Russell Beattie

I just downloaded a new open source puzzle game for my Series 60 phone called Frozen Bubble:

As you probably already know Frozen Bubble is a popular free puzzle game (especially in Linux platform). User controls a small canon, shooting bubbles and tries to hit other bubbles so to create groups of 3 or more bubbles of the same color. Whenever this is accomplished these bubbles go away. The purpose of the game is to eliminate all bubbles from stage.

Frozen Bubble is an addicting game so I thought that it would be a nice application for Symbian mobile phones, like Nokia 6600, Nokia 3650, Nokia 7650, Siemens SX1 etc. So I decided to port it to Series 60 platform and beginning with version 2.0 of the Series 60 platform (Nokia 6600). That's because I already own a Nokia 6600 so I will be able to debug it easily on the target device. However, with the help of the community porting to previous versions of Series 60 platform won't be difficult.

The game is just like the commercial N-Gage game Puyo Pop Puzzle Bobble, but unlike that version, this one doesn't suck. I mean, it's really great! It's good looking, with great sounds, and unbelieveably it's open source and made for my S60 phone.

This to me is a sign - now that the platform has had a year or so under its belt and more developers are starting to get them in their hands and wanting to hack on them, we're going to start to see more cool apps available for the Symbian platform, specifially, Series 60 phones. Finally! I get emails every week where people ask me to update my What's On My 6600 post, but honestly, since January there really hasn't been that many must-have apps that I've added to my phone. Frozen Bubble is definitely going on the list though.

Very cool. Great job to Elias Konstantinidis who developed/ported the app. Job well done.

-Russ

Update: This weekend, I decided to throw this game (which has me addicted) on my N-Gage instead of my 6600. It's *slooooow* to the extreme. I'm not sure what the difference between the 2.0 and 1.2 builds of the app are, but if you were wondering why I was so excited after you tried the app on a 3650/N-Gage, now you know. It's a completely different game on a S60 v2 system (6600, 7610).