Symbian Corner

Today Ovi Store has officially opened for users worldwide. Millions of people with Nokia devices now can benefit from tons of free and premium content. This service available for more than 50 Nokia S60 and Series 40 devices right now. But how to open and use Ovi Store on your phone? This is really easy - just select the Ovi Store icon in the Download folder on your device and open the Ovi Store page. Or you can get to the Ovi Store by visiting store.ovi.com with your phone web browser. There you can login to your account and start downloading apps to your phone. I will post my first impressions of this service soon.

6 April Nokia has released a new TV commercial with its first touch-screen device Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. This video shows what a cool things you can do with your 5800 device like Internet messaging and browsing with web video support, GPS navigation, picture and video uploading to Flickr and YouTube.

I wonder how we can extend these rich capabilities of this perfect device with freeware applications? The first thing I thought was extended messaging to many IM networks with Nimbuzz, Octrotalk, Palringo, Yeigo, Bombus and other such applications. The second thing would be free and low-cost VoIP telephony with great VoIP clients like Fring or Truphone. Other interesting option would be making from your phone a wireless webcam or microphone for your laptop which is possible with help of WWIGO or Mobiola Webcam and Mobiola Headset application.

My question to readers: how else we can upgrade our 5800 touch devices with Symbian freeware?

Finally Skype will embed its VoIP application to the Nokia mobile phones running Symbian S60. The first one will be the new N97 device. Moreover Skype software will be available to download onto other Nokia Symbian S60 models. But standalone version is less integrated into address books, messaging and other phone's built-in features. Integrated version of Skype client in Nokia N97 will be able to show when Skype contacts are online, send messages to them, launch free Skype-to-Skype voice calls, and use native phone client to make Skype Out calls.

Looks like we move to Skype availability on all Nokia Symbian smartphones.

Today at MWC 2009 Nokia has announced its new great service for smartphone consumers. This is a new Ovi Store - an application and content download service that will be launched in early May of this year. I've reviewed existing Nokia MOSH freeware download service which will be part of new Nokia Ovi Store. This means that Ovi Store will have a lot of free applications, games, themes, ringtones and other rich and free audio-video content. Supported Nokia devices contains a wide range of new and existing Symbian S60 smartphones and Series 40 devices. Since this service will be launched in May we doesn't have link to it yet, but we still can go to Nokia MOSH and enjoy free stuff.

Nokia consumers report the Nokia 5800 Express Music phones with touch screen got a software bug in installation software. This bug prevents you from installing any Symbian signed or developer singed sis packages with applications. You always got "Expired certificate" error message. For self-signed applications installation process finished successfully. This happens probably because of new Symbian S60 5th Edition software running on Nokia 5800. On some user forums people find a solution to solve this issue.

The main action you have to do is to reset your phone's software to manufacturer state via key sequence *#7370#. Device ask you to enter lock code, it should be 12345. But you can backup all your data before this action with Nokia PC Suite and restore it after resetting software.
Also it's better to update phone's firmware to latest version (to check version number press *#0000#) because in older versions you may still got "Expired certificate" error message sometimes later.

That's it! Now you can install any application you want, even developed for older S60 3rd Edition devices like Fring, Google Maps, Mobiola, etc.

Free VoIP Symbian application now is available for Nokia E71. This is Fring. Nokia E71 smartphone is another new device supported by this great free VoIP application. A few days ago Fring team also announced support of Samsung i550w smartphone. More information about Fring features you can find in previous post about Symbian VoIP SIP applications.

Nokia is trying to make own free location-aware social network. For this purpose company has released a Nokia Chat application. This is generally a chat messaging application but it also shares your status and your location.
Nokia's Chat also offer voice messaging function. Additional to this everyone in your contact list know where you're now. You can tag landmarks as hotspots.
You can download Nokia Chat application here.