Enhancing Your S60 Device: Part III

Symbian Antivirus
Today's mobiles are virtually like mini-PCs, considering the amount of connectivity, processing power, and multimedia capabilities they pack in. However, this has not been without its price. With this rapid change in mobiles comes a stream of malicious apps, Trojans and viruses that seek to exploit a smartphone. Not only do they tend to be annoying as hell as they keep broadcasting themselves to other phones, in recent cases they also encrypt your personal data and render it inaccessible. They can also completely disable your cellphone and brick it.

Now while these scenarios sound pretty alarming, they are not without solutions. The AV industry has now turned its eye on what could be a very lucrative business for them. Unfortunately the market for mobile-based antivirus scanners is still in a very nascent stage. Most of the current generation AVs are quite bloated and can cause phones to slow down. Not only that, they are very expensive. After going through a bunch of these, we found Kaspersky Mobile Security Suite for Symbian phones to be the best. Not only is it lightweight, it offers good scanning speeds and integrated updates. Unlike other trial software, Kaspersky generously allows you to test the software for a year before a purchase is required.

BlackBerry Connect
Around the time Nokia introduced its E-series of business phones, one of the things that caught everyone's eye and brought a huge sigh of relief for email lovers was the introduction of the support for BlackBerry email on Nokia's Symbian-based phones. While RIM's own BlackBerry handsets offer a very good experience in terms of usability, they tend to be a little too business oriented for a lot of users. The multimedia aspect (or the lack of it) can be quite irritating. Having BlackBerry support, while retaining the familiarity and ease of the Symbian OS, is a deal-maker for many. In fact this helped models such as Nokia's E61 and E65 achieve commendable success in terms of sales.

The BlackBerry Connect software is available for Symbian phones and offers many features familiar to BlackBerry users. Not only does it configure itself very closely with the OS, it offers multiple inboxes and thus classifies your mail. While attachment support is still missing and HTML mail gets stripped to their basics, it's still a great step forward and is evolving rapidly in functionality. The software is free.

The world of Symbian apps is constantly evolving. For a phone OS, there is a lot of practicality that can be added to enhance this platform. While we have tried to bring you a sample of good applications, we are sure there are many that we may have missed. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment or head over to our forums and start a thread.