Chat and VoIP: Nimbuzz gets tabs, Talkonaut fixes Samsung bugs

Nimbuzz

Chat and VoIP program Nimbuzz does Skype, standard SIP VoIP, GoogleTalk, Jabber, MSN (Windows Live), Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Twitter, Gadu-Gadu, and chat of social networking sites Facebook, MySpace, orkut, and Hyves.

The user interface of Nimbuzz has changed dramatically. The menu button can take a break, because many of its functions have been taken over by tabs. There's a tab or your contacts, a tab for your chats, a tab for your calls, and a tab for messaging. The settings screen is easier to use as well.

The contacts tab sports a "favourites" option which puts your favourite contacts on top of the list. And if you didn't like the ring and message tones that came with Nimbuzz you can replace them with your own tones now. The phone calls tab shows your Skype account name and your Skype credit, and you can now see which VoIP operator is active without having to dive into the settings menu. SIP calls should face less firewall problems, and they consume less battery power too.

If you always use the same internet connection, Nimbuzz lets you set it as default connection method.

The red hangup button doesn't exit Nimbuzz anymore, but sends it to the background so you won't get disconnected from all your networks by accident. The drawback is that you'll have to enter the menu to shut down the program. If you forget this and keep Nimbuzz running you soon find yourself with an empty battery.

The new user interface is an improvement, but it takes some getting used to. Your phone may refuse to "downgrade" if you try to install an old copy on top of the new version. To force the old Nimbuzz back you need to uninstall the new copy first, which means you'll lose your old settings and you'll have to enter them again.

• Nimbuzz


Talkonaut

VoIP and instant messaging client Talkonaut connects to Jabber (including Google Talk), ICQ, MSN, AIM and Yahoo, and you can call with just about every VoIP service that uses the SIP protocol.

Talkonaut won't use your phone's contacts list, and it won't work with Skype. But Talkonaut lets you store multiple SIP VoIP settings, which its competitors Nimbuzz and fring still have to learn.

VoIP calls on Samsung phones were buggy in older versions of Talkonaut, if they worked at all. The latest version fixes this problem.

• Talkonaut

Email: Nokia Messaging and OnePennyMail updated

Nokia Messaging

In an attempt to make things easy, push email client Nokia Email was renamed to Nokia Messaging (which required Nokia's instant messaging program to live with the name Chat on Ovi, err I mean Contacts on Ovi). But when you install Nokia Messaging, it puts an icon on your phone called (surprise!) "email." Enjoy that simple name while it lasts, because there's a pretty good chance that Nokia's marketing department will find out and rename the email program to something with "Ovi" in it.

The new Nokia Messaging can now read Hotmail all by itself, something that required a trick in older versions of Nokia's email program.

Nokia Messaging can finally display HTML email too, but don't expect it to work well. The page layout is not what the author intended, and some inline images don't display at all.

When I closed Nokia Messaging it left a bunch of processes running that kept my internet connection alive. To make sure you really go offline when you shut down the email client you'll have to enter the options menu and go offline before you shut down the email program.

Nokia asks for your phone number before it lets you download Nokia Messaging. Why can't they simply put a download link online instead of insisting on an on-the-fly install from an SMS?

The push email service is free for the time being, but it may cost money after the beta trial is over, and payment by SMS is definitely an option. Maybe that's why Nokia wants to know my phone number?

• Nokia Messaging


OnePennyMail

The poor man's push email solution OnePennyMail is a minimalist mobile Java email client that doesn't have to cost you a penny. It reads mail from POP and IMAP mail accounts, which includes GMail, GMX, Hotmail, and other popular free email services.

OnePennyMail asks you for your phone number before it lets you download and use the program, but in return you get a yourphonenumber@onep.co.uk mailbox which notifies your phone when you get new mail in the form of a missed call. If you put the OnePennyMail phone number in your contacts list and call it something like "you've got mail," OnePennyMail will work like push email without having to sign up for push email. It's almost as good as the real thing.

There were some annoying "features" in the previous version of OnePennyMail, and none of them is fixed in the current version:
- OnePennyMail won't let you organise your mail in folders.
- It won't let you choose between keeping your mail on the server or deleting it.
- OnePennyMail adds an advertisement for itself to your outgoing mails.
- Scrolling up and down an email takes two button presses per line on my Nokia phones. OnePennyMail won't scroll continuously by keeping the navigation button pressed, and there are no shortcuts for "page up" and "page down." Reading a long mail becomes very unpleasant this way.

Even if you don't want to use the creative push email substitute you'll still need to hand over your phone number, because OnePennyMail won't do anything until you enter a code that you can only get by SMS.

• OnePennyMail

Bolt web browser updated but there's still plenty left to fix

Proxy-based mobile Java web browser Bolt compresses data traffic but keeps the original page layout. Well, sort of. It shows bold and italic text as regular text, and it has problems with web forms and pulldown menus. Predictive text doesn't work either, so entering URLs or other text is harder than it should be.

The latest version of Bolt comes with improved magnification, landscape view, faster scrolling, a more efficient user interface, and a few other improvements (for a full list of changes click here).

Bolt has a pretty good and responsive user interface and its split screen mode is a nice touch, but the main reason for using bolt is to watch video. Unfortunately this is where Bolt fails miserably. Competing video capable browser Skyfire is slow and has many other issues too, but at least Skyfire shows web videos right, which is something that Bolt doesn't do yet.

You need to hand over your email address to download Bolt from the official site, but you can download it directly from Mobile Castle.

• Bolt official website (download requires signup)
• Bolt beta2 (v0.94) at Mobile Castle (download open for all)

DivX Mobile Player 0.92

DivX Mobile Player for Symbian S60 and UIQ is a very simple program. It plays DivX movies, and nothing else. It's not nearly as good as CorePlayer (which plays almost anything you feed it), but DivX Player is free.

The previous version of the program pops up an "application expired" message, so you'll need to download and install the update if you want to keep watching DivX movies on your phone. Nobody knows what's changed in the latest version. Maybe there's nothing new except for the expiration date?

• DivX Player for mobile phones