N95 Apps to Annoy Your Friends

Here are some applications for your Nokia N95 to annoy the hell out of your friends with. Particularly those owning an Apple iPhone or the Sony Ericsson W380 (or upcoming Z555). iPhone owners are so smug about how their phone’s display changes orientation as they rotate the actual phone from portrait to landscape and vice versa. Well guess what? So can the N95 with rotateMe (review). It isn’t quite as smooth or slick as the iPhone’s, but still, show it to them. Then, show it to them again!

What about gesture control on the W380? Okay, the N95 doesn’t have quite the same thing, but how about FlipSilent (review), an interesting application that mutes or rejects a call when you flip over your phone. FlipSilent can also be configured to activate Silent profile when you flip over your phone, and then return to General profile when you flip it back.

Still need more applications? Check out ShakerRacer, where the N95 is used to remote control a RC car through movements of the phone! Ok, that required some hardware hacking of the RC car, so if you’re not up to it, there’s still many other selection to choose from. Nokia Research Centre has Activity Monitor, a pedometer which measures the number of steps you’ve taken and the distance covered, among other features. The same page also contains the Moving Ball demonstration whose screenshot is shown above.

It’s really quite interesting what the built-in accelerometer of the N95 can do. The N95’s accelerometer isn’t very well advertised, and you seldom see it mentioned anywhere what the accelerometer can do. But it has been there. How else does the N95 auto-rotate photos depending on the orientation of the phone when you took the picture? (Some older Nokia phones also has the accelerometer hardware built-in.)

Another interesting twist is that the N95 does run the iPhone’s web-applications. The Nokia’s Series 60 browser has the same code base as the Mobile Safari browser, so it is no wonder.