Introduction

If you own as Series 60 phone you have, unlike owners of UIQ phones, no way to work out the time in Paris or Tokyo. Series 60 phones have no concept of ?home? or the ability to select multiple places in a clock application (as you can on UIQ). So if you want this type of information you turn to WorldMate from Israeli developer MobiMate.

WorldMate is a travel companion application which provides time zone, weather and currency information.

Clocks

WorldMate's main time zone screen is Clocks, which allows you to monitor the time in five cities, from WorldMate's list of over 250. The times are shown with both an analogue clock face and digital read, which shows the time in 12 or 24 hour formats depending on the settings of the phone. Providing both clock types is handy giving both the quick reference speed of the analogue clock and the certainty of a digital display to allow easy confirmation of whether it is morning or afternoon.

City details are simply changed from the Change City item on the Options menu. On selecting the city to change a list of all available cities is displayed. If you start entering letters a search dialogue is displayed and the city list filtered. The filtering is done on both the country and city names, so when searching for Tucson, Arizona "Tu" reveals Ankara and Istanbul, in Turkey, Tunis in Tunisia and Tucson. Once the desired city has been found it can be selected with OK or the joystick select.

Weather

The next screen provides access to weather information. A forecast for the next five days is available, with data provided by the Weather Channel. The display city is selected by scrolling up or down through a list of all the available cities while in the weather screen, or using the Change City item from the Options menu, which work as it does on the Clocks screen.

Weather details can be updated on-demand or an application preference, which we will return to later, used to automatically update details twice a day, daily or every two days. To update the details on-demand you use the Weather Update item on the Options menu.

If the preference option Confirm Connection has been selected then you are next asked to do exactly that before a connection is made to the update server.

Once this has been done the update is processed first by collecting data from MobiMate's server and then updating the WorldMate database.

Forecasts are provided for 67 US cities and another 190 world-wide. MobiMate update the weather data 3 times daily and the data ?packet? seems to be consistently around 22Kb in size from our tests. The forecast data appears to be up to date and as reliable as any weather forecast, certainly good enough to give any traveller an idea of what to expect at their destination.

Map

The next screen is Map which shows the world with the day-night ?? and the selected city marked with a cross. A few checks have shown that the dawn/dusk line is pretty accurate. In addition to the location summary of time and weather, this screen also provides the ability to compare times with a sixth city.

The city displayed on the Map screen can be selected with the up and down scroll or using the Change City item on the options menu, the same mechanism used in the Clocks and Weather screen.

Currency

The final screen in WorldMate for Series 60 is the currency screen. This screen provides exchange rates details and the ability to do conversions between three currencies.

In this screen the up and down scroll moves between the three currency value fields and entering a value, using the keyboard, in one cell automatically calculates the corresponding currency values in the other two cells.

The currencies displayed are set from the Change Currency item on the Options menu and uses a similar search mechanism to the Clocks screen.

However with the currency search, the search string filters the list of countries on the country name and currency mnemonic.

Exchange rate data is provided by FXTop and is updated in a similar manner to the weather data with the same options to update either manually or automatically.

Currency data is updated on MobiMate's server Monday through Friday at 3pm Central European time. Tests showed the update required about 3Kb of data transfer, and when compared to other rates, quotation services appeared usefully accurate.

Preferences

Finally WorldMate provides a number of preferences that allow the user to control its behaviour.

These include:

• The display units for Temperature, Celsius or Fahrenheit
• The access point for data updates.
• Whether the internet connection should be confirmed during manual updates.
• Whether data should be updated automatically (twice a day, every day or every other day) or manually.
• Whether summer time should be automatically adjusted for.

The automatic adjustment for summer time is perhaps the only weakness in WorldMate as it does not appear to fully account for the various staggered Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes throughout the world. This may be because it relies the Symbian OS world clock server which only knows three DST zones, Europe, Northern and Southern (which was true in earlier versions of the Symbian OS) so the problem may not really be with WorldMate. This means that it's worth double checking time during late March early April and October each year.

Conclusion

For the business professional or private individual, who travels frequently or simply has personal contacts around the globe, MobiMate's WorldMate will be a valuable addition to their Series 60 smartphone. The Clocks function is certainly one which can prove handy on a daily basis. While the weather and currency information may be used less frequently it is never the less extremely useful to have to hand when travelling.

Overall WorldMate for Series 60 is a well thought out and functional application and well worth the money if you travel or regularly are in contact with people overseas.

WorldMate for can be purchased here at Handango.

Web: MobiMate