Nokia 700 app: Care App review

We love the default Nokia Belle interface on our Nokia 700. It’s icons and layout stand out well, making the Nokia 700 easy to navigate. Naturally, the colour scheme won’t be to all tastes. So if you like the colour red, this Black Heart theme might be your thing.

It transforms all icons into solid-looking red and black boxes, in a very modern, almost futuristic-like design. On the homescreen you’ll notice this immediately. Dive into the menu and you’ll see that the theme has completely taken over, painting almost every icon the same tone.

Unfortunately that means the icons lose their uniqueness, but the theme does lend a nice uniformity throughout. For example, dive into ‘settings’ and you’ll see that the theme has given the background a subtle red and white sheen that sits well against the backdrop of red icons and contrasts well with the white lettering of the icon descriptions.

The unlock button is also transformed into a black bar with a faint red outline. Besides that we haven’t noticed other changes here. Some themes change the look of the time screensaver, but Black Heart appears to leave it alone.

So in all, Black Heart doesn’t actually change a lot. The wallpapers on each of your homescreen remain as they were, so it’s mostly just a case of new icons and a new unlock button. The changes are subtle and do fit in well, so if you’re after a minor tweak instead of an overhaul for your Nokia 700, Black Heart is worth a peep.

Download: Heart by Hank
Size: 3.70 MB
Price: Free

Check out the Black Heart by Hank theme for Nokia 700 photo gallery below:

The Nokia Care app acts as a sort of digital index of all things helpful and Nokia-related. It’s like having your own personal Nokia assistant at your fingertips – the kind of app you may not always need, but when you do, you’ll be glad you did.

Upon booting up the app, as we did on our Nokia 700, you’ll be met with a contents page with the following topics: User guide, software update, social media and contact Nokia – each linking to helpful sections – not all of them are new – but the sections are helpfully grouped into one place – and you’ll be glad they are.

For example, User Guide takes you to tutorials telling you how to do everything with your phone: from changing the theme to adding widgets. Tapping Software Update does an automatic update check for new software with, just one tap – adding another easy way to update your Nokia.

Social Media gives you the access to Nokia Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts. From here you can get in touch directly with Nokia, ask for support or check out the latest tips and tricks from around the web in video and written form, or call upon helpful Q&As on any Nokia phone-related topic you can think of.

Here you can type in the name of your phone, or the problem with it to find a solution within seconds, whether on Wi-Fi or a 3G connection, Nokia Care appears to work without a hitch, although when videos you will have to wait a little longer for videos to buffer over a 3G connection. Otherwise the rest of the app poses next to no problems in use. We also like the layout, which couldn’t be any clearer. Each section is helpfully displayed using large text, making the app easy to browse on the train, or on the move.

To sum up, we’re really fond of the Nokia Care app. It won’t keep you entertained on a cold night, but it’s still the most helpful, essential app you will ever download to your phone.

Download: Nokia Care App
Size: 0.32MB
Cost: Free

Check out our Nokia 700 app: Nokia Care App review photo gallery:

The RAC Traffic App is a free service that you can download for free from the Nokia Store, designed to help you beat the traffic jams by showing you which roads and motorways the journey-ruining incidents are taking place.

We wanted to discover whether you get the same experience across different platforms. With that in mind we grabbed hold of a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone and a Nokia Belle-equipped Nokia 700 to find out.

So, which is better? We agreed that RAC Traffic does its job, and is definitely a worthy app, but one with a lot more potential, and in need of an update. However there were some issues with the way RAC Traffic performed on our handsets.

On a Nokia 700, for example, we found that the RAC Traffic app handily maps your vicinity so that you could home in on potential traffic delays nearby. On a Nokia Lumia 800 it was a different story.  From a location in Devon, we found that the RAC Traffic app seemed to think that we were in the Peak District, miles north of where we actually were.

This meant we had to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and then scroll some more just to peep the traffic in our surrounding area – our biggest gripe with the Windows Phone version. It never did guess our correct location.

To the Windows Phone version’s credit, it does have a ‘My Routes’ feature letting you add your route, or find a quicker route to your destination, although this does not suggest any alternative routes should your journey face closures along the way. We also found that to use it you have to pin a shortcut yo your route via the Windows Phone menu and access it from the homescreen.

Read our RAC Traffic App review for the Nokia 700

A common bugbear was the Map Options. Here you can choose to look for ‘Incidents and Delays’ or ‘Roadworks and Planned’ roadworks, but unfortunately never both at the same time, which would only seem to add extra time to our journey and/or journey planning. RAC actually got back to us to say the following (thanks for getting in touch!):

“The reason for separating incidents and roadworks display is due to the fact that we’ve found out during testing that the traffic incident data sets would sometimes take too long to download when the handset is in a limited reception area (or on EDGE). Hence for better usability we decided to separate the two – something had to give, but hopefully it’s not too much of a deterrent as our aim is to provide top notch traffic updates and we believe the app delivers that.”

The ability to call the RAC in the event of a breakdown is another handy little feature, but not an essential one – you could just as easily have the number stored in your contacts list anyway, or call direct enquiries and ask to be put through.

Conclusion:

That aside, we do like the RAC Traffic App. It has a well designed interface that looks the same on both Nokia Belle and Windows Phone, so it’s nice to have a little bit of uniformity, there. But in general we found the user experience a little too stop/start for our liking. With an update and a couple of tweaks to speed things up, this could be a great app, for both Windows Phone and Nokia Belle.

Nokia Lumia 800 game: Implode! review

EVAC takes all the best bits of Pac-Man – the retro-minimalistic graphics, the frenzied kleptomaniac premise, the thrill of the hunted becoming the hunter – and takes out all the annoying difficulty spikes and inherent repetitiveness.

You play a pink block seeking to escape from a Tron-like digital dictatorship. To do so you must negotiate a bunch of maze-like levels, gobbling up all the dots… sorry, “colours”, in order to unlock the level exit. As with its main inspiration, you’ll be opposed by a number of constantly spawning opponents, which can only be engaged head-on once you’ve picked up one of the power-ups sparsely scattered throughout the game.

So far so familiar, but EVAC escapes the limitations of its source material by demanding a little more thought from you while asking only human reaction times. For example, while the angry red blocks that roam the mazey levels are generally to be avoided, it’s possible to deal with them creatively. You can hide from them in safe zones, pen them in by pushing blocks into their path and avoid spawning them by circumnavigating the trigger pads.

Still, it’s in your interest not too hang around too much contemplating your next move. Not only will the aforementioned red meanies home in on your position, but the score multiplier that builds up as you collect colours will gradually tick down if not constantly replenished. High scores are all about constant collecting.

The levels themselves are also far more involved than the usual Pac-Man fare. There are switches to be flipped and little block-pushing puzzles to be negotiated en route to the exit. Each level brings a unique mixture of these elements, often throwing in a new level feature to keep you on your toes.

This compelling gameplay is backed by some lovely presentation. Developer Hexage is a master at creating minimalistic but distinctive universes, and the neon-soaked EVAC is no exception. In fact, the subtly glowing cubes against a black background look makes us thing of the Windows Phone OS itself. Naturally, this high-contrast style looks best on the Nokia Lumia 800′s AMOLED display. Lovely.

Equally pretty is EVAC’s sound. In particular, the game’s music is a fitting ambient electronica piece that suits the trippy universe and laid-back pace perfectly. This is one game you’ll want to play with earphones on rather than simply turning the volume down.

In fact, just about the only quibble we have with EVAC (other than a slight stinginess with the number of levels) is its slightly wooly controls. The virtual d-pad with which you control your pink block isn’t quite responsive or reliable enough, often leaving you standing still when under pressure, or causing you to push a yellow block into an irretrievable position.

EVAC’s sedate pace and forgiving collision detection go some way to making up for this issue, though. Its atmospheric universe and gently absorbing gameplay also help take your mind off such matters. Now available for £1.49 on the Windows Phone Marketplace, you’d be crazy not to gobble it up.

Nokia Lumia 800: Driving with free Nokia Drive free satellite navigation

In a country like the UK, with its increasingly congested and overloaded roads, an app like RAC Traffic becomes almost essential for frequent travellers. It’s this or constantly checking the BBC Travel website, which obviously works quickly on the Nokia Lumia 800′s IE9 web browser, but can’t possibly match a dedicated app for speed and accessibility.

On that front, RAC Travel works like a charm. An appraisal of all the traffic incidents in your vicinity is only a maximum of two taps away – and one of those taps is to open the app itself. The second tap, on the News tab from the main menu, utilizes Microsoft Maps (shame it can’t use Nokia Maps really) to give you a map of the UK, then places coloured dots according to where the latest incidents are. 

These dots are colour coded, with yellow being a light hold-up and red being something major that you really should avoid if you can help it. By tapping these coloured incident dots you receive a summary of where the incident is, which direction is affected and what the cause of the hold-up is. Precisely what you need to make informed navigation decisions, basically.

I encountered a few annoying niggles with this aspect of RAC Traffic that spoiled the experience somewhat. For one thing, I found that the app wouldn’t home in on my location when I opened it up, in spite of the location services option being set to On. Sure enough, I checked both Nokia Maps and Microsoft Maps, and both accurately found my location without hesitation. The app seemed to have other ideas, depositing me on the edge of the Lake District as opposed to the middle of Cornwall – a mere difference of about 430 miles.

Having zoomed out and dragged frantically to find my true location, another annoying oversight became apparent – and this one couldn’t be attributed to a bug or glitch in the programming. For some reason, the app makes you decide between viewing either incidents and delays or roadworks and planned events. This mystifying option is buried in the settings menu, too. Why not just show us everything at once, with a little more colour or even shape coding to differentiate? People don’t really care what the source of a delay is – they just want to know if there are any and how they will impact their journey.

Outside of this main feature, RAC Traffic has a few extra tools, but they’re hardly anything to write home about. One is the ability to contact the RAC with a single tap, regardless of whether you’re a member or not. Of course, you could achieve this easily enough with your Nokia Lumia 800′s integrated Bing search facility.

The other tool is a rudimentary route finder, which is useful for highlighting how your planned route intersects with any of those dastardly coloured dots. Again, though, this feature seems to have been poorly executed (or at least seriously glitchy), as I couldn’t view said overlay unless I pinned the route to my Lumia 800′s start menu.

The thought behind RAC Traffc is good, but much of the execution is sloppy and the interface needlessly laborious. We have high hopes for a quick update to resolve most of these issues, as the app has a lot of potential. For now, though, it’s a bit like using a sat nav system that gets you to your destination via an overly elaborate route – you’re glad it got you there, but things should have been so much easier.

RAC Traffic is available now for free on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Minimal Cloud by Hank is a free theme that you can download right now from the Nokia Store. As zero cost themes go, it’s great. On initial impressions from the homescreen, Minimal Cloud by Hank doesn’t appear to change much, but look closer and you’ll see that the icons have been given a radical overhaul, giving each icon a warm cartoon look.

Dive into the menu and the changes are more obvious. Each icon has been lovingly restyled to clearly display what they do. For example, the YouTube icon has a neat little video camera icon, and the the Nokia Music Store has a very cool looking shopping bag that stands out a lot more than it did in the default look. The oranges, yellows, blues and greens look very vibrant.

We also love the dash of almost neon-like yellow added to the digital clock on the lock screen, giving it a minimal, yet fun feel.

Minimal Cloud by Hank also adds a grey background to menus such as inside the Settings options, painting the text yellow. Text contrasts well, and is easy to read, but it’s at the expense of looking slightly dull here. A little more “oomph” to the background would have made all the difference.

Overall, there’s a certain cleanliness here that you rarely ever see with free themes, so well done to developer Hank on spending some quality time designing an app that is pleasant to look at, and complements Nokia Belle nicely.

Check out the Minimal Cloud by Hank theme for Nokia 700 photo gallery below:

 
On the Nokia Store you’ll find there plenty of apps for varying purposes, yet only few apps become ever part of ones regular routine. RAC Traffic has potential to be one of those, but it’s the little hindrances that prevent this good app becoming an essential one.

RAC Traffic is pleasant to look at. On a fully up-to-date Nokia 700 updated to the latest Nokia Belle operating system, menus are bright, clear and easy to navigate. A clean layout makes RAC Traffic easy to use, and eliminates any kind of user confusion. Its two main functions: Traffic News and Broken Down are listed on the front page and accessible in a single tap of the screen.

The latter function links to a page with two links to the RAC Breakdown service, letting users call for assistance, whether or not they are a member of the RAC. Tapping either link brings up a number to call. If you already have the RAC number stored in your phone, you probably won’t need this function, but it’s nice to know the option is there.

The meat of the RAC Traffic app is its Traffic News feature. This displays planned roadworks, incidents and delays on a map, marked as coloured dots reflecting the severity of high, medium and low-level incidents. The first time using this, it took around four minutes for the incidents to display, which led us to thinking that the app was not working. Thankfully this appeared to be a minor teething issue. Results were soon being displayed within seconds. And the app appeared to recognise our immediate locale, too.

Reporting of incidents is handled well, telling you why a road is blocked or closed once a dot is tapped. Our major gripe is that roadworks planned and incidents can only be viewed separately, forcing you to double check between settings. It’s a needless and annoying quirk.

Another thing we don’t like is the clunky zooming in of maps. Unlike in the photo gallery of your Nokia 700, RAC Traffic lacks a pinch to zoom function. Zooming instead works using double finger taps, or by tapping buttons located on the bottom left of the screen. Here RAC Traffic is both slow and sluggish.

The Nokia 700 is capable of housing better user experiences than this, limited by what should be a small, albeit important mapping feature. Another thing to note is not to expect RAC Traffic to suggest alternative routes. You’ll need to do that for yourself, but giving RAC Traffic the benefit of the doubt, it never claimed to offer this service, but instead provide more of an informative service, which to be fair, it does.  

So, RAC Traffic is a genuinely handy app that does keep you abreast of major and minor incidents, and road closures in your immediate area, but it begins to crack when planning longer journeys, mostly due to how slow it can be to buffer its maps. The best way to use RAC Traffic is at home, before setting off, to achieve the best possible performance on a Wi-Fi connection, or risk being the victim of your own road rage.

Check out our Nokia 700 app: RAC Traffic review photo gallery:

Nokia Lumia 800: Top 10 things we already love!

As we mentioned in our recent review of YouTube Download, any new YouTube video app needs to match the intuitiveness of YouTube itself. You can have all the video options in the world, but if your app isn’t both pleasant and easy to use, you can forget about it.

Fortunately, YouTube Pro succeeds on this fundamental issue. The developer has adopted elements of Windows Phone’s Metro UI to make the app a natural fit on the Nokia Lumia 800. This extends to mimicking the OS’s tile-based homescreen for its own main page, from which you can access your favourite or currently trending videos, as well as details relating to your subscription.

Scroll right from this hub screen and you get an interesting Top Rated section, which selects three video categories at random (from a customisable list) and outlines four currently popular videos from within them. These can be reset and juggled by physically shaking your Nokia Lumia 800, which is a slightly gimmicky touch. In truth, we didn’t find this section particularly useful, as there’s often not enough information in these tiny thumbnails to inform a viewing decision.

You’re better off instead using the Hot Videos tile, which presents a standard list of popular videos complete with length, rating, full title and number of views. Alternatively, if you have a particular topic in mind there’s the effective text search tool, which lets you order video results by relevance, time and whether they’re HD or not.

The real strength of YouTube Pro becomes evident once you go into one of these videos. Here you’re presented with an excellent Metroisation (made up word) of the classic YouTube video experience. You have a thumbnail representing the video, as well as clear Like and Dislike buttons and controls for switching to high quality or even high definition video. There’s also the ability to download videos from here, but we’ll discuss that in a moment.

Tapping the play button will kick you into a landscape view and start the video, accompanied by controls (which can be dismissed or called with a single tap) for aspect ratio and full or windowed view. One particularly neat touch here is that you can turn the video volume up and down independently of your Lumia 800′s volume by pinching two fingers on the screen. It’s a surprisingly quick and accurate method.

In tests, high definition video played very well on our Nokia Lumia 800 (a decent HD video source really is one of the best ways to show off that AMOLED display). Combined with the ability to download such videos to your phone, you can compile a vast library of quality high definition content without having to rely on streaming via a flaky 3G or public Wi-Fi connection. This ability to download video isn’t unique – the aforementioned YouTube Download is one of many apps on the Marketplace to boast such a feature – but it’s also not something any official YouTube app has ever featured.

Nokia Lumia 800 Explored: Record and share HD video with ease!

Aside from a few untidy or superfluous elements, then, YouTube Pro has placed itself in contention as our Nokia Lumia 800 YouTube app of choice – especially with the sad demise of the excellent MetroTube. You can download it now for free from the Windows Phone Marketplace, while 79p will give you it ad-free.

Which YouTube app do you use on your Nokia Lumia 800, and why? Let us know in the Comments section below.

The internet can be an unwieldy beast at the best of times, and even with the Nokia Lumia 800′s excellent web browser it can be a time consuming process getting all the information you want quickly. What’s needed is a tool that condenses all this information culled from numerous sources into one bite-sized package. We call such a tool a news reader, which is precisely what Pulse is.

Check out our Nokia Lumia 800 review

In fact Pulse is a news reader with considerable smartphone pedigree, and one whose attractive mix of pin-sharp images and stylish text should marry seamlessly with the Nokia Lumia 800′s Metro UI. From a purely visual perspective, it does so beautifully.

But first let’s discuss how Pulse works. By clicking on the ‘+’ symbol you can customise your news selection from a variety of sources. There’s a Featured tab with a changing selection of popular news outlets, such as NBC News (well it’s popular in the US) and Wired. There’s also a wider ranging Browse tab that lets you search through news sources by category – from Art & Design to Technology. Many of the major online publications are featured, and can be added to your feed simply by flicking the switch alongside them.

Once you’ve finished adding some sources (you can remove them quickly by going into the  Manage sources menu) you can go back to the main screen and enjoy what the app has to offer. Pulse’s interface is a thing of beauty. Each news source gets its own horizontal strip, which is filled with a constantly updating list of stories from the host website. These stories are presented very much like your Nokia Lumia 800′s live tiles – large square icons containing a relevant image and the first few words from its headline.

You’ll get three of these stories on screen per news source at one time in landscape view, while tilting your phone onto its side will open it out to five. Either way, you can scroll across to reveal more simply by touching and dragging. Tapping on any story brings up the full story, nicely formatted for the Lumia 800′s screen. You won’t have to scroll left and right or zoom in to read the text. Meanwhile you can navigate through the other stories from the same news source via an overlay at the bottom of the screen.

It really is an attractive and useful way to stay abreast of the latest news on your Nokia Lumia 800. There are problems, though.

For one thing, Pulse on Windows Phone lacks some of the advanced features that can found in other versions, such as the ability to add multiple themed news source collections. It would be nice if you could separate the field into tech, gaming, music and so on rather than just scrolling through a single long list. Also, there’s no option to import your news sources from your desktop Google Reader account. This will doubtless be added in future updates, though.

Of most concern is Pulse’s less that slick performance. It’s all a big sluggish and stuttery, which spoils the level of polish and tactile feel found elsewhere. On the Nokia Lumia 800′s powerful 1.4MHz processor, this really shouldn’t be the case. Again, expect future updates to fix this.

As it stands, Pulse – which is available for free on the Windows Phone Marketplace – is a promising work in progress. It’s probably still the best news reader available for your Nokia Lumia 800, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. Ultimately, we can only see that as good news.

Check out our Nokia Lumia 800 app: Pulse review photo gallery:

Check out our Nokia 700 hands-on review

Having spotted the 2012 theme on the Nokia Store, we were half expecting it to be celebratory in feel. Think pretty graphics of fireworks and stuff, y’know. 2012. Bam! Happy new year. Instead 2012 is your run-on-the-mill theme.

Surprises aside, the 2012 theme is actually pretty nice. The biggest change 2012 makes to the Nokia Belle interface is in painting icons a rather refreshing shade of blue. You can see this on the first of your homescreens and when you tap the menu button.  

It looks both clean and welcoming. A white lining around each icon draws attention to the detail in the centre of each icon. Here 2012 looks great, but the downside is that because all of the icons are of the same colour, the second nature of browsing through applications at will has to be relearned.

It’s a minor criticism that, being fussy, can be leveled at any theme. Some Nokia users just like their icons to look different. But if you don’t mind uniformity, this will not be a problem. The blue look extends to inner layers of each menu.

For instance, tap settings and you’ll find the background replicates a kind of blue wooden texture that fits in well with the rest of the theme. Here icons have also got a slight change, displaying pictures in white signifying each function. Against the blue backdrop, they are easy on the eye.

We like 2012. It’s a very non-intrusive theme, barely noticeable on the homescreens, and welcoming once you dive into the menus. It’s clean, well designed and complements Nokia Belle nicely.

Check out the 2012 theme for Nokia 700 photo gallery below: