New improved version of phone book, call recorder and threaded SMS program Youlu

Youlu Address Book is more than an address book. It's also an SMS program, call recorder, and "vibrate on answer" application. A name like "Youlu Contacts" would fit this versatile program much better.

If you trust Youlu's server with your private data it can backup your contacts, messages, and calender to its server. This not only gets your phone book back when your phone gets lost or broken, but it's also useful for synchronising your data between phones. But even without Youlu's online backup there are still plenty of reasons to use this very useful program.

Youlu Adress Book does the things you expect from an address book (make phone calls, edit your contacts, send SMSs). The latest version reads the contacts on your SIM card too, and it lets you edit the pictures associated with your contacts. Youlu lets you tie ringtones to contacts if they're stored in the standard sounds folders on your phone. It doesn't see sound files in other folders, which is great if you want to set a ringtone without having to scroll through the thousands of MP3s that you may have stored in your music folder.

The SMS tab shows your messages as threaded conversations. The latest version of Youlu sees all your messages, even if you move them into custom folders. Even better, Youlu lets you choose whether you want to group conversations by contact or by folder. And unlike some other SMS programs, messages that you send with Youlu appear in the built-in SMS application of your phone too.

Some minor things to fix:

The phone book manager doesn't have all the fields from Symbian's built-in address book. Anniversaries, SIP (VoIP) numbers, and notes are among the missing entries.

The FreeCallSprite-like "vibrate on answer" function didn't work when I tried it.

The call recorder works if you activate it with the central navigation button, but the "record with camera button" option made Youlu crash on my phone.

Hitting the red hangup button sends the program to the background instead of closing it, and when Youlu runs in the background it won't show up in the task manager when you long-press the menu key. Exiting the program still requires a trip to the menu in the settings tab. Maybe a future version of Youlu can let us configure the behaviour of the red button and make the program appear the task manager when sent to the background?

If Youlu fixes the few remaining issues it will be very tempting to ditch my phone's built-in phone book and SMS client and use Youlu instead. Especially if it gets an offline backup function to store contacts, messages, and calender entries in a file on my own memory card and computer instead of on Youlu's server.

• Youlu UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.

Last time I checked, the official site still offered version 1.0.1 of the program. But version 1.0.2 (which is much better) is available on Ziddu:

• Youlu 1.0.2 (english version) on Ziddu UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.

FreeCaller for full screen pictures on incoming calls

When you receive a call on your Nokia, Symbian S60v3 displays a tiny little picture of the caller on your screen. For a full screen caller picture you needed separate programs like SkyeCaller or Best Full Screen Caller, and you had to pay for them.

You still need a separate program, but you no longer need to pay. FreeCaller puts a full screen picture on your phone for free. FreeCaller is still new and awaiting further development, but it gets the basics right.

You need to sign it at Open Signed Online or with your own certificate, or you can hack your phone and install FreeCaller without signing.

• FreeCaller at SourceForge

Resource Cleanup, X-SMS, fix for empty contact list in PC Suite

Resource Cleanup

The resource folders of your phone (c:\resource\apps, e:\resource\apps) are full of files with names like x.r01, y.r02, z.r03, etcetera. These files contain the same stuff in different languages, and together they waste many megabytes. Not much of a problem on your memory card, but in your phone's internal memory every megabyte counts. To free up some space you can delete the files for languages you never use. For example, if you only use english, you'd keep all the *.r01 files and throw away the rest. For american english you keep *.r10. For swahili you keep the *.r84 files.

You can do the same thing with all the different language versions of the help files: *.h01, *.h02, etcetera from c:\resource\help and e:\resource\help.

And you can use a Python script to do it all for you. This script removes useless resource files from your phone's internal memory, your memory card, or both. It makes a backup for you if you want, so you can easily restore the files if you accidentally remove to much.

Resource Cleanup requires that you hack your phone to set Symbian free.

• Resource Cleanup for Python


X-SMS

X-SMS exports the messages from your phone to a text or html file, so you can save them on your computer in a format that any text editor or web browser can read.

Unfortunately X-SMS works one way only. It can save your messages, but it won't restore them back to your phone.

• X-SMS by Siraj on Mobile Castle


Nokia PC Suite empty contact list fix

If you back up your phone with Nokia PC Suite, it puts everything in a file with an .nbu extension which only PC Suite can read.

Sometimes things go wrong, and your comtact list backup stays empty.

And sometimes you may want to extract the contacts as vcard files to import them into another phone or share them with others.

Enter Nokia PC Suite empty contact list fix. You upload your .nbu backup file to this site, and it extracts your contacts and saves them as vcards, which you can download to your computer.

• Nokia PC Suite empty contact list fix

Shorcuts to SIM contacts (for feature pack 1 and older) and themes (for feature pack 2 and newer)

SIM directory

Nokia phones with Symbian S60 3rd ed. feature pack 2 can display contacts from your phone memory and your SIM card at the same time, but on phones with feature pack 1 (or without feature pack) you have to dig deep down in the options menu to see your SIM contacts.

Or you can install the Python application SIM directory. This simple piece of code which floats all over the Symbian forums puts an icon on your phone for direct access to your SIM contacts.

• SIM directory for Symbian S60 3rd edition feature pack 1 and pre-feature pack 1
• Python (required to run SIM directory)


Themes Launcher

On newer (feature pack 2) Nokia phones the shortcut to the Themes settings disappeared from the Settings folder. You can still get there the long way (Settings, General, Personalisation, Themes), or can you can bring the Themes shortcut back with the (not very new) program Themes Launcher.

• Themes Launcher (for Symbian S60 3rd edition feature pack 2)

• Themes and themes tools collection


Which feature pack?

Not sure which feature pack your Symbian S60 3rd edition Nokia has?

• All Nokia S60 versions and phones

Auto Call Back: reduce call costs by calling back without picking up

Imagine: you and your girlfriend are on different mobile phone plans. It's very expensive for her to call you, but very cheap for you to call her.

To save costs, she could call you, end the call before you pick up, and wait until you notice the missed call and call her back.

Auto Call Back is a Symbian program that makes this a lot easier. It lets you select a group of numbers that are automatically called back. When one of these numbers calls, Auto Call Back will drop the call before it costs any money, then automatically calls back.

Different tariffs? Expensive fixed line to mobile calls but cheap calls the other way 'round? With Auto Call Back you communicate by the cheapest method.

Auto Call Back needs to be signed through Symbian Signed Online or with your own certificate. Or simply hack your phone and never be bothered by signing issues again.

• Download Auto Call Back from the official site. You'll get a .zip file full of source code and other stuff you don't really need. Somewhere among the files is a .sis file, and this is what you need to install. If your advertisment blocker doesn't allow content from fastclick.net you won't reach the download page.

• Direct link to the Auto Call Back program files from the official site.

• Auto Call Back on DotSIS, with just the .sis installer and none of the unnecessary source code etc.

Contacts Transfer: backup, restore, and transfer all the data of your Symbian phone book

If you have a large collection of names, phone numbers, addresses etcetera in your Symbian phone book, then one day you'll want to make a backup copy of all your contact data to transfer to another phone, or to import everything back into the source phone if the original contacts database gets lost or damaged.

The built-in backup option of the Symbian contacts application exports your contact data as a folder full of .vcf files. PC Suite stores your phone book in a format that only PC Suite can read: sending the backup to a phone to unpack it without a PC won't work.

Worse yet, these backup and restore options have the ugly habit of forgetting things. Either the thumbnail pictures are lost, or the backup didn't remember which contact belongs to which caller group, or it forgot your contact's birthdays, or other data is missing.

Fortunately there is a backup, restore, and transfer option that doesn't forget. Contacts Transfer for Symbian S60 from Juha Riihimäki remembers everything. You can send your contact list to another phone by bluetooth or infrared, export your contacts database to a backup file, restore the backup to the same phone, or restore the backup to another Symbian S60 phone. No matter how you backup, export, import, or restore, Contacts Transfer saves and restores all the original data from your phone's contacts database without losing anything, and it's been doing so since 2003.

• Contacts Transfer website