One of the most commonly used applications on any mobile phone is the calculator. From the dawn of mobile phones, people have been using the calculator on their phone to split bills, tabs, or to do sums under the table so they can appear slick at mathematics. However, despite their popularity, pretty much all of the actual Calculator applications themselves have been pretty awkward and cumbersome to use.
Calcium S60 (from mtvoid, the makers of Control Freak) changes all that.
It's so simple and easy to use that it leaves you wondering why someone didn't do something like it sooner. It follows the iPod's "less is more" approach, and simplifies the number of keypresses required to do a calculation. Check out the graphic on the overview page, as it pretty much says it all as to how simple it is. If not, here's the blurb from the overview page:
Calcium is a fast, easy to use calculator for your S60 phone.
Getting tired of the S60 calculator? We were, so we made our own. Using some of the concepts that make ControlFreak so easy to use, we removed the need to select on-screen buttons and moved all the operations to the joystick. Doing basic calculations on your phone is now only a couple of clicks away. So how fast is it?
Try this simple example: start the standard calculator and do 2/3 x 7. It takes 13 clicks. Using Calcium it only takes 6!
Best of all, it's free
Calcium is completely free and works with all 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition S60 phones (refer to the official list of S60 phones).
As you can see, the price is also right. Here's hoping mtvoid have a few other S60 apps up their sleeve soon.
I haven't really written much about the Nokia N73, because I'm not really spending a lot of time finding and add on applications for it. I'm loving it's camera (even if it's not as good as the N95), and that's about all I use on top of normal phone/SMS functions (apart from the occasional calendar/contact sync). I'd probably be more keen if it took standard 3.5mm headphones instead of requiring a pop port adapter, as then I could plug into it on the train when I run out of laptop battery - I really hate the pop port, and it's a bit of a killer adding one more thing to lug around. Fortunately it looks like they've done away with the pop port for a lot of their current phones.
It's also down to the a lot of the sites which have S60 software on offer - they're mostly pretty badly laid out, and seem to be filled with pretty poor quality applications, which every author seems to insist on charging money for.
However, I did find this site which has a lot of pretty slick skins. Not as many as some other sites, but they're all pretty quality productions. Worth a look if you're into that sort of thing.