1. the built in s60 5th edition application lancher, which nokia calls it menu, is ugly.
2. it looks ok on a non touchscreen phones on the old s60 up to s60 3rd edition.
3. on touch screen phones, the softkeys took too many spaces and it becomes uglier on landscape mode because only 2/3rd of the screen’s real estate is used for icons.
4. for s60 5th edition (symbian^1) there are some alternative launchers like handy shell. but i dont like it as well.
5. luckily, some chaps developed a neat applicatoin called vMenu. the developers are the same people who brought vHome Desktop for s60 3rd edition.
6. to make it short, vMenu allows you to experience “iphone-like” menu where you can flick your finger to move from one launcher page to the other. complete with kinetic scrolling effect.
7. depending on the amount of applications you installed on your symbian^1 smartphones, by default, you will be presented with 4 pages of application icons.
8. the icons are organised. 3 x 5 icons per page. that’s 15 icons per page. organising icons is also supported. you need to tap and hoid, and drag the icon accross the screen or to move to different pages.
9. it also has a neat taskmanager which allows you to see what applications running in the background and switch to them if necessary. you can also close any background applications by tapping and dragging the application icon into the huge red icon presented in the center of the screen.
10. unluckily, i cant find the official website of the developers yet. you can download the SIS file from our download section.
11. Have you tried it? what’s your opinion?
Note : this application was tested on a Sony Ericsson Satio and Nokia 5800.
- Asri al-Baker
