Sym4square – Official Symbian Application (S60v5) For foursquare

After a long wait the Official Foursquare application for symbian based mobile phones (Nokia) has been released. Currently, the application is in a beta stage. However, after testing it for quite some time, i believe the final version is round the corner. Sym4square (SymbianFoursquare), as it has been named, is a freeware application developed by ThinkChange, utilising official FourSquare APIs, to make the FourSquare service available for the Symbian S60 V5 smartphones.

First Hand Review of Sym4square

The installation file approx takes 738 KB which is understandable for an application which is expected to provide plethora of features (atleast i do so). Installation is breeze, no additional component is required. The initial login screen also allows you to create an account (Which i liked) but tapping it results in redirection and opens the default web browser opening the full desktop version of foursquare website. It’d be better if the account creation ability was integrated in the application itself. Moving on, in case if you submit the wrong credentials then the application stucks on “logging in” screen without warning you about wrong username or password, which i expect to be rectified in next release.

Once you login, the homescreen has 3 tabs at the bottom i.e Friends, Places and Me. Under “Places” tab, you get the nearest locations you can check in, after which you are shown the “Mayor” of that region/area/location. Other than this all the other 2 tabs are basic one’s and need no explanation. On the top of the screen, there are 2 tabs viz. Menu and Exit. Menu tab has 2 options, the first one is “Help” which isn’t much of help per se (Only the basic stuff) and second one is “About”. User Interface is attractive and interactive, and so is the application’s ability to handle GPS. It quickly locks position, locates nearby location as well as renders map relatively fast.

Currently Sym4square is available for Symbian S60 V5 devices. And supported devices are Nokia (5230, 5233, 5235, 5530, 5800, C6, N97, N97 Mini, X6); Samsung (GT i8910 Omnia) and Sony Ericsson (U1 Satio, U5 Vivaz, U8 Kanna). You can request a signed application via this link or can download the unsigned version from here and sign it yourself by following steps in this article.

Screenshots

My Opinion

Of all the features mentioned above, i couldn’t get to use the “Tips” tab. Each time i clicked, no tips were shown, maybe there weren’t any or i couldn’t get it correctly. Anyways, overall Sym4square does the basic stuff i.e for what it is know for, nicely. However, this doesn’t give me any reason to use it on continuous basis. Reason being, previously, i used Foursquare via Gravity (integrated in itself) which does all that stuff which Official FourSquare application does, thus eliminating the need to use a dedicated application. Moreover, this application is a big let down for me, as i like to share my current location on twitter as well as facebook and there is no way you can do so via this application. Following are some of the points, i’d like the developers of Official FourSquare Symbian Application (Sym4square) to take into consideration for the next/upcoming release:

• Landscape mode.
• Ability to update Twitter and Facebook.
• Notify about wrong credentials.
• Account creation in application itself.
• “Silent Check In”.

NOTE: Official FourSquare Application (V 1.0 Beta) for symbian has been tested by me on Nokia 5230 and Nokia 5800. The working as well as some of the features may vary on other supported devices.

UPDATE 1: Sym4square has been updated to version 1.1 and per se only one of the above mentioned problem has been fixed yet (Notification about wrong credentials). Also, a signed version of application is now available (See download link above).