Its all very well having a powerful pocket sized computer – which is what your Nokia smartphone is, really – with the ability to browse the Internet and download all sorts of useful information, but that phone still spends a good portion of the day just sitting there doing nothing. FlyScreen aims to put a little of that idle time to good use by letting your screen saver download and display useful information you can access at a glance.

FlyScreen is basically a widget platform that runs in place of the standard S60 screensaver. You sign up, select a few widgets and the app will silently update them in the background, displaying the results on your phone’s idle screen so you can see them without all that ‘running an app’ bother.

Once the app is installed,a basic set of widgets becomes available (BBC News, Weather reports, etc.) The basic widgets are a but uninspiring, but once you have set up a (free) FlyScreen account you can find widgets for the main social networking sites, net news sources and entertainment/tech sites like Wired, Rolling Stone or Engadget. The real power of the app, though, is the fact that it is basically an RSS reader – you can easily create your own RSS-based widgets from your favourite sites either directly on your phone or via the FlyScreen site.

The app is highly configurable and optimized to preserve battery and bandwidth. You have the option of both setting the refresh interval for your widgets and also setting an ‘off peak’ time where refreshing will happen less frequently or even manually.

Having instant access to RSS feeds on your idle screen is handy – especially if you have unlimited data tariff (or don’t stray far from a wifi node) but the limitations of the average Nokia’s screen dimensions mean that you will have to flick that D-Pad quite a bit in order to read all your feeds. The Twitter widget is a nice touch and if you are a light user of the service is actually a pretty decent way to keep up with your tweets.

If you need a fairly unobtrusive way of keeping up with a  small number of feeds or social networks, FlyScreen is definitely worth a try. With a few more and more varied widgets this could be a must-have.

Details
Size: 0.214MB
Price: Free
DOWNLOAD Flyscreen

Check out the Flyscreen review image gallery: