WebHQ

RamInfo

If you've even the slightest interest in the inner workings of your Symbian smartphone, one of the first things you'll seek out will be a way of monitoring how much RAM is currently in use - yes, the OS manages RAM for you, but when it's running low it will at least give you a clue about why something's not working, or why something else keeps getting terminated. RamInfo puts the stat you need up front on your phone's homescreen. Simple, attractive and free.

Socially

Starting life as a 'fill-in' utility for functionality missing from other applications, this has developed into a full Facebook/Twitter/Linked-in/FourSquare client, with extras aplenty, including limited contact and calendar syncing. The homescreen is unashamedly people-centric, the interface is smooth and in many ways rivals the commercial Gravity client. A great choice for anyone who considers themselves a social networking power user.

Skype

Despite a wealth of competitors and a somewhat murky past, Skype remains the service most people think of in the professional world when they look for VoIP, instant messaging and group conferencing. And its latest version works a treat on the latest Symbian^3 phones, with a better interface than ever, better behaved background operation, lower resource requirements and better voice quality.

Wikipedia Reader

There have been several versions of this over the last year or so, but it's coming along nicely and offers a mobile-optimised view into the full Wikipedia content, online. Indispensable for looking up facts, cheating at pub quizzes (not me, guv) and winning arguments down the pub!

X-plore

With a decidedly non-standard interface, X-plore is still mightily functional and is the current file manager of choice on Symbian - it has saved my bacon a number of times when I've had to extract a log file, zap a cache or put a system file back in place. Importantly, although the default fonts used are too small, X-plore is very flexible and you can easily bump up the font and interface element sizes to suit your eyes and fingertip size!

Although shareware, it only has the one 3-second nag screen and there's no time limit to your trial, so it just squeezes in here.

Orange Wednesdays

Although ostensibly a promotional application for Orange UK's cinema ticket offer system, this is actually a decent way to get listings of all the latest film releases, with synopses and relevant information. There's also a location-based cinema search module, complete with showtimes. Lovely little use of Qt and a must-install.

Converter Touch

Like all the other Offscreen Technologies applications, Converter Touch (below, left) is short, sweet and to the point. It's your all-purpose units converter, with a slick type carousel and lovely large buttons for entering numbers. If you only look up units once a week, grab this, to make your life easier!

Timer Touch

Offscreen again, with an elegant little timer utility (shown above, right), designed for clocking your kids on sports day or handling your own laps of the local track. Tapping the lap button adds a split/lap time to the middle roller and you can drag this down later on to record the times as needed.

Shazam

Shazam is a music recognition utility, with the free version limited to five attempts a month (fine for casual users, I suspect). It works by taking a ten second sample of music and creates an audio fingerprint based on the audio data's spectrogram. This fingerprint is then sent to Shazam's central network across your phone's data connection and at Shazam's end the fingerprint is compared with their massive database of pre-computed audio fingerprints. With surprising success, plus there are extra hooks into YouTube and the Ovi Store, if you fancy trying your luck further afield than a simple identification.

PocketLock

PocketLock is a small utility that locks your phone when inside your pocket or bag, and unlocks it when taken out. It runs in the background and auto-starts with your phone - in theory, it means never having to tug on your keylock button ever again and many people are finding this indispensable!

Tube Status

A fabulous little resource for anyone within striking distance of the UK capital. In scrolling pages and internal links are the latest details from Transport For London for Tube Status, Departure Boards and Weekend Tube work. Make sure there are no delays on the lines you have in mind.

Egg Timer Touch

Simple yet effective, this lovely little 'set it in 2 seconds' timer is perfect for making sure you don't leave the eggs (or pizza or whatever) in too long. Egg Timer Touch is also good for other little timing tasks around the house!

Vlingo

From a simple tap on your homescreen, Vlingo gives you voice recognition and control, from sending emails to web searches to updating your Facebook status. The format of your voice instructions does need a little learning (unlike Apple's Siri), but there's still plenty you can do and fairly smoothly, as long as you have sufficient data bandwidth for sending the voice sample off to Vlingo's servers.

FourSquare

It's everything you need from a FourSquare client, for checking into known locations and finding friends who might be nearby. You can add 'tips' to places visited and sit back and admire your badges. The application's written in Web runtime, so it's not lightning quick, but it does the job.

Nimbuzz and Fring!

These two fierce rival free VoIP and chat clients deserve a mention here, even though neither have really received any kind of official manufacturer bundling endorsements and thus have remained without any mainstream awareness. Unlike Skype, the biggest player in this field, which withdrew access to its IM services from third party clients last year, rather unfortunately. So we've ended up in a divided VoIP world where there's Skype, Nimbuzz, Fring and many others, including Apple's Facetime. 

Still Fring supports Yahoo!, Windows Live/MSN, AIM, ICQ, GoogleTalk, plus it has video call support, while Nimbuzz does much of the same but adds Facebook, MySpace and Hyve, so there's plenty of inter-service instant messaging for those on a quest.

You can get Nimbuzz here in the Nokia Store or from m.nimbuzz.com in Web. You can get Fring from here in the Nokia Store or from m.fring.com in Web.

If you don't fancy trawling the online stores for the best freeware then just bookmark this page and use it as your quick reference when getting a new phone up to speed!