Symbian steals my money

Symbian may have gone open source, but it is a commercial operating system for commercial phones from commercial companies who use it to make as much money as possible. That's why Symbian Signed protects the interests of Big Business at the expense of the small independent programmers who have to pay to get their programs signed even if they want to give them away for free.

Symbian being commercial is no problem as long as you can choose to pay for it if you want instead of being forced to hand over your money. If you prefer the products of the competition, you shouldn't have to pay a single penny to Symbian.

But now I have to pay for Symbian whether I use it or not. Because the makers of Symbian held out their greedy hands and pocketed €22000000 of my tax money from the European Union to increase the profits of Nokia.

If the shameless beggars from Symbian would have had balls they'd have refused this tax handout. They wouldn't even have applied for the money to begin with.

What's next? Will this get just as ugly as the Boeing vs. Airbus subsidy war? Are Android and Apple going to grab a cut from the Stimulus Program? Will RIM lobby to get their Blackberries subsidised by the government? Will we have to pay a Windows Mobile Tax because Bill Gates is short on cash? Funding phone operating systems with public money is plain wrong!

Shame on you, $ymbian. I want my money back!

UPDATE: The 22 million is split by the taxpayers and the members of the Symbian Foundation, so we only got scammed for eleven million. And now Symbian has the nerve to defend their actions on their blog and tell us they only stole half. Maybe I should start robbing people on the street and see if I can get away with it if I only take half their cash?

• Symbian bragging about their robbery

Opera Mini goes Symbian and speeds up

Opera Mini is an excellent web browser for Symbian, mainly because of its tabbed browsing and its proxy server that compresses data to reduce data traffic and increase speed.

The bad news: Opera Mini was coded in Java. This made things easier for the developers, because they could make a "one size fits all" installer that works on every phone that supports mobile Java. But this made the program start and run as slow as quicksand, and spit out an endless stream of security warnings and repeated requests for permission to go online.

The good news: we no longer have to suffer the limitations of mobile Java when we use Opera Mini, because now there is a real Symbian version of the program.

The new Opera Mini for Symbian loads much faster than the old Java application. Gone are the security warnings (Do you really want your web browser to go online? Duh!). Also gone are the repeated requests to define an access point because Opera forgot your choice of five seconds ago. Too bad that it can only remember a single access point instead of an access point group, a.k.a. as "destination" in Symbianspeak. But even so, one stored access point is better than nothing.

Scrolling through websites is a lot faster than it used to be, your cursor runs way smoother than back in the Java days, and your phone's predictive text input now works in Opera Mini too.

More good stuff: the hidden settings page of the old Java version also works in the new Symbian version of Opera Mini.

But there's still plenty of room for improvement. For example, the menu could use an overhaul and tabbed browsing could be made a lot easier.

Just about every Symbian program launches a standard cascading menu layout when you hit the left softkey. But Opera Mini has a horizontal menu bar near the top of your screen. This menu bar comes with shortcuts to the home screen, back/forward/reload buttons, an exit key, and a dropdown menu to go to your bookmarks and settings etc. This may work on a computer screen with a mouse, but it gets annoying real quick when you have to use the four-way navigation button on the keypad of a non-touchscreen phone.

Opera Mini 5 comes with tabbed browsing, but changing tabs requires a trip to the menu, because in normal page view the cursor gets stuck just below the tab bar. The cursor should go all the way up to the tab bar. If UC Browser can do it, Opera Mini can do it too. And don't tell me that I can toggle tabs in Opera Mini with a keypad combo; memorizing keyboard shortcuts has been obsolete since the death of WP5.1 and MS-DOS.

If you want to delete your cookies, clear your browsing history, erase stored passwords, or clean up other privacy liabilities you'll have to take a trip to the bowels of the settings menu. Message to Opera: the privacy options of a web browser should be clearly visibly and easy to get into. There's simply no excuse for burying the privacy tools in a hard-to-reach location. Opera Mini runs on mobile phones, remember? Those little pocketable things that are lost and stolen and abused wholesale.

One final bit of nitpicking: when you close Opera Mini it offends you with an annoying "are you sure?" dialog box. There's no way to switch this "feature" off. The red hangup key is no help either, because this only sends Opera Mini to the background. Opera, do you really think my fingers are so fat that I keep hitting the exit button by accident? The exit confirmation screen belongs in a museum, not in the latest version of Opera Mini!

Tailoring Opera Mini for Symbian is a good start. Let's hope that the other issues will be fixed in the second Symbian version.

• Opera Mini
• Opera Mini hidden settings


UPDATE: The day after I wrote this, story Dennis Bournique at WapReview posted this great review of the new Symbian Opera Mini: wapreview.com/blog/?p=8127

Two blogs know more than one, and ten blogs are even better. For a one-stop method to get the best out of 10 Symbian blogs check out this all-in-one feed:

• Ten Symbian blogs collected by Symbian Underground

Music player TTPod updated, still doesn't read embedded lyrics

Symbian music player TTPod plays mp3, ogg, aac, mp4, m4a, wma, mid, and amr files. It has a sleep timer and an alarm clock with custom snooze time. There's a mini player for your active standby screen, but you can't control TTPod from the active standby screen like you can control your phone's built-in music player. TTPod shows album art. It can display lyrics too, but only from separate lyrics files. It won't show lyrics embedded inside an mp3 file.

TTPod can sort your music by file name and by mp3 tags, and can edit tags too. It can also browse songs in folders, which many versions of the default player won't do unless you use a workaround.

TTPod is frequently updated and is probably the best free music player for Symbian, with more functions than commercial programs like PowerMP3.

TTPod is made in China. The official website is in chinese, and so is the program itself. Fortunately there are many unofficial english translations available.

UPDATE: Symbian is dead, and so are most sites that host Symbian apps. The links below no longer work

• TTPod (official site, chinese)
• TTPod v3.80 Beta (english version) at Mobile Castle

New english translation of UC Browser test version

UC Browser (the former UCWEB) is a Symbian web browser on par with Opera Mini. UC Browser offers tabbed browsing, a choice between a direct web connection and a proxy to reduce data traffic (which may help reduce data roaming charges), download manager, content folding against horizontal scrolling, page segmentation for faster access to big web pages, and many more useful options.

UC Browser is updated often. The test versions are released in chinese, but unofficial english translations always appear rapidly. Check the links below for the latest test version of UC Browser 7.4.

• UC Browser
• UC Browser 7.4 build 10101818 (unofficial english translation) at Mobile Castle UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.