But it's also a really, really much faster way to mark or unmark images or messages or what have you. Try this when faced with a stack of images you want to transfer to your computer (or send to the Kingdom of Deletia forever): hold down the edit (I almost wrote pencil) key and then click the center of the navigation key. You should see that little checkmark appear next to your item. Now try holding the edit key and pressing in a direction with the navi key: you should be marking multiple items that way. It's a simple trick, and I guess the edit key earns its name with that function. Again, this is pretty simple stuff, but while I knew about Mark/Unmark for ages, I just found out about how the edit key can be used with it about three weeks ago, and my thumbs are still angry with me for all the manual deleting of hundreds of needlessly saved text messages at one time. You learn something new every day, no?

So there's a nice little function, which is pretty familiar to many phone users, called Mark/Unmark. Essentially anything you choose to mark will show a little checkmark beside it, and if you mark a bunch of things at once, it's much easier to delete them or transfer them or whatever it is you're going to do with them. Marking and unmarking works with text messages and anything that's in your gallery (pics, ringing tones, tracks, video, presentations, etc). It also works on browser bookmarks and contacts. Contacts can be selected into groups, tracks sorted into playlists, and pics can be sent, transferred, printed, organized into albums, uploaded online, used in a muvee, deleted, or made into a slide show as a single batch.

What you can do with a bunch of marked items depends on what the thing is. So play around with it—you might find a trick or two that saves you time or even inspires you to do something with a set of images.

MMS is multimedia messaging service. Which, never mind that—it means you can send pics and video and STUFF in what is more than just an oversized text message. It's a feature that's been a part of S60 for a long long time, but there are plenty of people who never use it. For shame! It's one of the more entertaining things a phone actually does.

To use it, just open messaging and create a new multimedia message. Key in your text, add a picture or sound or video, or even more than one, and then hit send. Alternatively, if you're viewing a picture, you can hit Options, select Send, and Via Multimedia Message. You'll notice this popping up in context menus whenever you're viewing or listening to something that can be sent by MMS.

So, here are the quick hits for Why You Oughta Use MMS If You Don't Already:

- A picture really is worth a thousand words. And if you're the type that wants to write a thousand words on your phone, I don't know what else to say to you.

- Show someone something you're shopping for, map directions, the spot in the park where you're waiting for them to show up with a picnic basket, a diagram you need them to see, a picture of the gang you're with in the pub as incentive to join the party (or deterrent, depening on how long you've been in the pub) or your facial reaction to their last SMS. If you need to show them something instead of describing it, MMS really works.

- It's instantaneous. You don't wait for a person to get to their email or to see them in person to show them on your phone. Just snap a pic and it's off.

- News and radio channels often have MMS numbers (or email addresses). If you happen to snap the right shot of an event, why not send it to your local news?

- Send to another phone or to an email address. Just key in an email address instead of a phone number. Even if you don't need to send any multimedia, this can come in handy if you haven't gotten around to setting up email on yoru phone but need to send a message to someone's email address.

- Many S60 devices come with a little application called "Muvee" in it. I'll be posting on that one later and I'll let you explore that one on your own for now, but it's been one of my favourites for sending something to really brighten up a person's mood. Simple, big on the personal touch, and extremely silly.

- Nothing says "I love you" like sending someone a new ring tone. It's possible with MMS.

- MMS is another simple way of uploading photos to a photo community like flickr or to a blog. Many of these places allow you to upload photos via email. Well, MMS can send to an email address, so it works just fine!

Not working?
First off, if your MMS messages aren't sending, it may be because you don't have the proper settings in your phone. If your phone didn't come with the settings already installed, try out Nokia.com support (quick links to settings if you live in the US or in Europe... otherwise just go to your region's support pages on Nokia.com and look for Settings). Another factor, which seems obvious but isn't to everyone, is that the person on the other end has to be able to receive MMS messages. If their phone doesn't handle them, your network provider will often use another solution, such as forwarding a link by SMS to the message.

What have I left out? I know that a large percentage of mobile-savvy people still never bother with MMS, but the criticism (too difficult or inconvenient) is really unfounded IMHO. It's all in good fun, and occasionally really useful.

By now most of us are pretty familiar with the concept of group lists or mailing lists with email, and it only makes sense that this should also work on your phone.

In S60 phones, this is pretty easy. If you select any of your contacts, you'll see the option "Add to group" pop up in the menu. Or, from the contacts list, just hit the navigator key to the right to access your groups. This makes sending out mass SMS messages a lot easier if there's a bunch of people you frequently send messages to at the same time - whether that's for work, your baseball team, or "I love you" messages to all of your red-hot lovers (that'll probably get you in to trouble soon enough, though). Another nice feature is that you can use your contact groups to start up a Push to Talk call, if that's something you have from your operator.

Also, you can assign ringing tones to your groups, so you know whether an incoming call is from your center fielder or from a hot date. If you're dating your hot center fielder, I'm not sure which ring tone you'll get, but I invite you to try it out. :)

Some people have so many contacts that they sometimes get this Laura mixed up from that Laura or, even worse, forget who people are entirely. One solution that some people use with S60 phones is to organize their contacts into groups, so you get a bit of extra help in sorting which person is which. Just create a group for business projects, or your baseball team. Or, of course, your red-hot lovers. Might want to use a code word for that one.

If I were a developer, surely I could make enough for a yearly trip to Malibu with my swish creative flair, but I'm a bona-fide ignoramus when it comes to code and I'm pretty happy to keep it that way, so I'm open to sharing my ideas.

But speaking of yoga, there's a kind of nice S60 feature that's come up since podcasting really hit its stride: listening to podcasts on your phone. I found a nice bunch of yoga podcasts (easy to find with iTunes) and I thought hey, let's try out a new 60-minute class just to add another teacher's voice to my practice (okay, my nowadays reallyoccasional practice). Normally, I put podcasts on my mp3 player. So I put them on my trusty little machine and... now what? Do yoga with headphones on? I tried it once and got my downward-facing dog tangled up in wires. Plus having something on your ears isn't that nice when doing yoga. You could, of course, burn podcasts to CD or use separate speakers if you have them (I don't) or do yoga in the same room as your computer (very soulful indeed). But suddenly—wuppah! I can just play them on my phone's loudspeaker!

Now, there's already a Nokia Podcasting application (check out the blog!), where you can download podcasts right to your phone! That is absolutely boss—if you have a flat-rate 3G connection or WiFi, but if not, you can also easily download podcasts to your computer and then transfer to your mobile. Listening to music with the phone's speakers is still on the tinny side of enjoyment, but for spoken word, I think the sound quality's fine. So now I've got my hands free... free to grasp my ankle and try to get it around my ear. And that's freedom, I'm sure.

Download Yoga for beginners for N73 (apparently also works with the N95; you could try it on other phones that support Flash Lite but no guarantees from me!)

But seriously. When I think of games for S60, I mostly think of Texas Hold'em and a bunch of puzzle games, as well as a lot of stuff that basically looks like what I (okay, my brother) used to play on the Nintendo Entertainment System. My bent runs to stuff like Bejeweled and Tetris, although I've also been known to kill eight hours in one sitting with Sid Meier's Civilization III or The Sims. Also a die-hard Zelda fan.

What do you play on your phone? Do you download games? Give me something to try!

"Good memory, but short" is something they say here in Helsinki, and I have a feeling it applies mostly to Great People You Met At A Party Last Weekend & You'll Never Ever Remember Their Names, Ever. This sort of thing happens to me a lot, it seems—I have a theory about my meeting a lot of people and my brain basically doing social memory triage and deleting tonnes of names and faces really shortly after hearing and seeing them in order to maximize the chances that I'll remember where I locked my bike, or what my own name is, etc.

But anyway there's something in S60 that really comes in handy when you meet a lot of people: assigning pictures to your contacts. What you do is snap a shot of the person, and when you get their name and number, set that picture to be their thumbnail. When they call you (or when you call them, or just look at their entry in the contacts) you'll see a little avatar-sized photo of them. This works great when about a week ago you were at a party where there were a lot of new people, or a conference where you met a bunch of new potential business contacts.

There are two ways to do it: when editing the contact details, choose "Add thumbnail" and you'll open the phone's gallery, where you can select the photo to use. Or, if you're browsing your pictures, you can select a photo, choose Use image > Assign to contacts.

There's a quick way to switch between applications on an S60 phone. This trick goes way back to even 2nd-edition S60 devices and once you find it, you'll never know how you lived without it.

Just press and hold the menu key (you know, the one with the kind of swooshy symbol on it), and you'll see a scrollable list in the upper left corner of the screen. To switch to an application, scroll to it and hit the OK button (or Select). To quit an application without going to it, press the C button and then hit Yes. It saves a huge amount of time. Okay, it saves maybe three thumbpresses, but it feels like it saves a huge amount of time (staggering, maybe even), and that's what really counts.

The first time a friend of mine showed me this, I did a total smack-the-forehead -why-didn't-I-realize-that- before thing, which is pretty much exactly the same way everyone else reacts when I show them. It's so totally obvious and smart, and yet a whole lot of people don't even know they have it.

]]> http://blogs.s60.com/smartphonin/2007/07/the_allpowerful_shortcut_key.html http://blogs.s60.com/smartphonin/2007/07/the_allpowerful_shortcut_key.html S60 basics Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:14:55 +0200 I remember when I first got a phone that featured a calendar and all that jazz, I really didn't think I could be bothered to put in the time to start using it. I don't know if I just got bored on the train one day or if I got insomnia, but somehow I accidentally started to play around with the phone's calendar, and I have to say I'm a bit of a devotee. My schedule, I would bet a hot dinner, features a complexity set to rival, say, the Secretary General of the United Nations, so I really need to be able to access my calendar whenever changes to plans come up. If I get really, really honest: I have a calendar on my phone, I use Microsoft Outlook at work, but I also have a Moleskine dayplanner (to match my Moleskine obsession) that goes everywhere with me, and a wipe-off-use-again-get-that-nice-ink-all-over-your-fingers wall calendar at home. Looking at just my friends and family, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has an elaborate system worked out, but whether you're looking for redundancy in your timekeeping system, or a way to actually simplify your calendar habits, consider using your phone.

The way I've found that works best with my phone's calendar is to make sure I synchronize with my PC calendar at work. If you don't use a calendar application for your work or to organize your life in general, then you can just rely on the S60 calendar and you're pretty much set.

The biggest advantage of the phone calendar is that you can get a reminder (set a reminder alarm for any time, any day) and you're sure to get it when you need it. A book doesn't do that for you, and a computer only gives you reminders when you're sitting in front of it.

If you have recurring appointments, you don't have to key them in every time. Just type it in once and set it to repeat daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or even yearly. This is great for birthdays—you get reminded to send someone birthday wishes and bingo, your phone's already in your hand. (I have a feeling this feature might even have something to do with why my brother actually remembered to call me on my birthday this year. It's either that or Facebook, surely, but I'm not complaining.)

One more tip regarding calendar reminders: the newer S60 versions, such as that in the Nokia N95, allow you to set multiple alarm clock times, but with older versions you only get one (plus the snooze button, of course). If I had a flight to catch or something else important that required a seriously early start, I'd use the calendar to set a backup alarm a few minutes later.

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.

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.

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.

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?