2nd Edition S60 apps that I miss in 3rd edition

There are two S60 applications that immediately come to mind. But why haven’t they been ported to 3rd edition?

The first was a simple 79kb file called “Power Dictaphone”.

There were so many good voice recorders for my 7610 but why did I prefer this one?

• Unlimited recording. Only recently has 3rd edition S60 phones been able to record past 1 minute. e.g. My N93 still has this hindrance. No chance at recording lectures.
• Recording in .WAV. The AMR files most Nokia phones still record in sounds horrible. It’s like a really, really bad phone call. It took up quite a bit of memory back in my 7610 days. 512mb card helped.
• 3 pencil button press activation. Now, although the new voice recorder in the N95 covers both of the above, what’s most annoying still is that I have go through menu after menu or even short cuts and still I have to navigate down to the record button. Pwr dictaphone could record just simply by pressing the edit pencil button 3 times.  You could, if I recall correctly, set any key to start recording. Extremely convenient.
• RAM friendly: My 7610 only ever had about 8mb free ram at best. It was convenient that Power Dictaphone only took under 100kb to work. Current solutios to Power Dictaphone take at least a couple of MB.
• Automatic start up:  My Only alternative to Power Dictaphone at the moment is Alon MP3 dictaphone (that made the port over to 3rd edition).My main problem with it is that if I need to restart the phone, I forget to have this running in the background so when the opportunity comes and I have to wait to start it up.

Second: Nokia Album.

Relatively large, freeware application from Nokia.  When this application was available, most cameras didn’t even have 1mp. This meant that thousands of images could be stored on what’s a relatively small 512mb card.

It was fairly common not to be transferring pictures to the computer so often and leaving them on the phone. The only problem was that the standard gallery was soo slow. How on earth could you go through that many pictures?

Solution? Nokia Album. This automatically organised your pictures into:

• Month/Day grouping. If you remember a particular day, just go to that date and every picture you took will be in that particular album.

• Location based grouping: If you travel, your camera will take a stamp of what country you’re in and it will save your picture to that particular country.

• Your own set category:  Much like the album that the 3rd edition has now. Make a folder, stick the pictures in.

It also had plenty of other great features:

•  Super fast zooming/scrolling. Album worked by indexing all the your photos. They don’t show up immediately if you transferred pics from a computer but once they appear zooming and then scrolling was really fast. Not something to shout about now, but back then, dealing with large images, you could bake bread by the time the 7610 finished scrolling to the left.
• Multi criteria search. I haven’t used the app in a while, but I remember it was really easy to find what pictures/videos I was looking for by setting what media type I want to look for, date within it was created and possible file names.
• I feel there was a lot more to it, but I don’t remember what else it did right now.

With huge file sizes on multi mega pixel cameras and mb hungry VGA videos, it’s more of a necessity now to transfer pictures over to the computer. However, with larger memory cards (2GB+) it becomes a little more feasible to carry 500+ full size 5MP pics at a time and it would be great to have a media organiser better than the current Nokia Gallery.

Are there any applications you enjoyed but never made the port over to 3rd Edition S60?

Category: 3rd edition, Applications, Nokia, S60, Symbian