Somehow, I find mornings a little less painful if I'm waking up to something that makes me happy. In the absence of a train of well-mannered and beautiful servants feeding me breakfast in bed, I guess it's enough to set a good song as my alarm tone on my phone.

Basically, all you have to do is pick your morning melody and transfer it to your S60 device, using Bluetooth, USB cable, infrared, or by downloading it off the web if you're so inclined. Even if your phone doesn't have an MP3 player application or a whole lot of memory, it's still possible. Check for "MP3 ringing tones" or "alarm tones" in your phone's technical specifications if you're unsure. Once your tune is uploaded, it should be accessible from the Gallery application, built-in to the device. Go to the clock application and change the alarm tone to your MP3.

The other thing about using MP3s as alarm tones is, because you're not going to be using headphones, the sound quality doesn't have to be world-class. So when you transfer the song to your phone, you can make the file a lot smaller than you would if you were putting it on your MP3 player. If you want sound quality of course, knock yourself out with a big file, but if your phone doesn't have so much internal memory, this can be a useful trick.

Just a word of warning: after a number of rough 6:30 AM starts, you might start to have mixed feelings about that song. I can't listen to Roisin Murphy's "Sow into you" without wanting to hit the snooze button.

I'm not exactly what you'd call an expert on mobile security, but if you're kinda shy of downloading apps because you're worried about viruses, don't be.

Mobile viruses seem to get a lot of press these days, and while they are on the rise, there's still not much of a call for panic. The security features on S60 are already robust, but there are a few things you can do to be sure. The good (or maybe less bad) thing about mobile malware is that you can't install anything on your phone without hitting an "Ok" button, so if you never open or install anything you're not 100% sure about, you're basically safe.

What's suspicious, then? Most viruses are spread through Bluetooth, and usually the person with the infected phone has no idea they're spreading a virus. The best defense is to keep Bluetooth turned off, but if you want to keep it on, set your device to "hidden" in the Bluetooth settings, so infected devices can't find your phone. More tips at Symbian Central's How not to catch a mobile virus. There has been a mobile virus that speads through MMS, too, and of course if you're installing a cracked application from a peer-to-peer filesharing network, you're also at risk.

So what happens if you're sitting in the pub and get a Bluetooth connection request? Just refuse it, simple as that. In any case, as they told you in grade three, never open files from strangers (especially if they (the files, not the strangers) end in .sis, which means it's a mobile installer file). If you think you have got a virus, there's a good guide to cleaning up your phone here.

And for a bit of extra safety punch, you can install a mobile virus protection application, such as Trend Micro Mobile Security or F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus.

Personally, I've never used a security-boosting software on my phone, but I definitely have been hit by unsolicited Bluetooth requests a number of times. Staying clean is easy: just say no.

Here's one for the photo people. Panoman is a camera applicaiton for S60 phones that, using photo stitching technology, lets you take 360-degree photos with your phone. I took an example with my Nokia E50 (which has a passable 1.3-megapixel camera, but nothing like what most of the Nseries devices offer), and the day was overcast, and I'm a rotten photographer and all that yadda yadda, but it's still interesting. If you want to see some really nice shots taken with Panoman, look here.

One of the best things about Panoman is how easy it is to use. You fire it up, hit the "Trigger" command, and it starts shooting the image. Rotate the phone slowly in a circle and you can see the picture being stitched together on the screen. Currently, you can select between high and low-res images, depending on how much memory is in your phone. It also has a gallery browser embedded, and you can send images through the application as well.

I don't know if it's my E50's camera, or if it's the limitations of a phone's bit-crunching computer ability, but even the high-res images turn out rather small. Having said that, I can think of a lot of places where a phone app like this would come in handy, not the least of which is apartment hunting: I remember the last time I went looking for a flat, having my phone camera was essential, but I still had to take shots of each room from every corner in order to stitch together in my memory a decent idea of the place. Panoman would be a shoe-in for that job.

360-pics tend to work better when you have quite a bit of open space around you. Movement doesn't photograph so well (check out the half-disappeared car in the shot I took) but on the other hand it creates a rather interesting effect. It's been a long time since I was impressed so much by a mobile camera app. I really hope they keep working on this one.

Find Panoman from the official site or download it from S60.com.

I was all set to blog Jaiku today only to find it's in the air: Darla Mack's got an entry on the new Jaiku WidSets widget. But hey, it's Jaiku—the more the merrier.

Jaiku is a web and mobile place where you post sort of miniature, casual, in-the-moment messages. You know all those trivial must-share moments like "suddenly smell childhood summer in the air" or "best lunch ever"; the moments you don't really need to blog (and shouldn't) but you're sure have some place in the universe? Jaiku is the place for them. A lot of people might find that they've got quite enough communication with their friends and internet strangers already, but I rather like Jaiku. You can post and read your friends' posts from the Jaiku S60 mobile app. The interface is simple, and the application is blissfully nonintrusive: I was using Twitter for a while until I realized I was going crazy with constant SMS updates. But you can open the Jaiku applilcation whenever you want to take a peek at who's doing what.

It also has a bunch of nice features from the web and mobile worlds: it can grab feeds when you do other social stuff online (such as post pics on Flickr or post to your Blogger blog), and setting all of this up is incredibly easy. If you like, Jaiku will display your availability based on your phone's profile: a green light if your ringer's on, a yellow light with a note "shhh!" if you're on silent, and a red light if your phone is off. And, as you can see above, you can also add a snippet of code to display your updates on your blog (if you're feeling hardcore, I guess). All in all, they've done a great job with the features and it's still totally simple to use.

It's really built for mobile, too: I don't spend all my life in front of a computer (despite what my friends say), so really, a "light blogging" application like this should go with you. And it should be simple enough to use that you can post in twenty seconds and forget about it. Jaiku fits this bill, at least. Like all social applications, it's great if a lot of your friends are on it, and also if you've got a bunch of acquaintances there, too. Last weekend a friend posted an impromptu call for brunch, and it turned into a mass gathering with lots of new people being introduced.

Two caveats about using Jaiku on your mobile, though: you'll have to get used to recharging ye olde battery a little more frequently, and of course it uses mobile internet, so you pay for data transfer (but seriously, folks, if you're going to use internet applications on your phone, do go for a fixed-rate data service from your operator). Okay, three caveats: it's kind of addictive, too.

Anyone else? What do you use? Are you sick of social software on your mobile, or do you have to convince all your friends to sign up before you get into it yourself?

I've noticed lately that I've been using my cameraphone as a kind of notebook, especially when I'm in a hurry. Running from work to rehearsal to the swimming hall is a lot easier when you know the public transport schedules (if you're carless like me), especially for the specific stops you tend to use. So I end up snapping a picture with my phone, because I know I'll always have my phone with me and can just look at the picture later. Here's an example from the 1A tram line in Helsinki—the text comes out clear as a bell, even the fine print. This was taken with a Nokia E50, which has a 1.3-megapixel camera.

But I've also found that taking pictures of flyers is useful—concerts, announcements for yoga classes, pretty much anything I see posted around town. I've even taken pictures of clothing while shopping (including the price tag) so when I go back to the first shop of the day to get the shirt I really wanted all along, it hasn't been made cheaper in my wishful thinking memory. Maybe if I take pictures of my keys often enough, I'll remember where those are, too.

The short answer: S60 is the software your phone runs on.

Phones are getting pretty techy at an amazing speed these days, and sometimes it's as though features become obsolete before you even know they exist. If you're like the vast majority of people out there, you have no idea what's really going on inside your phone (and that's basically the way it should be). But the upshot is that now there really is a lot more choice of features when buying. The tagline for the new Nokia N95 is "It's what computers have become," and they really mean that.

So if you're buying a computer, you make a choice between Mac and PC, and between Mac OS or Windows or Linux, based on what you want to do with it. It's the same way with phones. S60 does sort of the same stuff on your phone that an operating system does on your computer: it gives you the look on the screen, determines which features are available, and also gives you a system to use those features. Email, calling, internet, the alarm clock, the calendar, voice commands, and games are all handled by S60.

S60 has, in my view, some clear advantages: the user interface has always been intuitive (if you've used one S60 phone, it's easy to switch to another one), and it's developed by Nokia, so there's a lot of mobile expertise behind it. Also, just as with a computer, you can add or remove programs (applications, as they're more often called) as you wish. Even one year ago, most of the applications were a bit clumsy and visually... unfortunate, but now mobile developers seem to have picked up the slack and there's a lot of great-looking, truly useful stuff.

So how do you know if you've got the goods? Well, if your phone is a Nokia, it's probably running S60 software—especially if it's a newer model. Some phones by Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Siemens also use S60, so it's not an exclusively Nokia thing. You can also take a look at the complete list of phones on the S60 website.