If you’re at all like me, then you spend all day with your mobile phone by your side – or at the very least, right nearby. You use your mobile throughout the day for a wide variety of needs, including: making and receiving calls, checking and sending e-mail, and of course sending and checking text messages. Your phone is beeping at you throughout the day, too, alerting you to new, incoming calls, mail and messages as they arrive.

For incoming text messages, all you get is a warning that says you have X number of new messages, and then you have to perform a couple of clicks to get to the new message that has arrived. It’s certainly no big deal, but a bit of nuisance nonetheless.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get a quick preview of any text message you receive – without the intervening clicks – so you can take a moment to decide if you need to respond right away, or if it can wait for later … We can do it with phone calls using caller ID (at home this is known as “call screening” of course); and with the preview of e-mail on the homescreen of your device, showing you a portion of the name or address of who sent the mail, and the gist of the subject line – it’s enough information to make a semi-informed decision before making that next click.

Text messages, on the other hand, do not normally allow that kind of preview functionality. (By now, I suspect you can see where this is going …)

Unless, of course, you install a free copy of SMS Preview from Mobile Nordic in Oslo, Norway – one of the many developer companies that is being featured this week during Nokia World in Stuttgart (or so I have been assured, as I continue to blog many miles away).

Just like the name of the app implies, once SMS Preview is installed on your Nokia mobile device – and I have been using it quite happily on my Nokia N97 – anytime a new text message arrives, you are presented with a big white box on the homescreen containing the exact text message, and the name (or number) of the person that sent it to you. Within the app settings, you can customize how long you want the Preview to remain on screen – anywhere from 5 to 60 seconds. I’ve set mine to 30 seconds. If I hear the tone that a new text has arrived, I simply pick up my mobile, and look at the display on screen.

Thirty seconds is plenty of time to read a typical text message – I could probably set it shorter, but this does assume you pick up the device right away to see the Preview. At that point, you’ve seen the text, and you can make a decision about whether any further action is required or not. If it’s my boss, I’m going to get back to her right away (what else would I say, she’s reading these posts!), but if it’s from my friend Kevin, I might not need to jump into action, and can send a reply when it is convenient for me. (Nothing personal, Kevin …)

As you can see from the screenshot above, the app works like a charm – doing exactly what it promises, in a clean, easy-to-read viewer that neatly displays on top of the widgets on the homescreen of my Nokia N97. I can read the message, and then click on it once to make it go away. What could be easier than that?

It is also worth noting that during the initial installation of the application, you can select the default language you want to use, choosing from: English, French, German, Italian or Spanish.

SMS Preview is available for a wide range of Nokia S60 devices, and it is free in Ovi Store.

App Compatibility:

• Devices: Nokia S60 3rd Edition, and 5th Edition
• Languages: English, French, German, Italian or Spanish
• Countries: Global

More information about this handy utility is available from the developer on their SMS Preview website.

Details about other good stuff from Mobile Nordic are available in this Forum Nokia Innovation Series video:

Finally, just for fun: obscure headline reference here.

Well, here it is, only the second official day for this blog, and we’re already breaking our own rule with a second post on a single day! Somehow, we didn’t think you’d mind. In honor of everyone attending – and soon leaving – Nokia World in Stuttgart, Germany, we thought we’d provide a quick look at a handy travel-related app called World Traveler. It’s free in Ovi Store.So you do a lot of travel for business, do you? Or perhaps you’re like me and you just obsess over the little details … Stay organized, and stay on top of your travel details with the free World Traveler app from Warsaw, Poland-based Psiloc. This app includes several quick and useful tools that should make your next trip – whether business or personal – a breeze.

Here’s a very quick video demo to show the basic functionality:

For starters, you can get the local weather forecast – just select your destination city. (It looks like it might be just the right time to be heading home from Nokia World …)

There’s world clock information – and your destination city is presented on top, so you can keep track of the local time, and still know how jet-lagged you’re likely to be later!

You can also see four different currency rates, and you can update that information over the web, as needed (updates occur quickly, with a good web connection on your mobile). You can customize which currencies to view within the app settings as needed.

A feature called “Travel Plan” is not yet active in the app, but the background screen makes it look promising! We’ll report on details once we find out what will be included. In the meanwhile, it does appear that you can get updates and alerts for flight information. Sadly, I do not have any at this time, so my results are: (zero). Drats. (You’ll have to imagine that screen image for yourself – it hurts too much to share it …)

I have been playing with World Traveler on my Nokia N97, and using the app it includes a nice touch-base interface, so you can easily scroll between different sections of the app. Just slide the icon on the lower portion of the screen to the right or left to see a different section.

And – while it appears to be more for fun than anything else – you can see a rotating world map within the app, showing two points – your current location, and another spot of your choosing. The planet rotates slowly on screen – showing areas of light and dark around the world. On touch-enabled Nokia devices, you can spin the globe, too – and see the pinpoints from different views as you complete a virtual orbit around the globe. More than anything else, perhaps this would be a nice way to show the kids just how far away you’re going to be on that next business trip. (No, I don’t live in Mexico – but you get the idea for how it displays. It’s pretty cool looking.)

The app also includes a built-in plug-in manager that can be used to check for updates to the app on a regular basis.

World Traveler is a free download in Ovi Store, and it should work on a wide variety of Nokia devices.

App Compatability:

• Devices: Nokia S60 3rd Edition and 5th Edition devices
• Languages: In addition to English, World Traveler is localized in several other languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian.
• Countries: Global

More information is available on the World Traveler website.

First, some brief introductions … Welcome to MyDailyApp.com. As the name implies, this website will give you a daily dose of mobile content (well, typically Monday thru Friday). In this case, the best mobile content for your Nokia mobile device, available in Ovi Store. For details about who we are, and what we’re doing, take a quick peek at our About page above.

To get things rolling, we wanted to share some of the really great apps – and the developers behind those apps – that are in the spotlight this week at Nokia World. Look for more good stuff tomorrow and Friday!

And now, without further ado, the first app is ideal for the news-craving tech geek in all of us ...

It is with great pleasure that we present the Grand Prize winner in the Internet Innovation category of Forum Nokia’s 2009 Calling All Innovators contest* … Drum roll, please …

The Tech Buzz Homescreen Widget from UK-based Mippin.

As the name of the widget implies, this handy – and free – mobile app provides instant access to the latest technology news and information on the homescreen of the Nokia N97. News feeds from across the web update to the widget on a regular basis, showing headlines within the minview on the homescreen. Then, if a story catches your eye, you can click on it, and immediately see the entire story in the Web Runtime (WRT) widget that is running in the background on the device.

Here’s a video demo of the widget in action:

Tech Buzz captures 20 different stories at a time, and like other homescreen widgets from Mippin (such as News Buzz, Gossip Buzz, and Gaming Buzz), the information can be viewed when you or online, or stored for later reading offline, such as during your commute by bus or train (assuming you might be offline at that particular moment in time).

If you really want details, most stories include a link to the original story posted on the web, and are only a single click away via your mobile browser.

Just for fun, here are screenshots from a couple of recent headlines that caught my eye:

And this soon-to-be classic (hey, they wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true, right?) …

Not only will you find great content with this app, it is extremely easy to use, and highly intuitive. It makes excellent use of both the on-screen real estate, and the touch UI available to Nokia S60 5th Edition devices like the Nokia N97 or Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (although the latter does not include the miniview on the homescreen).

The Tech Buzz Homescreen Widget is available for free download in Ovi Store by Nokia.

App Compatbility:

• Devices: Nokia S60 5th Edition
• Languages: English
• Countries: Global

UPDATE (2 September, mid-afternoon): We heard back from the Mippin team (Thanks Y’All!), and they have added some comments over on their blog site. Additionally, they point out how you can catch all the content in the MyDailyApp blog on your Nokia mobile device. It is as simple as pointing your mobile browser to: http://mippin.com/mydailyapp. For more information, see this post.

*Note: Details about winners in other contest categories are available on the Calling All Innovators website. The winners in the Apps on Maps category will be announced on Thursday, during Nokia World. We will provide additional details, soon.