Last week, I came across the video below, and it made me wonder how this smartphone holder worked. The stop-motion animation shows both metal and plastic objects clinging to the holder’s surface, so magnetism was out. I tweeted about it, Ideasbynet offered to send me a sample. It arrived today, and I think I have it figured out now.

More Gravity Defying Smartphone Holder actually uses gravity

I while ago I wrote about how Gravity, a native Twitter client for Symbian added some much-needed sexiness to that somewhat outdated operating system. But what Symbian was really lacking was a good, modern browser. And it seems like Opera has just fixed that.

Symbian’s built-in browser is painfully slow to use. It loads pages and then seems to re-render them using the attached style sheet (meaning it’ll first show you part of the page’s content and then appear to start all over again). It also does not play well with modern web apps that use lots of javascript and AJAX. I used it only if I had no other option, and greatly preferred the browser on my iPod Touch.
More Opera just made browsing on Symbian fun again

The launch of Nokia’s Ovi app store doesn’t seem to be going very well. Both TechCrunch and Allaboutsymbian are reporting issues, and my initial impressions also weren’t so great either. I tried to find the only Symbian app I’ve ever paid for on store.ovi.com, and I couldn’t. It was available, but just not for my phone.

Gravity has been humming along nicely on my Nokia E71. I love it so much I sometimes tweet from my phone while I’m sitting behind my PC. But if I select the E71 on the Ovi Store, Gravity disappears from all listings. Meanwhile, Mobileways, who created Gravity, even use the E71 as an example of a phone you could use with their product.

It looks like you need to select a touch screen phone in order for Gravity to show up, even though that app absolutely does not require such a phone. Luckily, it seems the mobile version of the website doesn’t seem to filter based on your handset.

Symbian may be the smartphone OS with the most experience, it does suffer from a certain dullness. It’s like the MS-DOS of mobile phone operating systems. Where the iPhone basically runs a trimmed down version of Apple’s OSX, Symbian was built to be light. Also on eye-candy. And it shows.

Fortunately, there are developers out there that create software that goes beyond that typical boring Symbian look and feel. Like mobileways.de, who recently released Gravity, a native Symbian Twitter client that brings both features and eye-candy.
More Gravity adds some sexiness to Symbian