You'll remember NeoReader as one of the main QR/barcode scanning utilities on Symbian? Well, it has just had a big update, to v4.6.0, allowing previously photographed codes to be accepted as input and now supporting 'Code39' (1D) barcodes. Screens below, but as NeoReader is free, why not just grab it and try it out yourself?

The quoted changelog for NeoReader v4.6.0 is:

1. Scan barcodes from images stored in gallery
2. Support for Code39 symbology
3. Minor bug fixes

Here's NeoReader in action:

Trying to scan 1D barcodes (previously NeoReader's bête noire) on the Nokia 808 was still a bit tricky because the 808 doesn't like extreme macros without being able to use the PureView zoom, but not to worry because this is a good chance to use the new Gallery feature....

Instead, I took a normal (PureView macro) photo of the barcode, crystal clear, and then used this 'Scan from Gallery' function on the 'More' menu.

Recognition was quick and then it's on to the mobile landing page for this code. Tap on Amazon Search and...

.... you're into the correct product at Amazon. Which is pretty cool even if, on the 808 at least, I had to scan the code in two 'steps'. I'd expect the N8 to fare a lot better, since it can get closer.

The usual caveats about the EDoF camera equipped- devices apply though - getting accurate code scans may be tricky.

As usual NeoReader includes a 'history' function, so that you can look up stuff you've previously scanned. Very handy.

You can download NeoReader for free in the Nokia Store here.

I'm a sucker for space arcade games, having been brought up on the original Space Invaders and Galaxians in the arcades of the early 1980s.... In many ways, Galaxy Invasion combines elements of both these games, though everything's slightly over-large and cartoonish, perhaps as a result of the implementation in QML rather than a lower level programming language. It's addictive and fun though, with the main real world caveat being that it won't work on Belle FP2 phones because of a QML bug. Hey ho, time to break out your C7 or N8, perhaps?

Here's Galaxy Invasion in action:

The screenshots tell you most of what you need to know here - aliens shuffle from side to side and dispense pulsing (and deadly) mines - you have to avoid getting anywhere near these, while simultaneously (auto-)firing at the alien ranks. Note the side to side control panel is beneath the spaceship, sensibly, so that your finger never obscures the action.

At first, single shots into aliens which need multiple hits to dispense means that the war is somewhat heavy going, but powerups start falling, enabling a faster rate of fire (for a while), stronger laser pulses (for a while) and firing three pulses at once (ditto). These really up the ante in terms of the intensity of the game, though you will, as hinted, need to keep catching new powerups, to renew your spaceship's powers. Note the indicators at the top right of the screen , showing which powerups are currently active and how long they have to go before they expire...(Right), one of the typical ads that appear between levels.

This is all with v1.2.5 - note that previous versions of the game hadn't been play tested properly and were far too easy. This version is pitched well, to provide a real challenge. There's a record of your scores, but sadly no online high score comparison table.

Well worth a download if you have a Symbian Belle or Belle Refresh-powered smartphone. You can download the free (ad-supported) Galaxy Invasion here in the Nokia Store.

PS. I'll shout if and when the developers find a workaround for the QML issue that stops this game working properly on Belle FP2 phones like the Nokia 808.

Everybody's favourite Belle FP2 replacement camera application just got itself a significant update, to v3.3.6, adding front camera support on the Nokia 808 and 701, plus a mass of fixes and optimisations, listed below in the changelog.

Here's the changelog for v3.3.6 from the previously reported v3.3.3:

• Added option to keep screensaver active
• Fixed "Set CameraPro as default" option
• Improved translations
• Bug fixes and improvements
• Added one-touch selection option
• Added: image control values are now reset when the text is tapped
• Added more version info to info dialog
• Added support for front camera
• Improved GPS handling
• Fixed presets
• Bug fixes

Here's the new version in action:

Belle FP2 phone owners can update in place in the Nokia Store...

Plenty of new and fixed options in Settings, in terms of how CameraPro Qt plays with the rest of Belle FP2...

The new 'front camera' option, though don't get your hopes up, since the hardware's not up to much and neither is Symbian's API to access it....

Proof that the new option works, at least. Note that the extensive effects and filters aren't available in this mode, either.

You can buy or update CameraPro Qt here in the Nokia Store. A reminder that this version of CameraPro is the one for the 1GHz Belle FP2 generation devices only.

There's also the first draft of a manual for CameraPro Qt 3: http://www.tequnique.com/wb/downloads/Manual_CameraPro_3_latest.pdf, for your interest and perusal.

It's all very well having a Nokia 808 PureView and sitting somewhere with friends, family or colleagues and feeling rather superior in the camera department. But, should the occasion arise, how do you best get over the power of the 808's camera sensor? You can expand photos to show how 'pure' they are, but it's tough to notice anything startling on an nHD display. You could find somewhere darkish and take a snap of someone with the Xenon flash, but that demo can be construed as a bit artificial. Or you could try the demo shown below, which (in my experience) even makes fellow 808 owners' jaws drop.

There are many ways that the 41 megapixel sensor in the Nokia 808 gets used to good advantage, but the most immediately dramatic is the extreme video zoom shown here. In fact, I even referred to it previously as 'binocular' mode, for obvious reasons.

Now, on most smartphones, digital zoom is a complete no-no. I was chatting to an iPhone 5 owner last week and he was demonstrating its camera - he multi-touch zoomed in and then said "Of course, it's all blocky if you do that, so I never use zoom normally". Figuring that this was the moment, I demonstrated the technique below and, predictably, a jaw hit the floor.

Here's what to do, as shown in the video:

1. Start the 808's camera
2. Switch to video capture mode
3. Tap the centre-top button to switch to 'Creative' mode
4. Change the capture resolution to 360p
5. On the screen, with your friend/colleague watching intently, perform the PureView zoom 'swipe' up, and pan the view such that the tiny resulting zoom rectangle is on a detail that's worth zooming into. E.g. a sign, someone's face, an animal or, in the example below, part of a plane.
6. Release your finger and let the software animate into its lossless zoomed view of that detail. Emphasise to the other person that what they're seeing on the screen is truly lossless, i.e. without any pixellation. Their jaw will drop, I promise.

You can then zoom out again and perhaps zoom into a new detail and generally show off the contrast between the field of view in the full scene and the amazing detail in the zoomed view, as I do in the video below (original YouTube URL):

If you do the maths, this works out, on a 41 megapixel sensor, to allow around 12x lossless zoom, which is why I latched onto the binocular analogy above. Of course, at 12x zoom on any handheld optical device, there's significant shake from your hands. Roll on a version of PureView phase 1 with Optical Image Stabilisation, perhaps? Until such a device exists, at the very least, if you wanted to capture video at 360p and 12x zoom, you'd have to stick the 808 on a tripod.

In practice, the traditional 808 defaults make more sense. At 720p capture resolution (the minimum for serious video online these days), you still get 4x lossless zoom and hand-shake isn't as noticeable at this level, while still letting you get close to the action.

Which is all very well, but I'm glad that this 360p, 12x zoom mode exists, simply because it lets me communicate what the Nokia 808 (and PureView) is all about visually and quickly, with no jargon or expertise needed by the other party.

PS. It's worth noting that this lossless digital zoom in video mode is something that was also present on the N86 and N8, the previous Nokia Symbian camera champions, though their smaller sensors didn't allow for such dramatic zoom ratios.

Back in January, I reported on Belle Extra Buttons v1.7.5, itself a big update. It seems that the developer hasn't rested, for we now have v2.1.0, with a changelog as long as your arm, including now up to 28 shortcuts for each of the two expending panels, better formatted pane overlays and a mountain of fixes and tweaks. See the full changes, some screens and links below.

Here's the summarised changelog from v1.7.5 to v2.1:

• Each Expandable Window now extends dynamically to hold up to 28 shortcuts, 56 shortcuts for both.
• You can select the icon style of the Expandable Windows (A / B) when set as a [Tap] for the Toolbar buttons under 'Stylize' category.
• Added more Stylish icons for Preloaded Features when used in the Expandable Windows under 'Stylize' Category.
• Home-Screen & Telephone Dial Pad applications are now available to be assigned to any button via [ Custom(Installed App) ] option.
• Status Pane Buttons 'Exception Apps List' changed to be 'Show Status Pane Buttons at' to add the applications where Status Pane buttons will be accessible.
• Status Pane Buttons by default (and automatically) are not available over 'Camera' application to avoid rendering problems on Belle FP2 devices.
• Status Pane Buttons by default (and automatically) are not available over 'Virtual Keyboard'.
• Fixed: Enable / Disable Status Pane Buttons during call option functionality.
• Fixed: Installed applications exist in the 'Expandable Window (A)' were not available to set to 'Status Pane Buttons' & 'Toolbar Buttons'.      
• Fixed: Music Buttons appears when 'Ended Call' / 'Java game' / 'Java application' information dialog appears.
• Music Control Buttons: Added 'Align Music Buttons' option [ Left - Right ] under 'Music Control Buttons' category (For Right-To-Left languages as Arabic).
• Music Control Buttons: Mute button is not overlapping 'Notifications' word in German / Russian.
• Internal enhancements for a better quicker performance.1) Fully categorized sections related to each feature.
• You can activate/deactivate Status Pane Buttons [Grey - Red - Green - Blue] individually.
• You can assign [ None - Installed Application - Preloaded Feature - Expandable Window ] to [ Tap - Long Tap ] of each Status Pane Button.
• You can assign [ Installed Application - Preloaded Feature - Expandable Window ] to [ Tap - Long Tap ] of each Toolbar Button.
• Music Control Buttons [ Via Drop Down Menu ] - Added Mute / Unmute button.
• The preloaded ‘Restart Phone’ Feature has been enhanced to be very quick.

The developer does note that you should restart your mobile after downloading / installing the new update so that the system reloads the new graphics (in case, for example, Music Player Control Buttons don’t appear correctly).

Here's Belle Extra Buttons 2.1 in action:

Central to Belle Extra Buttons are two expending panels - by default one handles all the system functions and shortcuts, while the other comes with applications, but you can fully customise what goes where....

Also included is an overlay pane for the drop-down notifications pane, with music controls and a 'mute' control, as shown right.

The main Belle Extra buttons control panel, with a mountain of dialogs to fiddle with; (right) at each stage, adding any app is as simple as picking it from the main OS identifier list.

You can buy Belle Extra Buttons for £3 (or update it) here in the Nokia Store. There's also, in theory, a 5-day trial version here, though when I checked this morning, this was still at the old v1.7 base - expect this to get updated shortly too.

Comments welcome if you use this utility. How's it working for you and what do you think of this new version?

Whether you think of dominoes as a) a kids game, b) a pub game, or c) simply a very old game, the fact remains that it's simple to pick up, has surprising strategy elements and, here, is totally free (with no ads) on your Symbian smartphone. What's not to love? Screens and link below.

This is no bare bones game either, with nice graphical touches and smooth touch control and animation. Here's Dominoes in action:

An originally-drawn splash screen with rich colours gets the game off to a good start...

Nice and simple - and no ads, surprisingly. Very welcome in this day and age. The Help screen just lists the basic rules - for people who have played the real thing, there are no complications (like playing doubles sideways) here - probably just as well.

You're automatically in a four way game, just as you might be down the pub. When it's your turn, just drag a suitable domino to a possible end position and the game does the rest, animating it rotating if necessary so that the dots 'match'.

Having the game orchestrate the layout of the dominoes does at least get round the 'don't be silly, you're heading off the table if you go in that direction' awkwardness of the real thing!

If you have no matching dominoes, then the AI automatically suggests you 'pass'. Tap to carry on, etc.

There doesn't seem to be a way to let human players take over any of the other three positions, but then this is a free game - perhaps a multiplayer version might arrive as a paid title?

Dominoes also plays in Arabic, appropriately given the board game's popularity across the Arabic world...

You can grab Dominoes for free here in the Nokia Store for any touchscreen Symbian device.

As with the recent baseline street map updates, Nokia's Symbian users continue to benefit from the work put into increasing mapping resources for the company's wider platform ambitions (e.g. HERE, Windows Phone, Asha). In this case, at some point recently, coverage of far more cities was introduced at the server end, with most major towns around me in the UK now covered for bus and train routes. Screenshot proof below - I'd love comments from others on how well Nokia Public Transport now works in other countries around the world.

Note that, in order to see the new cities and towns around you, the last official release of Nokia Maps Suite will be enough (with Public Transport v2.1), but that in order to see transit timings and most fine detail, you will have to install the Nokia Beta Labs v2.5 release of Nokia Public Transport. So go and do that now.

With that in place, here's what I now see:

In the v2.5 version, there's 'covered cities', showing the degree of granularity in coverage now (the v2.1 release merely had an (out of date) list of random cities that were initially covered). Again, you need to be on v2.5. (Right) coverage for my home town of Reading - woohoo!

Nokia Public Transport's databases on the Nokia servers now include several other local towns (Slough, Harrow) and doutbless coverage is being added on the server all the time. (Right) browsing departures from my local stop - for some obscure reason some of the times are doubled. Does this happen for you?

I doubt Symbian users were top priority for Nokia's maps teams, so being able to inherit this common data is pretty cool - and genuinely useful in the real world. Even if most users out in the wider world beyond AAS won't know about the v2.5 app update and so won't see all the data. Nokia (or Accenture) really needs to push out the new application to all via the Nokia Store or 'Software Update'/Nokia Suite. Anyone able to comment officially on this?

Again, comments welcome from users around the world as to how well (or badly) your own country or region is covered. 

One of Nokia Beta Labs shorter trials, Webview widget was only in the wild for six weeks, yet managed to accrue quite a bit of feedback for the Nokia team, not least in our comment threads. Beta Labs has now said that the Webview widget trial is officially ended and that no more feedback is needed. Intriguingly, the team talks about "plan the next steps" - so presumably, this will make it into future device firmwares, should any such get approved? Let the speculation commence!

Just to refresh your memory, the Webview widget lets you see a predefined 'window' onto live web sites on your Symbian phone's homescreen:

From the Nokia Beta Labs post:

Update March 27, 2013:

The Webview widget team would like to thank all the trial participants for the valuable feedback we got. We are happy that there were so many people trying out the Webview widget, and are delighted by the amount of comments and suggestions we got. It was excellent that we were able to catch and fix few bugs as well.

At this point we have sufficient trial results to plan the next steps and, therefore, are concluding the beta trial.

Thanks again for your time and effort!

Best regards,
The Webview widget team

In the meantime, of course, your downloaded and installed copy of the latest version of Webview widget will continue to work, since it talks directly to the appropriate web sites that you've targeted. [What do you mean, you never got round to downloading it? If only some helpful soul had archived it....]

With Symbian firmly in its twilight years but still very much alive, I'd like to gather a little data, for all our interest, on the generations of Symbian-powered hardware still in active use. It's unlikely that everyone reading this owns a Nokia 808 PureView, but just how far back do you all go? Are there still readers actively using a d-pad driven Nokia N95? Any Nokia E90 users still? See below and add your tuppence worth! [UPDATED]

This is, in fact, the sort of thought that keeps me up at night - I think of some of the classic devices in my Symbian museum and wonder how many of them could still be used productively in 2013. I waxed somewhat lyrical about this recently:

I've often commented, when asked which smartphone fills my needs best, that I could pluck almost any device from my Symbian archive, stick in my SIM and refresh its podcasts/PIM info and I'd be off and running.

Here are some advantages of going 'retro':

• no problems with pocketability
• better feel in the hand when really mobile, less droppable
• (probably) no problems with fragility
• full use with gloves on(!)
• no worries about it getting something really valuable lost or stolen (who'd nick a old Nokia in 2012 - a sad observation...)
• a wider range of form factors, including sliders, candybar T9, candybar QWERTY, touch/T9 hybrid, full clamshell QWERTY, etc. - one form factor very definitely does not fit all!
• The feel of buttons under your fingers - definite, mechanical, satisfying buttons...
• the certainty that you can replace the battery (everything in the Symbian world prior to 2010 had a battery door/cover)
• you already (probably) own the device in question, so you don't have to take out a second mortgage to pay for it...

The disadvantages are just as numerous, of course, from lack of compatibility with many 2012 apps and services to smaller screens and slower processors. But, staying in the 'retro' spirit, just how far could I go back?

My conclusion was that such use of a non-touch, older device was perfectly possible, with only a few caveats, though I did draw a line in sand at the point where Nokia started supplying free voice-guided satnav in firmware - anything before about the N95 and you'd be utterly reliant on Nokia's old Maps licensing servers.

All of this was just my opinion though, which is why I'm/we're after some data points to see if anyone else is still using such an 'older' device in real life. Classics like the E90 and E72, and even the N82, must surely have some active fans, still?

In the absence of a foolproof polling mechanism, plus hoping for some explanatory text and interesting testimony(!), let's keep this low tech.

If you don't currently use a Symbian-powered smartphone as your main device then I'm assuming you're simply here out of interest, in which case please ignore the question below - this poll is for people still on the platform.

Please comment below with your answer to the following question:

Do you still use a button/d-pad driven Symbian-powered smartphone as your main phone? 

[hint: if your smartphone has a touchscreen of any kind then the answer's automatically 'no' - unless it's a Nokia E6, in which case you're a valid edge case and you can answer how you like(!)]

If you've then got an extra few seconds to spare, why not let me know a little more detail, such as which Symbian device you do use right now, and (if it's an interesting choice) then maybe a line explaining why.

The Poll is now closed, in terms of stats, at least!

Depending on how you count, we had around 56 qualifying responses below, of which:

• 31 people still use a non-touch Symbian smartphone as their main phone
• 12 further people still use a non-touch Symbian smartphone as their backup phone
• 22 people use a touchscreen Symbian smartphone as their main phone
• 6 people use the Nokia E6, which sits firmly in both/neither camps(!)

Now, there's obviously bias here, in that those still using older phones will have been drawn much more to this article and driven to vote, but the results (and peoples' comments) still make interesting reading.

Note also that the numbers don't quite add up, due to the complexities of individual situations (work/home phones, multiple backups, and so on). Plus that pesky E6, which resists classification here - watch out for more on the Nokia E6 shortly here on All About Symbian.

It does seem, as I suspected, that the advantages of button-driven phones (and associated advantages, such as long battery life) are still being appreciated amongst All About Symbian readers. One project I was going to tackle was living with a S60 3rd Edition device for a week and wondered which one to use. From the poll results below, we have a top 3 of:

1. E71 - 5 votes
2. E72 - 5 votes
3. E90 - 3 votes

I have each here, but reckon I could live with the E72 best, since it has the most modern Nokia Maps implementation and the best camera. So, roll on a week with the E72 in 2013 - watch this space!

Thanks for everybody's input.

And in the meantime, recognise that there's more to smartphones than large touchscreens - some smart people choose very different plus points when deciding on a phone....

Ah, now this was something that had been bothering me for months. How to photograph the moon? 'The moon?' I hear you ask... on a phone? Yep, this is the Nokia 808 PureView we're talking about and if any phone can photograph the moon unaided then surely this one can. In fact, the biggest problem isn't the moon's size in the sky (though it's small compared to the field of view) but its relative brightness. Happily, the PureView Club has documented a solution. And, yes, I had a go too....!

Over to Marc:

I was getting pretty frustrated by the fact that I never could manage to get a good (not even reasonable) shot from the full moon, and after sharing my frustration on Twitter, I almost directly received a fantastic tip from @Massis_ about which settings to use.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll get a result like this – it could be a lamp post on a foggy night.

Seeing this, you’ll understand why I was disappointed. This evening I got the tip to use these settings:

- Nokia 808 PureView in Creative mode
- choose full resolution in 4:3 for 38MP resolution
- put ISO on 50
- ND and Flash ON
- Exposure on -4 (that’s minus!)
- don’t forget to choose 'infinity'!

This is the crop from the very first result I got from these settings – and I didn’t even use a tripod (but rested my hand on the balcony).

Aha! A great example of lateral thinking, to deliberately snap the moon with flash turned on! The idea here is that the phone reduces the exposure time drastically (down to around 1/100th of a second) because it knows the flash has been fired. Otherwise you get much too much light, as shown at the top. 

The 'infinity' reference is because there's nothing to really focus on (in terms of contrast), so you have to long press on the 808's screen and pick from the various focus modes. This avoids the usual low light 'what the heck do I focus on' issues....

As luck would have it, it was a full moon yesterday here last night, so I braved sub-zero temperatures and had a go myself:

Hmm.... not as clear as Marc's attempt. And I think I know a few things that I might have done wrong:

• The instructions said to use 38MP mode, i.e. the sensor at its native resolution. I tried to second guess this and used the PureView zoom all the way, figuring that this effectively amounted to the same thing, i.e. using sensor pixels 1:1. Maybe involving the PureView processing at all has a detrimental effect?
• In an attempt to reduce hand shake, I was resting the 808 on the edge of a garage roof, but I'd forgotten that the forced Xenon flash would bounce some light off the roof below and back into the sensor. I would have done better to find a flat and hard edge with nothing beneath it, I think.

In addition, having grabbed the shot, I should have checked it immediately, found it was a little dark and fuzzy and gone out to try again. By the time I realised that it wasn't perfect, clouds had crept across the sky....

The forecast isn't bad for night time snapping today and tomorrow though... How about other 808 PureView owners pop out and try the settings above on the moon in the next few days? Post your (cropped) results below and let's see how well the 808 can do!

You have to hand it to NokiMoki - having perfected his 'connect 4' clone for Symbian, he's producing a fair number of differently themed versions. We had Four In A Row Planets only the other day and, with the Easter weekend upon us, we now have a perfectly egg-cellent Easter Egg version of the game. Screenshots below - yes, it's another quid, but if you didn't pick up a previous version (there's also a Valentine edition, for example) then maybe this is the one to get?

Here's Four Easter Eggs in action:

Look familiar? It should. But full credit to the developer for putting effort into presentation and artwork. As before, the only thing to fiddle with is turning off the somewhat basic sound effects.

As before, the Connect 4-style AI is actually quite clever and will give you a challenging game - this is definitely not all eye candy...!

So colourful, so cute, so topical... Place your bets on the next annual celebration that NokiMoki will target?

You can buy Four Easter Eggs for £1 here in the Nokia Store. Or, you know, pick up one of the other themed variants instead?

In All About Symbian Insight number 235, Steve and Rafe spend the first half of the podcast talking about updates (Messaging fix), new betas (upload to SkyDrive for S60 5th Edition), and updates (Nokia Public Transport coverage). In the second half of the podcast we turn our attention to imaging, discussing the Burst Camera app and, building on Steve's recent camera shoot out (special guest appearance by the Nokia N95), talk about the progress in smartphone camera technology.

This podcast was recorded on Thursday 28th March 2013.

In this podcast we cover:

• 'Upload to SkyDrive' brought to S60 5th Edition in beta
    
• Messaging 'critical fix' available for Belle Refresh smartphones
    
• Nokia Public Transport coverage increased across the world
   
  
• Slide To Unlock, currently free and offering N9-style double-tap unlocking  

• Burst Camera provides 'HTC Zoey' function for Symbian
    
• The big shootout: Nokia 808 vs HTC One vs Lumia 920 vs an imposter(!) 

You can listen to earlier episodes of the AAS Insight Podcast in our media section.

I've featured several of Marc's PureView Club retro unboxings before and I make no apologies for another here, since he's got his hands on a virgin, never used Nokia N70, the very first 'multimedia computer', the first Nseries device and a smartphone that I loved back in the day (2005/2006). I do remember the build quality being great, the feel in the hand being superb, the performance being blistering (for its day) and the camera quality surprisingly good. If you want to reminisce too, see the quotes, photos and link below.

From the PureView club post:

About the Nokia N70 – I’m extremely happy I received it from friends in the Netherlands, especially for the Nokia Time Warp Series. Despite its age, it’s in a 100% mint condition – it looks like someone just found it as an unsold and untouched package in the back of a store. So I took the time to make a large amount of shots.

I’m not sure if the N70 was a very popular device in 2005/2006. It’s the first of the Nokia N-series, but I can’t remember seeing many people using it, in fact. It was announced together with two other “multimedia computers”, but I don’t think the N90 and N91 were very succesful either.

Nokia was the undisputed market leader and could afford to experiment. The big success of the N-series came with the Nokia N95 and N95 8GB no doubt, and in fact I’m still looking for all those in a mint condition like this N70… Here are the pictures to show what I mean.

You can read on in the full post.

In answer to Marc, the N70 was very popular, I saw them being used by everyone from geeks to normobs, and plenty of carriers stocked them back in 2005. 

The N90 was a specialist camera-centric device, of course, I had one and found it a little fragile and finnicky, but then if we'd not had the N90 (or indeed the N70) then we wouldn't have had the N93 and, ultimately, the N82, N8 and 808.

The N91, the other Nseries device of its time, was a music-centric device with metal styling and a 'love it or hate it' design. Personally, I hated the weight and fiddly keypad, though I'll admit the audio quality was fabulous.

But it's the N70 which is the star here. Comments welcome, either here or on Marc's page, if you want to chime in with your own remembrances....

With GDC happening this past week in San Francisco, we did spot (via) an item of direct Symbian relevance. V-Play is a new Qt-based cross-platform game engine specialized for mobile (2D) games, with the unique feature that existing QML games can be easily ported to other platforms, including iOS and Android. Some quotes from a V-Play spokesperson below.

From the announcements:

V-Play is a Qt-based cross-platform game engine specialized for mobile 2D games. It helps developers saving time and money in EVERY part of the game development lifecycle:

1. Start from ready-made game templates of most popular game genres
2. Then develop on any desktop OS with the world-class IDE Qt Creator and integrated docs for all of our components
3. Test easily on your mobile iOS & Android devices by just scanning a QR code on V-Play Build Server or deploy locally to Symbian and MeeGo
4. Finally add a customizable level editor into your game which allows your players to create new content,  keep your game alive and grow your user base.

With V-Play, Symbian and MeeGo developers can port their existing QML games to iOS and Android easily to get a bigger reach and new monetization options. Basically we added a convenience layer on top of Qt for mobile devices and specialized for games, which includes handling of different resolutions, native access to text input fields, message boxes, video playback, audio components and more. We also set up a detailed list of benefits on our website for existing Qt developers:http://v-play.net/benefits/#qtdeveloper

Although we are specialized for games on iOS & Android, "normal" apps can be done equally well, especially if you are using a custom GUI (e.g. custom buttons with a unique style of the app not using the native-looking buttons for each OS), where QML has its biggest strengths. 

Given the number of QML-based games on Symbian, it's a rather nice facility to be able to take code and also roll out ports for other mobile platforms. It's also cool that such an engine is effectively starting life in the Symbian world and then embracing other platforms. Rather than the other way round...

Comments welcome if you're a developer and have had a go with V-Play's code.

The V-Play team (shown below) can be followed on Twitter @vplayengine.

The scope of LE55ONS hardware expertise in the Symbian world continues to grow, with the Nokia 701 taking its turn to be torn apart on gory detail for your viewing pleasure - and then reassembled to show that no damage has been done. If you're thinking about a 701 repair or if you just enjoy this sort of geek porn, then knock yourself out with the fascinating video embedded below.

As usual, you might want to maximise the window and 'up' the quality?

Interestingly, the Nokia 701 is virtually a clone of the C7 (from the previous Symbian hardware generation) and you have to expect that a C7 would be very similar to take apart, should you have to repair one. No doubt there would be significant motherboard and screen tech differences, but I'll bet that 95% of the other components are the same and/or in the same mounting positions.

Comments welcome if you've taken either a C7 or 701 apart at any point!

Lonely Cat Games has recently made their old SmartMovie system for Symbian freeware - it's fairly evident that all Symbian smartphones since the Nokia N8 do a pretty good of handling MP4, WMV and AVI movie files/containers/codecs, so I'm guessing that interest in this previously commercial software has waned significantly. Owners of older S60 2nd Edition, Series 80 and S60 3rd Edition/5th Edition smartphones might like to grab this though. Caveat - it relies on a Windows PC to run the movie 'converter'.

You may remember my original review, from 2006, an incredible seven years ago? I concluded:

Despite having the latest Quicktime Pro and several DVD players on my Windows PC, SmartMovie's converter wouldn't open any of my .MOV, .WMV or MPEG-2 video files, which is something of a shame. It turns out that it uses DirectShow, and with the codecs here,here and here, it should be possible to open any combination of Real Media, Windows and DVD format files. Just be prepared for a little fiddling! As things stand, with no extra codecs, you have to start with video in AVI, encoded in a common codec, or in bog-standard MPEG-1. Still, for something that's precious enough to go through all this for, the chances are that you'll put the work in massaging your footage or installing extra codecs.

If I had to pick any one system for taking along my own collection of a dozen or so favourite video clips (e.g. the Floyd at Live 8, as shown here, or home footage of me performing at a gig, or classic music videos), SmartMovie would be the one I'd go for. If I were starting with a physical DVD, I'd be torn between the different options, I suspect, there's no one outright winner.

Despite slight reservations over its interface on the smartphone, SmartMovie does what it claims to do well and does it reliably.

Do bear in mind that this was written in 2006, in a totally different software landscape, but it does give you a flavour of how SmartMovie works (with a little codec help). In 2013, this might be useful, in its new freeware form, for resurrecting an older Symbian smartphone, perhaps as a backup device. With SmartMovie installed and a few favourite movies converted (it takes a while), it's still a valid way to fill up a microSD card...

To download SmartMovie and to see the related links and documentation, see the Lonely Cat Games product page.

Pick (up) Sticks is a classic family game, typically with slender 'sticks' which are scattered in a heap and then you have to remove one at a time without disturbing any of the others - this is the computer version, simplified by replacing heap fragility with time constraints. Here, you have to correctly identify the 'top'-most stick/pencil and tap on it, in turn - but against the clock...

Here's Pick Sticks in action:

Presentation here is first rate - though not obvious from the screenshot, the menu items and the banner ad all 'wiggle', in fun 'click me' fashion. Very slick and cute.

The game itself is surprisingly addictive and challenging. While it only takes the eyes and mind a second or so to spot which pencil is 'on top', add in the time constraints and you'll realise you have, typically, less than a second for each one. In fact, as 'Survival' mode progresses, you'll have less and less time to spot and tap on each stick/pencil, with the time limit being reduced by 5 seconds for each stack cleared. Gulp.

In 'Normal' mode, the goal is to take as few seconds as possible to clear the random stack, with your high scores recorded (though with no global/online option), so that you can try to beat your previous best times. 

An excellent casual game. You can download Pick Sticks for free here in the Nokia Store.

So 2013 saw the first 6"-screened 'phone' (the Huawei Ascend Mate). Greeted with a degree of shock by most, would you be surprised to know that my 'smart' device of choice back in 1997, a whopping sixteen years ago, also had a touchscreen with a 6" diagonal? Now that your jaw has hit the floor, let me suggest you glance at the chart below, proposing that large screened devices have, for tech fans preferring to live on the cutting edge, always been available and that impressions of a gradual size creep are more for the wider market.

You see, the very first 'smart' devices in our pockets (in my case, the Psion Series 3a and then Series 5 palmtops) had, on the whole, larger screens than the Android-powered monsters of today. For example, it beggars belief that the humble Psion Series 3a from 1993 has a screen that's exactly the same size as the one in the latest Samsung Galaxy Note II - yet it's true, I just measured it!

With that in mind, I've cherry picked some of the cutting edge smart devices from the last 16 years and represented their screen diagonals, plotted against time, running right through to today:

Note how the space between 4" and 6" is most populated in this 'flagship' overview - this screen size has always been available to geeks and tech fans, prepared to seek out the right kit.

Of course, there are more general consumer trends, with the dotted line representing the average in 'phone' screen sizes, as seen by the general man or woman in the High Street. From tiny screened feature phones of the millennium to the introduction of smartphones masquerading as 'normal' phones (Nokia's S60 Symbian handsets, for example) to the increasing presence of touchscreens in mainstream hardware today. It's this trend that we normally consider when thinking of increasing size - I've put it as a straight line, but in reality it's probably tapering off and will level out around 4.3". Again, this is for general consumers.

Meanwhile, the tech illuminati, those who follow tech news, trends and announcements, and who are prepared to seek out hardware that really, truly suits their needs, can carry on cherry picking, as I've done here. I went from Psion Series 3 to 5 to Nokia 9210 to 9500 to E90, for example, never once dipping below 4" screen size over a fourteen year period. In fact, apart from a few dalliances with S60 devices like the N93 and N95, and a year with the 3.5" screened Nokia N8, I'm still over 4", with the Nokia 808, Lumia 920 and Galaxy S III currently the three smart devices in my pockets.

Comments welcome. Does this geek theory of screen size continuity ring true for you? Or is it skewed because of where I started - Psion palmtops and Nokia Communicators which were ahead of their time?

Psion Series 5mx with a modern Nokia Lumia 920 - note that the silvered areas are all part of the touchscreen, but mapped to specific control functions. Cool, eh?

Well, paint me silver and fire me off into space, Nokia Conversations just featured the Symbian-powered 808 PureView. In April 2013. Not only does this show that, secretly, there are still some 808/Symbian fans over in Nokia, the article also has a couple of very nice examples of when fiddling with exposure in your smartphone camera can produce better (or, at least, interesting) results.

Here's a snippet or two from the article:

So, now we’ve got the hardware at our fingertips, how do we get the best out of it?  Here’s a few tips about exposure, using the Nokia 808 PureView, which might help improve your smartphone portraits.

Exposing yourself

All digital cameras make light readings and in their automatic modes opt to give you the best overall shot. In most circumstances this is completely fine; after all, these devices have had millions spent on them to give us the best results. 

But sometimes, the ‘best overall’ photograph is not the most visually interesting and learning some very small tweaks can make big differences to your pictures....

To flash or not to flash

 The automatic setting on your smartphone will very often fire off the flash. Once again, as a fill-in flash this is mostly acceptable, but it might not always give the picture you’re after.

Here’s an example of a backlit subject – a typical instance of when your smartphone will automatically fire the flash. However, if you manually turn off the flash, the camera will under expose the person because there is still so much light reaching its sensor from behind the subject. This is a classic ‘error’ and one, which results in numerous silhouette portraits! However, by deliberatelyover exposing the shot, you can get more detail back into the subject despite still having the light from behind. (You will lose or ‘burn out’ some of the detail in the background though).

The author makes a good point - whenever extremes of light are involved, there's nearly always some degree of exposure compensation which can give you a better photo. Either increasing exposure (as above) to highlight a foreground subject or decreasing it, typically to highlight a background landscape (e.g. a nice sky/sunset).

And yes, it's great to see that Nokia's PR people haven't totally forgotten about the Symbian-powered Nokia 808 PureView, still far and away the best camera-toting smartphone in the world. 

Symbian's Music Player is now pretty good for most people, it has to be said, producing decent playback with very little hassle, and with an intuitive tabbed interface. However, real music afficionados might want to go further. Fancy gapless playback? Fancy playing back Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files as well? Fancy integrated, fully working cover art, lyrics, and artist bio downloading? Fancy a full 10 band parametric EQ with additional bass and treble customisations? Fancy comprehensive genre-based playlist construction? You'll be wanting QuasarMX then. Read on...

The story goes that Symbian and Meego fan - and, happily, Qt programmer - Andre Beckedorf liked listening to music. A lot. And, however good Symbian's music player might be, it wasn't anywhere near good enough for him. He wanted, and here I quote from the official QuasarMX feature list:

• Intuitive swipe user interface
• Fast library overview and filtering
• Playlist management
• Supports many formats (MP3, MP4, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, ALAC, etc.).
• Gapless playback
• 10-Band Parametric Equalizer
• Bass and Treble Booster 
• High-quality audio reproduction with novel approach to preventing distortions
• Integration of external services like LyricWiki or Last.fm
• Cover Art Downloader

It's true we've seen a few of these features in add-on utilities before, but never has someone attempted to put all this into one application. Well, Andre has succeeded and QuasarMX (which came out of beta for the first time in January) is a work of relative maturity, (almost) all screens and dialogs are pixel perfect (Qt's components sometimes get in the way - witness the main options menu, which looks complete but is in fact scrollable) and the core music playback is excellent. Even the gapless playback is close to living up to its name.

QuasarMX scans your music folders on its first run (and, as with Music Player, you can re-scan at will via a menu option), this takes about as long as for the Symbian music application, producing a summary of genres, artists and albums found, as shown here. The ticks can be applied to add/filter items into your default playlist - there's support for multiple playlists, but I've always been a 'one album at a time' person, so I haven't explored these functions in detail. See the bottom of this review for details of a trial version of the application, where you can try everything out for yourself.

The first of the six tabs, then, is the playlist construction area, while the second shows the current playlist in graphical (i.e. cover art) form. At any point you can type in the search bar to find a particular track or artist. And, as the play controls at the bottom of the screen suggests, you can do all this while music plays. 

The third tab, shown below, is for details of the current track and where it sits in the current album or playlist. I'm an album guy, as I said, so here I'm playing through Pink Floyd's 1973 masterpiece...

Anyone familiar with "Dark Side of the Moon" will know that, like most live albums, there's no gap between songs, i.e. they flow seamlessly into each other in terms of audio. In the Symbian default Music Player, there's a second's gap (of silence) when one track finishes and before the next one starts, which can be jarring. QuasarMX claims to offer 'gapless' playback, though it's turned off by default (presumably because the majority of albums aren't designed to flow in this way?).

I turned 'Gapless playback' on in the settings pane and then listened through the album - playback isn't truly gapless in QuasarMX, in that there's still a very tiny silent blip, but it's of the order of a tenth of a second and is worlds more palatable than the behaviour of the default Symbian player. According to the developer, this blip is caused by there being a tiny bit of silence on the end/beginning of the tracks themselves and he's planning an algorithm to remove the effects of this in a future version.

Onto the fourth tab then, with a dedicated cover art playback screen, looking especially stunning with the black artwork for "Dark Side" on the AMOLED screen of the test phone. The top tab icons fade to black during playback, too, very artfully, ensuring that nothing gets in the way of enjoying the art. While you can tap to advance playback during a track in the other views, the playback bar can't be interacted with in this view. (By default anyway, there's a setting to enable this if you need it.)

Tapping on (or swiping to - you can swipe between all of these screens, side to side, Meego or [dare I say it] Windows Phone style) the fifth tab gives information, and lots of it. There are toggle switches to turn on each of artist, album and lyric displays (because each uses data to retrieve what it needs from Internet services), but each works well, as shown above and below. There's no lyric tracking (by time code), it's just a scrollable display, but it's still extremely handy.

Also available is the file view below, showing the vital stats of each track, in this case an iTunes AAC-encoded song at 128kbps.

Finally we get to where much of QuasarMX's exciting functionality lives, the mysterious "..." sixth tab, effectively two utilities and a terrific settings pane. First up is a fully working cover art downloader, using a custom, open source service of the developer's making. It took around a minute to grab art for the 45 albums I had loaded on the test phone, which seems quite reasonable, especially since some of the artwork is relatively high resolution.

Obviously, if you subsequently add more music to your phone and re-scan the folders to pick up the tracks then you'll also need to re-run the cover art downloader function if you want to fill in any more gaps.

The Last.fm sub-tab is for 'scrobbling' - sending details of what you're listening to the Last.fm service, for onward sharing and for building up a list of what you've heard - I've never used this service, preferring to keep my somewhat quirky listening private, but the facility is here if you need it...

Now we get to perhaps the most exciting part of QuasarMX, its real time audio processing. The very fact that 'gapless' playback is attempted gives a clue that QuasarMX is handling the audio stream in real time (so 'gapless' here involves a degree of buffering both the current and next tracks and trying to splice them 'on the fly').

The 'Volume Amplifier' is very useful - I'm sure we all have tracks or podcasts on our phones where they're simply too quietly (and amateurishly) recorded to be heard properly, even on in-ear headphones, if you're not in a quiet room. The amp system here means that you can wind the volume up to suit, effectively magnifying the processed audio waveforms. The danger with doing so (apart from to your ears!) is that if you amplify digital sound beyond '100%' you get 'clipping', i.e. unpleasant distortion. QuasarMX thus also comes with an optional 'anti-clip' system wherein it monitors the waveform of each upcoming second (or so) of music in real time and auto-adjusts the volume back downwards to keep the waveform within bounds and to protect your listening experience.

Effectively, this means that you can wind up the volume to hear a quiet track in your playlist and then when Led Zeppelin comes on next, the volume will auto adjust down to safer and more bearable levels.

Also present are treble and boost options, with parametric controls to shape their operation - I found these over-fiddy, both in how the controls 'turn' and in not really knowing what I was doing in terms of cut-off frequencies. You might want to leave these 'boosts' off most of the time?

The traditional parametric 10-band equaliser is more familiar, with half a dozen presets and full control over how each frequency range should be handled. There's also a pre-amp, which seems to control how much of the output audio goes through the equaliser system. Clever stuff.

I'd decree all this to be a bit over the top, but there are no '3D'/stereo widening options, something which has taken off on other platforms in recent years - I'd have thought this would be quite easy to implement, given the amount of processing already being taken onboard - something for a new version to add?

I'll draw to close here - 1400 words on a music player already seems a bit excessive, but there's a lot in QuasarMX that's worth showing off. As shown above, there are options to copy the default Symbian behaviour of pausing when unplugging headphones, plus a simpler 'car mode' that can also be automated when hooking up a Bluetooth headset or car kit, though there's not room to get into that here - go try it for yourself.

Yes, try it. QuasarMX is commercial software at £4 (a sensible price, in my view, that's bearable and yet rewards the developer adequately), as reviewed here, but there's also a 'Lite' version, which has all of the full version's features but in a trial mode: 

• Playlist Management
• Sound-Settings
• Parametric Equalizer
• Bass-Booster
• Treble-Enhancer
• Auto-Anti-Clip
• Gapless Playback

You can unlock each of these 3 times each for 4 hours, for extensive testing. After the trial period you can carry on using QuasarMX for general playback, including its cover art and informational views, but you'll lose the real time audio functions listed above.

QuasarMX is clearly a labour of love and it shows. Highly recommended for anyone who's serious about their music collection on a Symbian handset.