Some people adore the Nokia interface, seeking out Noks phone after phone. Others (especially newcomers) like the handsets but find the menus either overly confusing or irritatingly simple: Handy Shell has been written for them.

This hefty download replaces your home (Active Standby) screen, gives you alternative displays for contacts and applications, and promises smart dialling, too.

The first thing to install is Handy Weather - this great little world weather forecast app gives five-day forecasts for thousands of cities around the globe with just a miniscule 2KB daily download.

Once that’s in place, you can install the full Handy Shell. Your home screen instantly fills to bursting with six standby apps, a new digital clock, icons to track calls and messages, upcoming appointments and – naturally – that five-day weather forecast. Business folk will love it – others might find it a touch cluttered. You can toggle easily back to Nokia’s home screen with the red key.

The Applications and Contacts screens are just a simple grid of your 12 favourite apps and friends. These work well enough but if the person or software you want isn’t there, you have to navigate back to the Handy Shell home page, toggle to Nokia home screen and proceed as normal. It’s hardly time-saving.

A Dial and Start feature is supposed to let you just start typing a contact or application name to bring up a quick list of matches but in our tests this either hung the phone (an N81 8GB) or worked only with numbers, not letters.

A mixed bag, then, with a good home screen replacement and weather forecasting let down by weak support apps and frustrating navigation. And at this price, you should expect more than that.

Key details

Size: 1.55MB

Price: 14 day trial, then $44.95 (£27.50)

Download here: S60.com