeware at that time just bookmark this page and use it as your quick reference when getting a new phone up to speed!