In a nutshell…

Smartphones are complex beasts. Use Nokia Device Status to take a peek inside the intricate workings of yours!

Judgement time…

Nokia owners are a lucky bunch. Not only is the Symbian platform a solid and reliable one, but when an application does crash, it rarely bricks the whole phone. But that doesn’t mean you should be complacent. Where your smartphone’s concerned, ignorance definitely is not bliss.

That’s why Nokia has cooked up Device Status. It’s a simple app that sits on your phone, spitting out all manner of information, from memory status to files loaded and firmware version. There’s a companion app that runs on a Windows computer too, but more on that later.

What Device Status does is open up the otherwise hidden world inside your handset. Want to know exactly which apps are installed? Nokia’s software can tell you. Likewise, it’ll dish up info on your network, although in truth, not much of the information will be of use.

See, that’s the problem with Device Status. It’d be great if it could fix problems too, but all it currently does is serve up statistics and confusing information from inside your phone. Information that, even to hardened tech-heads, is interesting, but pretty much useless. The desktop software is also unstable, refusing to run on our cleanly installed Windows XP machine.

If Nokia could hook this up to an online service centre, with automated fixes delivered over the air, they’d be onto a winner. As it is, Device Statuswill only appeal to nosey types and spec-heads.