Rah Digga’s Straight Spittin is a battle rap app that allows you to user your Nokia N8 to rap battle anyone in the world, whether they are on Symbian devices or a variety of mobile platforms. The app is named after the well-known American rapper Rah Digga, one of hip-hop’s most skilled MCs. The key weapons in battle rap are rhymes and your imagination. There are thousands of battle rappers out there in the digital world, and this app brings them together on the screen of your device. The app was the first place winner in AT&T’s Open Call contest at CTIA 2011.

I took the app for a spin on my Nokia N8. As a long time Berkeley and San Francisco slam poet I had seen a number of MC battles on stage, but this was the first time that I had stepped into the MC ring myself. In the back of my mind was the question of how I would find an E-rated battle rap, but the bottom line is that raps are as varied as the people doing the rapping so I plunged ahead.

The first step was establishing my ID and password on the Straight Spittin site, which can be done directly from the Nokia N8. When I actually went to rap battle for the first time, I had to answer at least five questions to become battle-ready. These are questions that ask for your favorite team, favorite food, biggest fear, what kind of car you have, your current job, favorite movie, and others. I will note here that, while you must supply answers to at least five of these questions, remember that your answers are for your battle persona, not necessarily yourself personally. My battle persona, for example, is a hedge fund manager who drives a Porsche. When opponents do battle, they can see each other’s handles, locations, and the answers to the five questions.

The Main screen of the app looks like the screen below, and has major sections for Battle, What’s Good, Pics, Rehearsal, Replay and Voting.

That last one, Voting, is what makes the battle rap world go around. After you listen to someone else’s battles, the app gives you the opportunity to vote on the winner and loser of the battle. Other people also vote on your battles, and out of these votes come the gold and platinum rappers, with everyone else sorted into the category of “Unsigned Hype”.

The What’s Good section is a forum for rappers. In that section you can see comments that others have made about rappers, including yourself, and post comments that add to their comments.

In the lower bar on  the screen is the Menu button (triangle).

In the screen above, the Menu button has been clicked, revealing the Audio Settings function. This is extremely important, as it lets you adjust your playback volume.

When you are below the main screen, the Back button (always in the upper left) brings you back up one level from any plunge into the section and detail screens.

Clicking on the Rehearse section, I went in to practice my rap. No rap is complete without a beat, and it is in that section that I selected the beat. The app gives you such beats as Backwoodz Break, Backwoodz Grimez, Keep It Coming, and Bury the Bastards.

Once I selected a beat, the app wanted to know how many bars (8, 16, or 24) should be in the battle rap.

The convention is that the first 4 bars are left without words so as to establish the beat, so an 8-bar rap would really only contain 4 bars of words, and a 16-bar rap would only contain 12 bars of words. Not everyone out there adheres to this convention, however. The rehearsal section lets you listen to your recording of the rehearsal, but when I clicked the button to Save to SD card, I got a message about the soon-to-be-available paid app, MC Pro, which will implement this function.

Actually, you don’t have to have your own battles at all. If you want, you can just listen to other people’s battles. Touching the Replay section you get the screen below, which lets you listen to battles by location, artist name, the most popular battles, or your own battles. If you click on the voting section, you can also cast your vote on the winners and losers of the battles you hear.

I, however, wanted to battle. I clicked on the Battle button, chose the Freestyle format over Written, and saw the screen below.

Realizing my place as a novice in the MC world, I clicked on Unsigned Hype to find an opponent. I selected my beat, the number of bars, and chose between the one- or two-rebuttal format. The next thing I knew, the screen below came up and I had been challenged by a rapper out of Omaha, Nebraska. I accepted the challenge, and the rest is history.

How did the battle come out? Well, like I said, this is an E-rated blog, so I’ll have to let you dig into the Replay database to listen to the details yourself.

I can see why this app won the AT&T Open Call contest at CTIA 2011. Appalachian Apps has put out an excellent first effort in establishing a mobile platform for would-be battle rappers across the world. The developers are hard at work on a couple of updates to this Qt-based application, including an ability to buy Premium beats to customize one’s rap ($3.49 each) and a paid version, MC Pro version, which would enable the storing of rehearsals to the device’s SD card.

Rah Digga’s Straight Spittin can be downloaded for free in Ovi Store.

As anyone who has gotten their hands on a Nokia N8 knows, its built-in camera is, as smartphone cameras go, a quite superior piece of technology: 12 megapixel sensor, f/2.8 lens from Carl Zeiss, extra-bright Xenon flash, lots of clever software features. And now, here comes a brand-new app from BLStream that promises to take the N8’s camera even further.

And that ShutterPro does quite well, in fact, though mainly in the way of a newly-engineered user interface. There’s only so much that software can do to improve the actual images that a digital camera captures, especially when that camera is as good as the N8’s is to begin with.

To cut to the chase, if you like shooting pictures with your N8 – and who doesn’t? – do yourself a favor and download ShutterPro from Ovi Store. You can’t go wrong. After all, a price of $0.00 is hard to beat. (For now, at least, the software is being offered as a “Preview Edition.” We’re not sure what this means, but the name seems to imply that another, perhaps more-functional version of the app is in the offing, quite possibly slated to carry a price somewhere north of zero. Also, note that this app relies on the QT software framework which, if you don’t already have it installed, is a necessary and significant download from Nokia that’s probably best done via a Wi-Fi Internet connection, not your strictly-rationed cellular data plan.)

Here’s what the app does, both in the way of its GUI and the photographs it produces. (Scattered throughout this review are, just for fun, a number of photos we made using ShutterPro.) The interface seems to have been  designed to take full advantage of the N8’s large touchscreen. When you’re holding the camera in landscape orientation and pointing its lens at a subject, the app will, as usual, show you the image that it “sees.” But on either side of the screen – along the short edges, that is – you’ll see blank, or all-black areas. A touch of the finger in either of these blank strips will trigger a set of graphical function buttons appear.

On the left, you’ll see an ‘X’ button to shut down the app and another button that, when touched, brings forth an extensive main menu of additional buttons with which to change the usual photographic parameters: ISO speed, white balance, color palette, and so forth. (More on this later.)

On the right side, a touch of the finger will bring up buttons for some of those same parameters. And here’s the nifty part: You can choose which of those parameters to be made available in this right-hand set of shortcuts. You get to toggle them on and off within that main menu.

Now, let’s pause to take stock of what we’ve seen so far. (And we do apologize for not being able to show you these buttons as they appear when using this app. For some technical reason that’s beyond us, we’re unable to get the phone to snap screenshots of ShutterPro’s own screens. Evidently, as a camera-based app, it prevents the phone from “seeing” itself – a self-referential logic conundrum worthy, no doubt, of some budding Wittgenstein in the audience.) The fact that these buttons appear along the sides of the screen makes them quite accessible to your fingers when holding the phone in landscape orientation. Especially if you’re right-handed, it’s a quite natural movement to reach with the right index finger and touch one of the buttons, all while holding the phone with left thumb and index finger and with right thumb and middle finger.

Now, a second touch of the left index finger will bring a slider will come into view, and this enables you to adjust the camera’s digital zoom factor. You can zoom from 0, or full wide-angle, up to a maximum factor of 11.64. Why 11.64? We can’t say. But this range is much greater than that provided by the N8’s native software, which maxes out at just 2X – but remember, extreme digital zoom shots will be extra-pixelated. As with most things in life, in photography, too, there is no such thing as a free lunch; everything is a trade-off.

Now, let’s look at that main menu, which is down a level below the main screen. No big surprises here, but there are a few goodies that may find are fun to play with. The usual parameters are available for adjustment: Exposure, Flash, Program (close-ups, night shots, landscapes, etc.) White Balance, ISO “film” speed, Face Detection, Image Quality, and Color palette.

As for the goodies, try these: You can toggle a button to have the camera display either of two histograms. They are marked RGB (for red, green, blue) and Medium RGB. The former displays three small histograms on the main screen, one for each color; the latter combines these into a single histrogram. (In digital cameras, histograms are a sort of bar chart that shows the distribution of pixels according to the brightness of light falling on them, and this can be used to fine-tune an image’s exposure to capture the maximum amount of detail in a given scene.)

Another clever feature is an anti-shake function, which includes sliders for setting its sensibility, samples, and timeout. How all this work, we’re not quite sure, but the controls certainly look impressive.

Also, there’s a function title Cannon, which enables the camera to take multiple shots separated by a pre-set period of time – from 0 to 3,600 seconds. There’s also a setting title Rounds, whose slider can be adjusted anywhere from 2 to 9, it appears. Another slider under Cannon adjusts “EV change,” with EV standing for exposure value. This can be set at either 0 or 0.33, but what this function actually accomplishes, we’re not quite sure.

Yet another surprise: Tilt Shift, which digitally simulates the kind of tilting that’s possible in an old-fashioned view camera – the kind on a tripod with a black cloth at the back under which the photographer stands while setting up the shot. Tilting the lens relative to the film, so that they are no longer parallel, was used in those cameras to selectively focus and defocus different parts of the scene. Here, a somewhat similar effect is possible through a digital blurring process. The Tilt Shift menu includes sliders for Size, Position, Saturation, Strength, and Speed. Honestly, we didn’t have sufficient time to test all of those parameters or even find out what each one does, but here is a sample of what even a first-timer can do with TiltShift; notice the blurring at top and bottom:

If anything’s missing from ShutterPro, it’s a good set of instructions – indeed, any instructions. The app comes with no help screens that we could find and there doesn’t appear to be anything available on the Web. An email address for support is included in the app’s About screen, but that’s not going to be of much use when you’re out in the field and can’t understand, say, how much Saturation to use in your next TiltShift shot. Some basic guidance about how to make use of ShutterPro’s rich menu of functions would be extremely helpful.

Still, we look forward to exploring N8-style photography with help from ShutterPro’s well-menued software extensions – and to seeing what additional functionality Gameline will pull from its sleeve for future versions of this intriguing app. (And finally, if you’re taking N8 photography at all seriously, do check out this extensive set of well-crafted tutorials at the N8 Camera School.)

ShutterPro Premium is available for $2.99 (USD) in Nokia’s Store.

Simple controls, tough challenges, and 3D graphics so real I got a little vertigo. What’s not to love about Prism 3D from Gamelion Studios? Your task in this game is simple: bounce a ball along a path to get to an end point, all the while collecting points and avoiding hazards. Control is also deceptively simple: you control the direction of gravity by tilting your Nokia phone.

Prism 3D is available for Nokia Smartphones for $1.99 or as an ad-supported free version. I tested the paid version on my N8.

The designers take their 3D title seriously; great 3D effects begin even before your first game. Even the transitions between menus are executed with a 3D flair. Press play and you realize the menus are affixed to a cube, and you move among menus by spinning the cube.

Even the direction of spin carries subtle meaning. The right-left spin you see above means you’re moving forward (from set-up to play). If you chose instead to customize your game before playing, the spin would be top-bottom.

Different spin directions mean different things.

Now on to game play, which is conceptually simple: bounce the ball along a path to a goal.

Bounce the ball along a path to a goal.

Your vantage point is from above the bouncing ball, and you control the ball by tilting the phone. There are only two subtleties to understand:

• “Above” is calibrated when you begin a game. The direction of game-gravity is always perpendicular to the screen of the phone as held during calibration. If you lay the phone screen-side up on a table during calibration, game-gravity and earth-gravity point in the same direction. If you lay the phone screen-side down during calibration, you can play laying on your back. Any orientation during calibration works.
• Tilt controls gravity, not just rebound angle. When I first played Prism 3D, I thought in terms of “hitting” the ball with the play field. If I wanted the ball to bounce right, I tilted the phone to the right. It took me a few lost balls before I realized that I could influence the ball in flight by changing the orientation of the phone.

Special tiles add interest

Once you get the basic idea of staying on the path, you can start targeting special tiles along the way to pick up points or make your job easier. Specialty tiles include:

• Bonus and penalty tiles increase (or decrease) your score.
• Point multipliers increase the value of bonuses and penalties.
• Inflators and deflators change the size and “bounciness” of the ball.
• Side shots force your ball to bounce in the direction of the arrow.

There are also exploders, moving tiles, tiles that disappear when you bounce on them, tiles that move, and others that you’ll learn as you play.

Special tiles add interest.

For a game that’s such a 3D experience, I’ve written more than enough words. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this video is worth even more.

For some great 3D fun, check out Prism 3D in a free (ad-supported) version or as a paid (ad-free) experience.

It can happen to anyone: You’re out with friends and the conversation turns to a particular song, perhaps one from long ago or one that has been on the radio just recently. Everyone starts to sing it, but …

Or maybe you’re on your own and you find yourself thinking about that special someone and they remind you of a certain song and …

And for some reason, nobody, and certainly not you, can remember the lyrics to the song in question, the words that are … aghh, they’re right there, on the tip of your tongue! What was it that Tom Tom Club sang in “Genius of Love”? What cities was David Byrne of Talking Heads thinking of escaping to in “Life During Wartime”? How did that Beatles song go, “Drive My Car”?

OK, we’ll admit, with pre-Jurassic titles like those, we’re seriously dating ourselves. (The Beatles, we should point out to younger readers, were a band, somewhat famous, in which Paul McCartney played, before Wings.) But you get the idea: At certain moments in life, song lyrics are simply the most important thing there is, absotively and posilutely necessary to get right, right now.

Which is why, evidently, a company called musiXmatch, based in Bologna, Italy, has produced an app for Nokia smartphones called, simply, Lyrics. With this app on your phone – it’s available on Ovi Store at no charge – you can gain more or less instant access to a searchable database of some 5 million – 5,000,000! – popular song lyrics, all in a variety of European languages.

Five million is a big number, and we haven’t had time to count, much less explore, so many sets of lyrics, but so far, our pseudo-scientific testing shows the musiXmatch database to be quite comprehensive. Not only does it show the lyrics for The Beatles, The Beastie Boys, and The English Beat – all big names in the musical pantheon of our long-ago youth – it has the words to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and even “Forget You,” by Cee-Lo Green, complete with this gem of rhyming brand names:

Yeah, I’m sorry, I can’t afford a Ferrari

But that don’t mean I can’t get you there.

I guess he’s an Xbox and I’m more Atari,

But the way you play your game ain’t fair.

According to musiXmatch, quoting Google, since 2004, “lyrics” has been the most searched-for term on the Web, more popular than even “sex,” “dating,“ or “love.” And that’s the case not only in the U.S., the firm says, but in the U.K., Germany, Japan, and France, too, though we suspect some different spellings may be involved.

As for the Lyrics app itself, we can say this: It has a slick design, it works well, it does what it’s supposed to, we recommend it.

Looks: The app has a quite sexy feel, its menus – there are but three: Charts, My Music, and Search – sliding silky smooth across our N8’s touchscreen in response to a swipe of our finger. Clearly, some thought has gone into this app’s look and feel. Also, many songs’ lyrics are illustrated with cover art – a pleasing touch, we found, even if the art is mini-thumbnail size. Likewise, the app provides short biographies of many musical artists, often with photographs.

Lyrics: There’s a whole lot of them, though we can’t be sure there’s a full 5 million. In any case, we’re impressed with the fact that for songs released in more than one version – say, one for adults and another for children – Lyrics lists both sets of words. What’s slightly annoying is that if you look up an old standard, such as “Autumn Leaves,” the app shows a list of 20, 30, who knows how many recordings, each by a different artist and each, we suspect, with exactly the same words. One would suffice, of course, though would disrupt this app’s ability to send customers to the Ovi music store.

You can search for lyrics by the title of songs or the name of a band. You can enter a partial title, but beware, too unspecific a search and you’ll be presented  with a long, long list of song titles to scan through. Unfortunately, you cannot search the lyrics themselves for specific words, which means that if you don’t remember the name of that song still echoing in your brain years after it left the airwaves, you won’t find it here. (On the other hand, a good search engine like Google or Bing will no doubt help you in this regard.)

MusiXmatch states that the lyrics in its database are fully licensed. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that every lyric it lists is perfectly correct. For some reason, online collections of lyrics are notoriously rife with mistakes. And this one is no different. When we used this app to look up that long-ago Tom Tom Club hit “Genius of Love,” we found the word dimension misspelled as “dimention.”

Sometimes, of course, the words in lyrics are anybody’s guess. Nobody – perhaps not even the singer herself – knows what the correct words are. And seriously, what would be the fun of a perfect listing of every song’s words? Think how many devoted listening sessions and great barroom discussions that would obviate. (“Judy in the skies,” or “Judy in disguise”?) Entire Web sites are devoted to this topic.

To its credit, the Lyrics app takes itself seriously enough to solicit comments about its database. Upon searching for a song, music fans can use a set of buttons to tell musiXmatch that the lyrics shown are not by the selected artist, that the lyrics seem to contain “strange characters” or scrambled words, or that its verses are contain too many lines of text.

When you’ve finally found the lyrics you’re seeking, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to buy a recording of the song at the Ovi music store. And Lyrics makes it easy to go do that, as for many songs it offers one-button access to the appropriate page within Ovi. (To make a purchase, of course, you’ll need to have signed up for the right Ovi account.)

There’s more: Lyrics automatically scans the music files you may have stored in your Nokia phone, listing them in a separate menu. It also shows a menu of songs currently enjoying popularity, though specifically which chart it’s tuned to, we can’t tell.

MusiXmatch – a witty outfit, in every way; check out its home page graphics and its jobs page – has done the Nokia community well with this Lyrics app. Clearly, the price is right, and the content it provides such easy, comprehensive access to is absolutely vital, no matter how old a teenager you happen to be.

Lyrics is free to download from Nokia’s Store.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a Desi? If so, you probably already know about Desi Hits!, an entertaining website for fans of Bollywood movies, Bhangra music, and other aspects of pop culture from the Indian subcontinent.

If not, then it might help to know that ‘Desi’ refers to anyone from the India region, including Bangladesh and Pakistan, who typically lives abroad. Bollywood refers to the India-based producers of outrageously gaudy and delightful musical movies. And Bhangra is a kind of pop music based on folk music and dances from the Punjabi region.

Now Desi Hits Inc., the New York-based company behind the Desi Hits! website, has added a mobile app to its offerings for Nokia phones. The new app, simply called Desi Hits!, runs on selected Nokia advanced touchscreen phones. The app lets you view news, photos, and videos, and listen to radio programs, all centered on Bollywood, Bhangra, and what the app calls Urban Desi.

Using the app is a breeze. First, you select a main category: videos, photos, radio, or news. This brings you to a category screen. For example, here’s the Videos screen:

Each category screen, in turn, has four buttons across the top: All, Bollywood, Bhangra, and Urban Desi. ‘All’ is the default, so if that’s what you want, simply select an item from the thumbnail list. Or, to select a subcategory, tap one, and the list is adjusted.

Select an item from the list, and it appears. For example, here’s the sequence for Photos. First you see the master list:

Tap on a thumbnail to see the larger version of any photo. For example, here is a recent photo of Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan:

Tap Home, and you return to the main menu. Tap Back, and you return to the preceding screen.

Next, the News category delivers a list of light news stories about actors, singers and the like. Here’s a look at the main News menu:

And here’s an individual news story:

Any screen can also be viewed in landscape mode:

The Videos and Radio sections of the app deliver the multimedia fun. The Videos are mostly interviews with celebrities, both from the Desi world and without. For instance, here’s a screen capture from a video interview with Lady Gaga, who is not a Desi last time I looked:

The Radio section mainly features two programs: the Arun and P Show, which features music tracks and interviews with musicians, singers and actors, and the Bhangra Vibes show. Here’s a look at the Radio menu and then the screen that appears after I selected an individual radio program:

Overall, the Desi Hits! app is easy to use, and navigation is intuitive. That is thanks in part to a User Experience (UX) consultation recently provided by Nokia experts. Desi Hits Inc. wanted to ensure that the app would be as intuitive and easy to use as possible. So the company submitted a prototype of its mobile app to Nokia UX consultants. They, in turn, applied a series of mobile-usability heuristics to identify the prototype app’s strengths and weaknesses. To learn more about Desi Hits! and its Nokia UX consultation, see this Nokia Developer case study.

In my own tests on a Nokia N8 phone, I too found Desi Hits! easy to use. But I had a few quibbles of my own. For one, on the category pages, the subcategory buttons (All, Bollywood, Bhangra, and Urban Desi) were sometimes unresponsive. I often had to tap those buttons several times before they would ‘take’.

Another small issue: one can exit only from the Home screen. So if you want to exit from, say, a radio program, you have to first stop the program, then tap the Home once or the Back button twice, and finally tap Exit. An easy fix would be to add an Exit button to all the ‘inside’ screens.

Also, during my tests, the Desi Hits! video and radio broadcasts were sometimes unresponsive. One day, I could barely get either videos or radio programs to load or play. But the very next day, I found both the radio programs and the videos loaded within mere seconds and then played flawlessly. On a third day of testing, about half the videos I tried hung, while the other half played smoothly. So was the problem with Desi Hits!, my Internet provider, or something else? As they say, your mileage may vary.

Desi Hits! is available in Ovi Store, and it is free to download.

The holy idol has been stolen by a jealous tribesman and the stars have suddenly begun to fall just like 14 years before. Unless you can collect the diamonds off the slew of islands, your world is doomed. That’s the main storyline of Diamond Islands 2, created by Digital Chocolate. It’s a puzzle game that will have your head spinning as you try and finagle a totem through tight spots.

Each archipelago has five different islands where you must use your four tribesmen to move a rather large totem from point A to point B. Simply tap in the direction you want to go near the totem and the tribesmen should push it. Move the totem to a vertical or horizontal standing point as you roll it across each island. Be prepared to get stuck on a patch of island for a while as you roll the totem over and over again to place it just right.

Along the way collect diamonds that are spread out amongst each island. If you’re lucky you’ll collect them all. I was on a pretty sweet track record until archipelago 3 opened up. Suddenly collecting them all wasn’t such an easy task.

Use rafts, that you MUST get onto in a specific way with the totem, to travel to another island within the board. Use switches to raise and lower bridges to collect diamonds and allow the rafts to move forward. But be careful, you may get trapped on an island and have to restart from scratch. And watch out for mud that will cause your totem to slide.

Tired of playing the main storyline of Diamond Island 2? Why not try the Challenges part of the game. Each island is covered with a specific amount of diamonds and it is your job to gather them all in a certain amount of moves.

A few levels in and your head may be spinning even more than during the storyline’s game play. I dare you to try and reach 1st place in every challenge. But beware, you can only play a certain amount of challenges before having to play the storyline again to unlock more boards in challenge mode.

Diamond Islands 2 is an addictive and fun puzzle game that will give you quite a challenge. I’ve been stuck on a level for two days now, but I will prevail!

The game is available in Ovi store for $1.99 (USD).

Ever been, say, stuck in a meeting and a call comes through to your mobile phone and you see on Caller ID that it’s from someone important – a friend, your spouse, the boss, your business partner – and you really really need to take the call but it’s just not polite or convenient to do so right at that moment?

You could just let the phone ring – silently, of course – until your caller was offered a chance to leave a message. Or, you could turn to Quietalk, an app that’s designed to help out in exactly this situation. Developed by Telekonnectors Ltd., an Indian firm, it’s available in Ovi Store at no charge.

In a nutshell, Quietalk would not only enable you to answer the call silently, it would enable you to communicate with your caller silently, as well – and not via standard SMS-based texting but over the regular phone call that your caller placed to you. You could choose either to send them one of several dozen previously prepared messages – “I’m in a meeting right now, will call you as soon as possible,” for instance – or, you could (discreetly, of course) type in a new message. Either way, though, your caller would actually hear your message on his or her phone, not simply view it as text on their phone’s screen.

Here’s how it works:

Quietalk is able to record, as audio files, anything you’d like to store as a message for later use: “I’ll be home for dinner at 6pm,” or “I’m working late tonight,” or “I love you, darling, more than there are stars in the universe.” You get the idea. And then, when someone calls and you’d like them to hear one of these pre-recorded messages, you just select one on your touchscreen and Quietalk will play it over the current phone connection – in sparkling, high-fidelity audio, no less.

And if you need to type out a new message? In that case, Quietalk takes your text, entered the usual way, via the touchscreen keyboard, and uses Nokia’s built-in text-to-speech technology to speak your message in a synthesized voice.

We tried it, and it works. You can launch Quietalk and keep it hidden from view until a call comes in. When you want to activate the app, you need only touch the small red icon that it keeps up at the top of your screen. You’ll be shown a list of pre-recorded audio messages, any of which can be played by touching its triangular “play” button.

It’s easy to record messages by speaking into the phone. It’s not clear exactly how many audio messages Quietalk can keep on hand, but more than a handful, with each one having a unique name to identify it.

To have text messages read to your caller, you just tap on the TypeTalk button at the bottom of the Quietalk home screen. That makes visible a red field into which you can type your text. Once you’re done entering text, it gets stored in a list of messages, with maximum capacity of 40 entries. Any of them can be called into action by selecting it and touching the “Say” button.

In case you’re wondering, when Quietalk is delivering either kind of message to a caller, your phone remains muted. That way, there’s less chance of any audio interference.

The version of Quietalk we tried out came with U.S. and Canadian versions of its text-to-speech function, but it’s possible to download additional languages from Nokia’s Web site. For the two English-language selections, there are default male and female voices to choose from plus another one called Jane. Evidently, different language packages include different voices.

Finally, you can configure Quietalk to load automatically when you switch on your phone. That could be helpful, we imagine, for those who often find themselves in meetings, for example, and wouldn’t want to have to find Quietalk at the moment it’s needed. As mentioned, when loaded and hidden, the app is unobtrusive yet easily pulled into action via its small red icon, which remains visible no matter which screen you’re looking at (see screensnap above).

And that’s about all there is to say about Quietalk, a simple app that does what it’s designed to do quite efficiently. Unfortunately – or quite fortunately, depending on how you look at it – we don’t have a lot of meetings to attend, so we’re not sure how the app works in the heat of battle. But we invite you to try it out and tell us how it has helped you communicate on the QT, as it were.

(Speaking of which, before installing this app, you do need to load Nokia’s Qt software framework into your phone, an easy if somewhat sizeable – and entirely free – download. You’ve probably got that code on your phone already, but if not, you’ll want to download it via a fast WiFi Internet connection, not over your slower, metered cellular network.)

Quietalk is free to download from Store.