Upgrade your Nokia 5800 with free apps

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?

Free VoIP Symbian app Fring now on Nokia E71

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.

Symbian VoIP SIP applications

There is a lof of free and not really free VoIP clients for Symbian Nokia and Sony Ericsson devices like BaraBlu, AQL, Mobiboo, Skype, RebTel, Jajah, Truphone and possibly others. But we talk now about really free software clients that allows to use SIP gateways on Symbian 9 and Symbian 8 smartphones. You always can use special edition of Nokia smartphones Ineternet Edition - N80 IE and others. These devices have embedded SIP client that can be configured to work with any SIP gateway server. But what to do with other Symbian smarphones? We need to install some free SIP client on the smartphone. One of these applications is Fring. Since version 3.0 it allows you to call not only to Skype contacts, but configure a SIP service and directly use it. Now you can call for free to many countries with SIP services like Gizmo, Free World Dialup or bunch of Betamax services like VoipStunt, VoipDiscount, VoipCheap, NetAppel, Voipbuster, SparVoIP etc.
Update: Read about new Free Skype VoIP client in Nokia phones, it's ready to be released in Nokia N97 phone

Native Skype VoIP client application on Symbian phones - not until real HSxPA

If you are waiting for Skype client on Symbian you probably should suspend your hopes until arrival HSxPA or other next-generating networks. Skype still not release it's client for Symbian. As we know only phones run Symbian so Skype don't ready to play on this field. In the meantime there are a bunch of third-party solutions that transfer voice over current cell networks to the Skype network. Such well-known solution is Fring free VoIP client software that actually encode voice with AMR codec and transfer it to its server.
But I think Skype is losing to traditional VoIP clients in consumer phones. There is a lot of free SIP VoIP clients for Symbian even embedded into phones like in Nokia Internet Edition devices N80, N73 etc. If Skype will waiting too long it might completely lose this battle to companies like Betamax (VoipDiscount, VoipCheap brands).