P1i - Opera Mobile 9.50 - SMS glitch

After the release of Opera Mobile 9.50 beta 2 Fingertouch, I've been using it a lot on my P1i for browsing for hours. I notice a strange behaviour in my P1i when I've browsed the web for long through it. My phone doesn't notify me of any SMS sent to me. Neither with the tone, nor with the icon in status bar. When I restart the phone, the new SMS is displayed. I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't turned my phone off one night before going to bed when I was too tired. In the morning when I booted the phone back I got two SMSes that were sent to me three days ago. lol! I generally didn't use to turn the phone off for weeks. Whenever necessary I used to set it in flight mode. But now I do that every night before going to bed.
Well, a probable reason I guess is that the new Opera Mobile is a RAM hog, and when the RAM goes too low while web browsing, the phone shuts down the SMS client process that listens for SMSes, in order to free up some RAM. Whatever may be the exact reason, it should be fixed by Opera.

Opera Mobile Finfertouch for UIQ3

On 6th of this month Opera released the second beta of Opera Mobile9.50 for us UIQ users!!! Contrary to the popular feeling that UIQ is dead and Opera too will ditch it. The new beta is great! I felt some improvement in stability issues and speed in loading large pages. They also changed the logo. Earlier it looked like the power key!! And the best thing of the new beta is the new Fingertouch technology. According to Opera's official blog:

Today we introduce Opera Fingertouch, a technology designed to make interacting with the Web easier and simpler on touch-based devices. Opera Fingertouch provides visual feedback when you hit a Web link, and assists you when you come across multiple links or other selectable elements in close proximity to one another.

Here's a video released by Opera officially about the new jargon:


I tried capturing the screenshot os fingertouch in action on my P1i but it didn't work. The screen capture apps weren't able to capture the display area of the browser. Only the address bar came. I tried two different apps TOSC(the Open Screen Capture) and CS(Capture Screen), but same result. I'm attaching a screenshot anyways.

YouTube/FLV and Padissimo on P1i

The latest Core Player 1.30 has built in support for streaming youtube videos! And, you can even play FLV videos stored on your memory stick too! Yeah!!! Go get it from imserba forums. For streaming YouTube videos smoothly you need at least 3G or WLAN to be working really fast.

Another cool app has been released by CPS(CellPhoneSoft) for P1i and the like(M600). Ever missed the D-Pad on your P1i? Padissimo fills that void!!! Download and install it from here. Launch it, then just long press 0 to hide the screen d-pad. Now use 2, 4, 6, 8 and 5 keys as d-pad anywhere in menu or web browser. To disable d-pad(especially recommended when you are on opera mini), just long press backspace key.
Enjoy!

Ozone for UIQ3

And finally, what I was waiting for my P1i is out!!! Yes, the bestestestest mobile web browser for the UIQ3 platform is out!! It is called Ozone and can be downloaded from their site http://www.o3mobi.com/
Before Ozone, we the forgotten UIQ users had only 3 native options apart from the java based rocker Opera Mini viz. the built in Opera 8.65, @Web and Opera Mobile 9.5 beta. The 1st one is too crappy and renders pages weirdly. Especially I hate the automatic link highlighting and text highlighting with a contrasting colour on some themes in Opera 8.65. Then came @Web, based on Apple Webkit engine promising big things. But, it fell like a dead monkey. It is pretty medicore at UI, features, user friendliness and more. Then the biggest fuss maker for WM phones, landed to UIQ - Opera Mobile 9.50. But, it sucks at speed and stability. And it is pretty heavy on resources. I remember once while surfing through Opera Mobile I had opened heavy sites on four tabs and it had eaten up the whole 75MB free RAM of my phone. I got a call but could not receive it because of no RAM!!! I had to take out battery to reset. Damn you Opera!!!!
And finally today I read about Ozone on UIQblog.com. Downloaded and installed it right away. The peculiar thing is that it identifies itself as Apple iPhone's user agent. So, I directly opened Orkut on it to experience the iPhone version of Orkut on it. And guess what? It rocks!!! It rules!!! Although P1 has a resolution of 240*320 and iPhone has a hefty VGA screen, but Orkut looked pretty on P1. I had to scroll horizontally, but it was a nice experience. Google guys have designed Orkut for iPhone pretty intuitively and aesthetically appealing and later sprinkled decent user friendliness on it.
Earlier I was jealous of Nokia fanboys having better browser(Safari) on their Symbian 9 series phones. But now Ozone comes to the rescue and it beats Safari as well as Opera Mobile hands down!
My verdict on Ozone: The best mobile browser ever made for Symbian OS.
Plusses: very stable, fast, intuitive, user friendly, fast page rendering, low on resources, free
Cons: Its an alpha version!, seems to fail to load Orkut's desktop version

Current UIQ browser scores out of 100(My opinion)
1. Opera Mini 4.2 - 99
2. Opera Mini Mod 2.06 - 95
3. Opera Mini Official 3.2 - 94
4. Opera Mini Mod 3.x - 93
5. Ozone 0.9 - 87(Native UIQ app)
6. Opera Mobile 9.50 - 81(Native UIQ app)
7. @Web 2.0 - 65(Native UIQ app)
8. Opera Mobile 8.65 - 54(Built in)
9. Tea Shark - less than 40(failed)
10. UCWeb - less than 30(failed)

Please note: This is my opinion based on the browsing experience on my favourite sites on my P1i that I use regularly. It doesn't have any connection with any other individual, company, site, platform, phone. And the opinion can differ user wise. Please don't flame me with comments if your opinion differs. You stay happy with your opinion and me with mine :)

Best UIQ3 Apps(Part-2)

Well, so lets proceed with the second part of Best UIQ apps.

QFlashLight(must have)
This is a torch app. Works best on P1i, this app can turn on both the LEDs at once and the brightest torch app available.

Swiss Manager
This is the Swiss army knife for your UIQ device. It has a nice Task Manager, File manager, System Info page and lots more. Though cool, I don't use it much.

The Open Screen Capture
As the name suggests, it is an open sourcse screenshot program.

LCG X-Plore(must have)
One of the best apps available for any smart phone!! It has virtually everything built inside!!! It is a file manager, video player, music player, zip/rar extractor, doc viewer, hex editor and lots more!! A must have for all UIQ users.

Abakus
Its a cool and handy calculator app for your UIQ phone. Scientific and Engineering modes are there apart from the basic mode.

BestCrypto
This app can be used to protect your private pics, sounds and everything by encrypting and password protecting them.

DocumentsToGo Word/Slide/Sheet(must have)
These three programs are your replacement for any office suite! Apart from viewing any of your office documents, you can edit them as well. And the latest version even supports the latest docx(Office 2007 format). Its an another must have app.

Foxit Reader
Though new, but its a very good alternative for the built in PDF+. It lets you view PDF files just as they appear in your computer. But the app lacks fullscreen view and some more needed features. Well, they should be available soon, as the developers put more of them inside.

MobileFTPd
This app can turn your UIQ smart phone into an FTP server. So you can access your phone files remotely from any part of the earth.

StickIt
This app can stick your notes to the standby screen so you keep getting reminded of your notes whenever you have a look at your phone.

WorldMate
This one is for travel junkies, those who keep roaming around the world. It can help you plan your travel better.

Torch
Although it can't light the LEDs as bright as QFlashLight, but it is handy when you don't need lots of light. Get it from swmail's site.

With this I end this post. Enjoy your UIQ3 device :)

Best UIQ3 Apps

As you might be knowing, I'm the owner of a Sony Ericsson P1i which runs on UIQ3 which in turn runs on top of Symbian OS 9.1; I am dedicating this blog post to the apps I use on my phone. I am not providing any link here to download the apps, you should give some pain to your fingers and google for the apps.

Oh wait..... Don't get disappointed. You can get all the apps full and cracked at imserba forums thats http://www.imserba.com/forum/. If you've ever used a Nokia S60 phone then you might be knowing about many of these apps. Some apps have been supplied with a direct download page link here. Others can be found from imserba. Ok, so lets start:


Agile Messenger
This is an IM app so you can hook your phone to ICQ, MSN. AOL, Yahoo! and GTalk messengers in one go and simultaneously. Works very good.

Blogger
This app, you can get from the SE's Fun & Download site. This is the same Blogger app's UIQ version which you might have seen on Cyber-shot phones that feature mobile blogging.

Core Player(must have)
This is a killer app for UIQ phones!!! Makes your phone a true multimedia device. It support lots of audio, video and pic formats but I mainly use it for playing videos with extension AVI, MPG, DAT, MPEG, MOV. It supports following filetypes: aac, asf, aif, avc, bmp, flac, amr, awb, h264, jpg, jpeg, m3u, mka, mkv, midi, mid, mp1, mp2, mp3, mpa, mpeg, mpg, mpv, m1v, m4v, mp4, mov, 3gp, m4a, m4b, k3g, mc, mpc, nsv, ogg, ogm, pls, png, spx, tif, tiff, ts, m2ts, avi, divx, gvi, xvid, wv, wma, asx, wmx, wvx, wax, wav, rmp

Fring
This too is an IM app, but supports VoIP calls so you can talk to your gtalk, yahoo friends directly if the phone is hooked to net through WiFi. Download it to your phone from m.fring.com

Google Maps
Google have released finally the native UIQ version of Google Maps with satellite view, traffic info and lots more. Get it from Google Maps site or the UIQ site.

Image Converter
As the name suggests, it can convert any image among various image formats.

LCG Jukebox
For the S60 fans who used it, its available here on UIQ too. But if you didn't know about it then don't use it. The Walkman player is better on P1.

Opera Mini 4.1 & Opera Mobile 9.5(must have)
Both of these are the bestestesttest browsers available for mobile phones. Everyone knows about them. Get the mini from mini.opera.com and the big one from opera.com/products/mobile

Slick
Yet another IM app, but with cool and slick looks. Try it if you're an experimenter.

Digia @Web
A very good browser. It boasts itself as the full finger touch browser and yes thats true!!! You don't need any keypresses for browsing, except for typing URLs and form data. Get it from their site

Yell Radio
A cool internet radio program. Though I don't use it because of my crappy gprs connection.

Tweak Peaks
This app turbocharges your phone to work fast by implementing some POSIX libraries. Also you can change your browser's homepage through it. But, it requires capsSwitch for the latter task. Get it from cellphonesoft.com

Airtel Live TV
Never worked for me after I purchased my P1. Thats because Airtel has shutdown all those channeld. Will run great after 3G starts.

Mobipocket Reader
It enables you to read e-books in PRC format.

CapsSwitch(must have)
This is the hack app for UIQ. It turns off system file protection and much more security restrictions and unlocks access to system folders. Get it from its developer's site http://101swmail010.googlepages.com/uiq3mods

GDesk
A very good app. It replaces that old boring desktop with new great looking designs with icon launchers and menus. Get it from http://gdesk.wetpaint.com/. Their site is weird! It'll take you lots of time to search for the download link. Go search it and know more about it there.

iPhoneLock
A keylock app that works just like the iPhone's keylock. Cool one. But it has some issues if you've turned on the Inactivity Lock in your security settings. Get it from http://iphonelock.kwull.com/download.html



Well, there are lots more apps remaining on my phone that haven't been listed here. I'm now tired of typing, so I'm splitting this venture into two parts. The next set of apps and their functions will be posted when I do the next update of my blog(that should be within 2-3 days).

Hard time for SE

It seems that SE is having a hard time in the market. The sales are decreasing day by day. No doubt SE designs the best phones in the range from Rs.4k onwards but it is now being ruled out of the roost. Nokia as always is dominating due to its craze and people being ignorant that an SE is always better and easier to use than a Nokia. Although Nokia phones are more durable than SE ones but I still prefer an SE because of the ease of use, size and shape. Well, the SE guys have done a great mistake by breaking the relation with UIQ. By the way, SE is loosing in India due to one more reason - the cheap chinese phones which play MP3's as loud as a music system are taking over the market in the range Rs.3k-Rs.10k. Well whatever goes, I'll always be loyal to SE.

Opera Mobile 9.50 beta released for UIQ!

Today on October 20th, 2008 Opera Software after a long wait, have released the first public beta version of its long awaited Web Browser for Symbian OS UIQ3.x platform. Earlier it was available only for Windows Mobile.
According to Opera, following bugs are there:
->The browser sets a new system-wide home-page, which cannot be opened by the embedded Internet browser (Opera 8.65).
->Cursor is not shown when HTML edit fields are partially out of screen.
->No support for landscape screen mode due to a number of system issues with the OpenGL graphical engine.
->Browser plug-ins are disabled by default due to non-existent or incomplete system support for Flash content. They can be enabled by the user for experimental purposes only, via More > Tools > Change settings > Advanced > Allow plug-ins.
->The continuous browser usage experience might be affected by the amount of available phone RAM memory.

As a lucky owner of Sony Ericsson P1i, I got to use their new lil kid. As soon as I came to know about the release I jumped to the Opera Mobile's official download. It was a monstrous 4.14MB!! Yes monstrous because I am using GPRS and it takes an era for downloading 4MB.

I got hold of the browser and was extremely happy to use it. The browser gave me the best experience ever on mobile. I could open the full facebook, and gmail standard view on my phone!!! But alas, due to crappy policies of Orkut its full view isn't available for mobiles. They detect the browser and redirect to the mobile version.

It also comes with the Opera widgets - handy little apps that run in the Opera browser.

So far I'm extremely satisfied with the new app. It changed my perception of web on my phone. The old Opera 8.65 was too crap to be usable. The worst thing that I hated most in it was the automatic link highlighting and mixing up site's CSS with the phone's theme. Digia @Web had come to my rescue but didn't appeal much. And finally Opera 9.5 put an end to my problems and I now can browse the web with ease.

There's an issue with mobile sites on 9.5 though. When you open any XHTML mobile site, it seems to hold the left part of the screen unless you zoom.

For the SE P1i/G700i/G900i/W960i, here is the download link