SajiOS standby screen alternative: good idea, but no match for GDesk yet

SajiOS is an alternative for your Symbian S60 standby screen that makes your phone look like a Windows desktop.

SajiOS gives you twelve standby icons instead of the usual six or seven. But you'll lose the custom actions of the softkeys, and there's no quick access to the calendar, search box, etc. through the active standby items, so the net gain is not that much. SajiOS won't display the usual application icons either, because it can only handle icons and background images in flash format. The built-in icon set is quite limited. For example, there's no suitable icon for the SMS application.

But the main problem is that SajiOS turns your navigation button into a very inefficient mouse, which makes launching the twelve shortcuts very slow. The program would be a lot more efficient if the 4-way navigation button would toggle the highlighted shortcuts in the same way as GDesk and Symbian's own menu.

SajiOS shows an analog and a digital clock on your screen. Both work as shortcuts to the clock app. The calendar image does not launch the calendar application, and the program doesn't offer a way to show the current calendar entries on the standby screen. There's no network signal strength indicator either. The mini music player on the SajiOS desktop didn't respond to the volume buttons of my phone, and crashed when I tried to exit it, which made SajiOS enter an endless shutdown/restart loop. Fortunately KillMe came to the rescue.

SajiOS is a good idea, but in its present state it just changes the looks of your standby screen without improving its functionality. But if future versions get better it may become a lightweight alternative for GDesk.

• SajiOS, a Symbian Active Standby alternative

• GDesk, another Active Standby alternative