I’ve been a Symbian S60 user for some time now and I’m aware of its capabilities of adding functionality by installing new programs, but every time it amazes me what they’ve managed to add. Take for example the much awaited (for S60 3rd edition at least) Symella and Symtorrent applications. Symella is a basic Gnutella client for mobile devices based on the S60 platform. The name comes from SYMbian and gnutELLA. (Gnutella is a file sharing network used primarily to exchange files.) Symella is capable of searching and downloading, in its current release it’s not capable of uploading any data. It supports multi-threaded downloads which means that if multiple users have a particular file then Symella can download the file from several locations simultaneously. I tried this app yesterday on a Nokia N93 and it worked flawlessly, very impressive. I was able to download two songs using my WIFI connection at home. Right now it is only supported for Symbian 3rd edition, but the developers did say that if the demand is high enough, they would create a new version for S60 2nd phones as well. Previous versions contain several bugs, and therefore they are not supported.
Main Features
-Follows Gnutella 0.6 draft
Most things that could be solved on this mobile platform are in it. Handshake, standard Gnutella messages, Pong caching, connecting, querying, downloading (except Push messages). It doesn’t have a sharing subsystem though, it has no sense having one on a small platform like Symbian – it concentrates on searching and downloading. It has no GGEP or HUGE implementation, just plain Gnutella messages.
-Uses GWebCache
As the draft suggests, it uses GWebCache, host caching and a primitive message caching to make communication easier.
-Search
Does the search by the book – collects files with the same hash into one result, resulting in faster download later.
-Swarming
Uses swarming technique for downloading – splits the selected file into more small parts, and downloads them simultaneously – faster and more effective than the one-threaded download.
-Multiple downloads
Only one search can be active at a time, but multiple downloads can run in the background, even from different searches.
-Open downloaded file
Open the downloaded file with the corresponding program, if available (MP3 player, picture viewer, etc)
And if that wasn’t enough Symtorrent was also simultaneously released. SymTorrent is a BitTorrent client for Symbian smartphones. (BitTorrent is off course a very popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol used by millions of users worldwide.
SymTorrent is the first full-featured and complete BitTorrent client for Symbian OS. It supports downloading multiple torrent files at the same time, is capable of both downloading and uploading and can save the status of your unfinished torrents, so you can resume the downloads after restarting the application. You can also check the status of each file inside a torrent along with several other statistics and properties during download. Currently, it is available for mobile devices based on the S60 Platform 3rd edition.
If you have any of these Symbian S60 3rd edition phones like N93, N80 and E61 you can head over to the Symella and Symtorrent site to download them and try them out, just be careful with your data usage if you are not using WIFI or unlimited data plan.
Written by Devin