since i upgraded the firmware on my nokia e70 last week, i’ve been testing free phone apps. my favorite right now is talkonaut. talkonaut is a sip and chat client which i’m using as a jabber client. it’s clean and yet feature rich (various beep and vibrate profiles for when new chats arrive). it works splendidly over my 3g/umts data connection, and hands over seamlessly to gsm when the 3g drops out. the ui doesn’t really understand the e70’s portrait mode as far as menu button placement, and a joystick press is sometimes required to navigate between chat tabs, but it really is quite clean compared to anything else i’ve tried.

shozu is a bit of a mixed bag. it works well for cameraphone photo uploads, even with my photo site smugmug. at first i had a sort of kludge with emailing photos to smugmug, but it turns out that if you go to the shozu webpage (not on the phone) you can add a lot more available apps and services than just the default phone installation choices. tagging doesn’t stick with the shozu-smugmug system, but titles and uploads are fairly seamless in the nokia ui. the twitter part of shozu sucks, but it’s better than the dedicated twitter phone app twibble. i also tried out the symbian s60 jaiku app, but it’s not all that different or more feature rich than a basic twitter client.

since i still don’t have a way of sharing my 3g connection with my netbsd4 subcompact lappy from my e70, i want to try joikuspot lite. this app allows one to share a mobile connection over wifi. the newest version even includes wep if you want to be stingy (not that wep isn’t easily cracked, but whatever). where is the ubiquitous net? it’s not low-cost 3g data, but it’s the closest we have.