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I get quite a lot of emails asking about what Midlets I use and what I recommend for business midlets. To that end I thought it would be a good to put together an article that not only goes through what Midlets I use, but also how these Midlets can turn a K800i into a true Smartphone. After all, in many ways a Smartphone is defined by its applications and usabiity as much as anything:
K800i: Features - 3 MegaPixel Camera, Quad Band, GSM/ GPRS / 3G, Standard Phone Keyboard, Support Java, J2ME
Midlet Applications:
Email: Flurry - Flurry is excellent. It's easy to setup, *very* quick, very clear / easy to view, and responding on the predictive text keyboard is easily done. I've not see an email Application on any SmartPhone that betters this.
RSS / Blogs / News: Widsets is such a great application for the Mobile. It beings the concepts of Widgets to Mobiles which contain information, which essentially is packaged RSS and in some cases more, but the whole concept is brought off beautifully and looks great and more importantly is really easy to use.
DataBase: MDrawer - A Daabase for a mobile phone ? And one that has realy tables, encryption and is easy to use ? That will be MDrawer then..
Excel / Powerpoint Word: FoneFolio satisfies the need to be able to access Office Document. To view a file on your Java enabled phone, you simply select it. In addition to built-in support for all versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint since version 97, and for Corel WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Presentations (version 10 or newer), the software also works with generic text, comma delimited files, and 12 of the most popular image file formats. It's a real life save if you are on the move with out your laptop and their are a couple of files you need to view. It's a SaaS model, but at around $5 per month, it is a great insurance policy.
Location / Mapping Software: I use Google Maps much to get places. It is a superb application and eminently suited to a mobile phone.
Browser: There is only one browser to be used on for a J2ME enabled mobile phone and this is Opera Mini, now at version 3.1. Version 3 introduced HTTPS support, built in RSS and photo uploading amongst other things.
Subway Software: Having to navigate the Tube daily, there is really only one contender here, the excellent Tubelet .
Instant Messenger: There are a variety of different J2ME programs available but I am a partial to Agile Messenger . It supports MSN, AOL,Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk and XMPP.
Photo Usage: I tend to use the camera to take pictures of whiteboards or business-cards or take a picture of a document rather than using a scanner (the K800i is excellent for this). I've been using ScanR to instantly submit the photos for clean-up and translating into PDF (if you so wish), and then they are ready for me to collect from my ScanR Inbox. You can see an example of an original photo and a cleaned up photo that has been done via ScanR below.
Notes: I used JKeynote which was developed for Motorola phones but works on my K800i. It is very slick. It allows you to create a book which in turn has the concept of note entries associateds with the book. Uniquely once the file has been saved you can choose to send the note to yourself via email or SMS. Note that you have to change the file location from 'a:' to 'c:' when you save. An honourable mention also goes to ENotes .
It would be interesting to know what other Midlets find invaluable so I look forward to some interesting posts !
Thank you for your writing about converting Java enabled phones into a
Smartphone.It is very useful.Especially, I am glad to see there is a J2ME
program that I can use to view office files.
wow! this is very useful. i've been looking for months now on how to make
my k800i smarter. im glad i found this post.
