Compute on the move

Your mobile phone isn’t a phone anymore, what with more and more features getting packed into it. It is a computer, as Nokia would like us to believe. Not surprisingly, hordes of programmers have descended onto the mobile platform and are developing great applications.

Large service providers have realised that ‘Mobile’ is the future. Microsoft, unfortunately, wants everybody to use its operating system on the phone as well, and hasn’t developed any application to deal with Microsoft Office on a phone. But worry not, Quickoffice, (www.quickoffice.com) developed by the imaginatively named Quickoffice Inc., is a brilliant solution for accessing Office documents on mobile phones.

Quickoffice is available on a variety of platforms, including Symbian Series 60 (Nokia N-series, E-series), BlackBerry and Palm. The only problem is that what you get as standard on most phones is the basic ‘Quickoffice Reader’ (for reading documents) and the full version that allows you to edit files costs quite a bit. Quickoffice Premier 4.5 with support for XML files (Office 2007) costs $69.95 (Rs 2,798) for a licence. But, if you ever consider buying software for your phone, this is it.

Then, there is Opera Mobile Browser (www.opera.com), which is a very good alternative to standard browsers on phones. In fact, Motorola even installs it as the default browser on its ‘Q’ range of smart phones instead of Internet Explorer.

But, you will need to buy it after the 30-day free trial—$24 (Rs 960) for the S60 version. You don’t have to pay for everything, though. One of the nicest applications we have used for S60 phones is Yahoo! Go (go.yahoo.com), which, despite all the problems with Yahoo!, works. The latest version, 3.0, which is in beta, adds maps functionality to the phone, and if your phone is a GPS-equipped mobile—Nokia N82, N95, E90—it works with the GPS also.

Even though Google Maps for mobile also integrates GPS (when available) and has better maps for India, Yahoo’s is the more complete solution. Google has a host of applications for your phone (m.google.com), but you cannot access all of them at one convenient place, so you can’t go from Gmail Mobile to Google Maps without going back through the device menu. Here, you not only can access your favourite RSS feeds and e-mail from the well-laid out carousel but also your Flickr stream.

In fact, once you start down the road to loading applications on your mobile device, you can carry on and on. But be warned, these applications can be very resource-hungry and sometimes do not mix very well when a call comes through. In fact, sometimes trying to accept a call when an application is on can lead to your phone system crashing, particularly on devices with less memory— much like a computer. So, technically, it isn’t a mobile phone anymore, but a mobile computer.

— Kushan Mitra