Being connected to Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter 24×7 has a necessity these days. You need to know what your friends are upto each hour, minute and second of the day and that too while on the go. Although the new devices being launched these days do show live feed of twitter and facebook, an example being Nokia N8. However, majority of mobile phones in market don’t allow you to be connected with such sites and provide dull home-screens instead of showing the updates right on the home-screen (will eliminate the need of any 3rd party applications as well!). This being said, HipLogic’s Spark comes to the rescue.
Spark, currently in beta, is a mobile application which once installed replaces the original home-screen of your mobile phone with a new, interactive, offering social media updates right on the home-screen! I tried Spark after seeing some great screenshots of pimped up User Interface on some Nokia touch devices and I must say going by the looks, it does rock! Now, offering an awesome Interface is good but other things need to be considered as well. Read below my review of HipLogic’s Spark:
Spark (Beta) Review
The installation size of 10 mb is pretty hefty and takes a toll on the phone memory (installed for maximum performance) but then again, 10 mb is worth sparing provided the application is a real killer (which it wasn’t). Spark takes a lot of time to start up even if it is installed on the phone memory which is a real let down. Next, on the home-screen initially all the options are enabled i.e Headlines, Twitter feed, Facebook updates and weather, however, on Nokia 5230/5800 (testing device) i barely managed to see the weather updates and headlines on the home-screen (for facebook and twitter updates i had to scroll down). And the prime reason for this was the font size and plenty of unused space. A better design of the home-screen will let the user see more updates in single screen. Further more the scrolling is slow, it lags and slows down the usage of Spark. Regarding the configurablity of Spark, it does allow you to organize your homescreen and add/remove the widgets. Plus the ability to update the updates is good as it lets you control the bandwidth usage but more flexible update intervals could have been included (for heavy social networkers). All in all, i found Spark to be a Potential Killer Application with a lot of area’s to be taken care of. This being said, since Spark is in beta, we CAN expect positive changes to happen and Spark making its way to Smart-phone’s soon!
Spark runs on most Android OS 1.6-2.2, Symbian S60, 3rd Edition (FP1, FP2 & MR), 5th Edition, and Symbian^3 phones. In terms of brands, Spark is available for HTC, LG, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. You can download the latest version of Spark directly from their website or by visiting m.SparkMyPhone.com from your mobile phone’s default browser.
