That was when SBSH came in. SBSH, along with Dominique, started working on a new, modular version of FExplorer with support for Tools & Utilities.

FExplorer Pro

Powerful set of utilities that are missing with S60 phones for advanced users. Including the most robust file explorer with file searching, ZIP files management, image viewer and more! Screen capture utility, flashlight, memory defragment, advanced phone and network info tools and much more!

Main features of FExplorer Pro

• Robust file explorer
• File search
• ZIP files support!
• Image viewer
• File editor (text and binary!)
• Screen capture tool
• Memory defragment
• Development utilities
• Phone info (IMEI, firmware etc.)
• Network info (cell ID, network info etc.)
• Much more!

Click here to read the release note from the development team and find out more about the new SBSH FExplorer Pro

SBSH FExplorer Pro download (Symbian S60 3^rd edition, non-touch screens)
SBSH FExplorer Pro download (Symbian S60 5^th edition, touch screens)

Screenshots

The folks at SBSH were kind enough to sponsor 5 licenses for our readers. To stand a chance to win a license, all you need to do is leave a comment with a suggestion for the Tools feature in FExplorer Pro. Which tools would you like to see in FExplorer Pro. Drop your comments by Sunday, the 20th of September, after which I will randomly choose 5 commenters for the licenses.

Reminder – If you are a developer or know any developer who develops for Ovi or Symbian and publish the content on Ovi Store, ask them to take the Ovi Developers Survey 2009.

Announcing the new beta, the Maps team explains what all you can do with the new Ovi Maps^Beta -

All these services focus on your current location and nearby surroundings. My Position looks for your location and shows it on the map. Find places lets you search easily for cities, addresses and places with the new one-box search. Favourites allows you to save your personal map objects such as places and routes. Sign in with your Ovi account and synchronise your favourite places with Ovi to make your maps.ovi.com experience more personal. You can also synchronise your map objects from maps.ovi.com back to Maps on your device.

Our popular car navigation service, Drive, with voice and visual instructions, lane assistance and speed limit warners, comes now with text-to-speech feature for voice guidance including street names during navigation.

My personal favourite service, Walk navigation, takes you through dedicated pedestrian zones, shortcuts, stairways, plazas or pathways through parks and buildings. Now we are introducing voice guidance for Walk with voice instructions including street names during navigation.

Anywhere you go always take the weather with you, or rather real-time Weather information including a 5 day forecast for your current location or the one you go next. Additionally, check out Events for movies, concerts and venues around your location or other places you have found with the help of the Find places functionality.

For you guys, travellers and globetrotters, we’ve added premium editorial travel content by Lonely Planet and Michelin for over 1000 destinations. Find thousands of listings for sights, restaurants, hotels, shops, nightlife, and more. Look these places up on the map, and get there quickly and easily with pedestrian and car navigation.

Basically, What all is new in this release is :

• Weather - Get real-time weather information including a 5 day forecast for your current or any location found with the help of the Find places functionality.
• Michelin and Lonely Planet – Get dynamic access to premium editorial travel content for over 1000 destinations. Find thousands of listings for sights, restaurants, hotels, shops, nightlife, and more. Look these places up on the map, and get there with pedestrian and car navigation.
• Events - Check out the events on the map around your location or other places you have found with the help of the Find places functionality.

To know more about what all is new in this release, Watch this video Introducing the new Ovi Maps  -

Screenshots

The new startscreen offers one touch access to all the new content & services.

You can now access weather & events info from within the Maps view.

The new content & events view in Maps. This looks really impressive!

Smarter navigation options.

Ovi Maps^Beta is compatible with the following Nokia devices:

• Nokia N97
• Nokia N97 mini
• Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition
• Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

You can download the sis file for the beta from this link – Download Ovi Maps Beta.

1. Nokia Photo Browser

An experimental photo browser from the Nokia Beta Labs, Nokia Photo Browser makes your viewing experience quick and fun with :

This is still a beta application, but nevertheless, a fun app to browse photo on.

Download – Nokia Photo Browser

2. Nokia Handwriting Calculator

Another release of the Nokia Beta Labs, Handwriting Calculator is a showcase of Nokia’s new handwriting recognition technology. It allows you to calculate handwritten math expressions using the stylus as the writing instrument.

As with the Photo Browser, this an experimental beta too. There might be hiccups, but its simply too cool to not have on your phone.

Download – Nokia Handwriting Calculator

3. Easy Wi-Fi

“Easy Wi-Fi automates connection to the Wi-Fi hotspots you use. No need to use a browser and remember usernames and passwords. Easy Wi-Fi makes it simple and fast to get connected”

Download – Easy Wi-Fi

4. AccuWeather.com WRT Widget

The N97 ships with the AccuWeather.com WRT Widget, but for some reason, instead of the widget being installed on the 32GB mass storage, it is installed on the meager phone memory of the N97. Now you can uninstall the widget from phone memory and install it onto the mass storage, thereby recovering the crucial phone memory.

The best part of the AccuWeather.com widget is that it supports the widget based N97 homescreen, which means that you can set the widget to show the current weather on the homescreen all the time!

Download – AccuWeather.com WRT Widget

5. PixelPipe for Share Online

Liberate your media with Pixelpipe. Upload photos, video, and audio files once through the Pixelpipe Media Gateway and distribute your content across over 100+ social networks, photo/video sites, blogs, and other online services.

Snapped a photo and want to share it with your friends on Facebook as well as your followers on Twitter? How about a 100 other services in one go? Simply send it to PixelPipe which pushes your uploads to the configured services. Download this widget to configure PixelPipe in your N97’s Share Online app to enable one touch uploads to PixelPipe!

Download – PixelPipe for Share Online

6. Nimbuzz

We have already reviewed Nimbuzz here on OviApplications. It is the “One app to IM them all!”

Off all the messenger apps available on the Ovi Store like Palringo, Fring, Eqo, we found Nimbuzz to be the best of the lot.

Chat with your friends on Yahoo!, Windows Live, Facebook, MySpace, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk or talk to them using Skype, Gizmo5 or any other VoIP service.

Download – Nimbuzz

7. Compass Touch

The N97 includes a Compass. But the only place it is used is in the Ovi Maps applications.

Download this app to access the magnetometer and use your N97 as a compass.

Download – Compass Touch

8. Shazam

“Lovin ’ that tune? Create music moments: discover and buy music.”

Loving that tune being played in the bar but can’t remember which song it is? Fire up Shazam and let it recognize that song for you. With a free for use trial till November 30th, This one deserves to be present on your N97 as well.

Download – Shazam

9. Dabr

Love to tweet? But not willing to pay for Gravity, the popular S60 twitter app? Dabr is just the right kind of service for you. It is a mobile optimized website for twitter. Dabr supports replies, retweets, sending DMs, image previews.

Download – Dabr

10. MeCanto

Do you feel 32 GB is still not enough to store your entire music library? Need more space?

Listen to your ENTIRE music collection on your phone and on the web. MeCanto lets you take your music collection with you, wherever you go, with virtually no storage limit.

Register for an account on www.mecanto.com & install the client on your computer where the entire music library is stored. You can then access your library from anywhere via the MeCanto website or your phone.

Download – MeCanto

The following softwares were released at the store today, in addition to the ones already available from the store here.

1. Best Taskman

“Running applications and tasks control, ability to substitute built-in system task manager or work along with it, ‘Windows Alt-Tab’ style task switcher, a unique way to access favorite applications (Quickstart), running processes control, and many more advanced functions to explore. Unlike built-in task switcher it tells you what programs exactly are running on your smartphone, where these programs reside, memory they consume and capabilities they use.“

2. Best Jotter

“Best Jotter allows you to write down quick notes, memos, ideas and any piece of information, organize it, and easily find at any time. You can keep your sensitive information as notes as well. Just set up a password in the application and Jotter will encrypt all your data. Additionally it’s possible to export notes to a text file that you can transfer to PC. The format of this file is very simple and you can edit the file in any text editor or Excel, transfer it back and import to Jotter.”

3. Best Converter

“Best Converter is the fast and easy way to convert almost anything to anything else. Over 1100 units in 67 categories – it’s a real conversion power in your pocket!”

4. Best Menu

“Best Menu is: a launcher – you can can organize and instantly access applications, phone numbers, contacts, emails, documents; text templates – you can insert predefined text templates into any application; a macro machine; fast and easy search – with ‘Type & Go’ you can type anything and the service will find contacts/applications matching your text. When you activate the service to access its functionality in any application just press and hold green key (dial key) for more than 1 sec”

5. Best Full Screen Message

“When you get a voice call, no matter what application you’re in, you always have instant access to it. Why getting a new message should be different on your phone? FS Message application shows incoming text message on full screen instantly when it comes. Additionally it shows all unread messages and you can switch between them very fast with left/right keys. You can mark the message as read, reply it, call back to the sender, delete the message or open it in messaging application.”

6. Best Blacklist

“It is a service for automatic calls reject depending on your rules. Are you at the meeting and can’t accept calls at the moment or you want to block someone from calling you permanently? Blacklist offers you an easy solution. Blacklist Scheduler makes your phone an automated personal secretary. It can reject everyone at night, accept only co-workers at business hours, etc. Just configure and turn the service on once and forget about all unwanted callers.”

If you travel frequently and are looking for an intuitive and simple application to keep track of your expenses, you’ll probably find the Best Expense handy.

Installation:

Best Expense is a paid application and can be downloaded from the Ovi store for $1.99.  The current version 1.01 is 0.133MB and is available for s60 3rd and 5th edition  devices in English and Russian language. There is no requirement for account  registration.

Features:

The first screen of the application shows the “expense list”. The list by default is called “My expenses” but can be renamed at a later time. The next screen has a snapshot of all specific expenses with options to customize, add and delete expense types and categories.

The application supports eight expense types (Food, Clothing, Misc, etc) , multiple currency and different payment options (Cash, Credit Card, Check) and the ability to categorize expenses (Personal, Business, Family, etc). There is also an editable “note” field that can be used for additional details.

BestExpense also has the ability to generate reports for a set period of time based on defined metrics such as reports by Type, Paid with or Category. The report then can be either sent as a message or copied to clipboard.

One of the coolest features of this app is the ability to export data to CSV or QIF. This option ultimately empowers the user to utilize the data collected by Best Expense with their favourite finance program on their PC.

Conclusion:

Best Expense does exactly as advertised. It is very easy to use, customize and the fact that it allows users to export data will make your life easier.

Note:

If you visit the Smartphoneware website, you will notice that the same Best Expense app is priced at $7.95. In a quick conversation with Inga Simkovska Business Development Manager for Smartphoneware, he explained that the website pricing is higher because users get 15 day fully functional trials.  It is also worth to note that when a user buys the software in online shop, they are automatically registered in their support system. This system allows the buyer to change several devices and get multiple licenses while the Ovi purchase will only allow the use in single device.

Features:

This is a very simple app. There are four touch control buttons: info, chalk, sponge and exit. Chalk is used for drawing and sponge for erasing. Sponge leaves wet trails simulating reality.

Actual drawing is done overlaying partially transparent PNG image on top of the background graphic. The erase functionality works just like erasing a blackboard in real life and does not clean neatly and leaves behind a mark. The information key is just rather a small box with the current version and company name.

Conclusion:

Blackboard for Nokia 5800 was developed by a Finish based Offscreen Technologies. The company has developed an end to end, integrated development environment for Symbian S60 3rd and 5th edition GUI application developments called Origo IDE. This unique empowers developers to quickly write codes in UI based environment compared to those created with C++.

Using such technology, Offscreen has been able to develop several high quality touch applications for S60 devices. Blackboard for Nokia 5800 is a simple app that many could find it handy for quick note taking and fun drawing projects.

One of my favorite apps in the OVI store has to be the Searchme app. I’ve had it on my 5800 for the past couple days and I must admit it is a great app to have.

Searchme is a VC funded visual search engine, designed from the ground up to provide the user with a better search experience. Since its launch less than a year ago, Searchme has gained favor with web searchers and has more than 4 million monthly users now, growing more than 180 percent since January 2009.

In a short amount of time that I’ve had this app, I’ve found it to be extremely useful and the UI interface is just slick. The key to this app is the way it streamlines the search into categories. As you start typing, visual categories (web pages, videos, music and products) that relate to your query appear on the results page, making it easy to search and provides an immediate access to results. Searchme runs as a native Symbian application rather than in a slow-rendering web browser so it’s a relatively a quick and fast app (with some minor hiccups here and there).

Some of the other key features of the app are:

- Supports both touchscreen (5800, upcoming N97) and devices without a touchscreen.
- Access over air or wi-fi connection
- Previews sites before opening browser (saves a lot of time)
- Runs on all s60 devices

My only complaint about it, would be that the content of the search queries still need some improvements as some queries produce irrelevant results. There also appears to be a bug while searching for video categories that prevents the video from playing but besides that it is a great app for web and image searches.

You can download the app for all Symbian S60 devices directly from the OVI store.