With the many issues N97 users have been having recently with Satellite Navigation. Waze comes as a breath of fresh air or at least the promise of this software, soon to release for Symbian devices.

Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road. 100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets. Join the community of drivers in your area today!

In other words you leave Waze running in the background when you are driving around and it logs the road you use and adds them to their database. Also if it knows the speed linit for a spercific road and you are doing consciderably less it will ask if you are in traffic and if you select yes this will be reported to other Waze users in your area. Basically it's a new concept for Sat Nav "By the People. For the People."

Some lucky members of the mobile comunity have managed to get there hands on a pre-release version to trial. One of these is the TheGURU over at http://www.symbian-guru.com/ and here is a link to his article.

Preview Of Waze Social GPS Navigation For Symbian

The band news is that at present it appears to be limited to the USA. Hopefully this will expand to the rest of the world in future.

I know I want to give a try if/when it releases in the UK. What about You?

Battery level indication is a long standing gripe for Nokia mobile owners leaving owners with no reliable indication as to how much longer their batteries will last.

The wonderful guys over at Capree have developed a solution to this in the form of iON Battery Tracker. Presently it is only available for Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition phones, but I have been informed that a S60v5 version will release in September.

The main features of the application are:

For more information head over to http://www.capree.com

This could be the "Must Have" for all Nokia mobile users providing more reliable battery and filling another little functionality gap.

A little while ago, a moderator on the Nokia Forums let slip [intentionally?] that a mini or lite version of our beloved Nokia N97 would be being released later this year. No additional news has been released and some sources suggested this slip was an intentional ploy by Nokia to jump ahead of the game, as a rival company was also due to release a smaller version of a competitive model using the word 'mini'. The thread in question was eventually edited along with a handful of user responses.

Now just a couple of days ago, Engadget blogged about the N97 mini with Eldar Murtazin as a source. Eldar is well known in the Nokia world and his voice carries weight. Eldar claims that the mini N97 is very much real with some slight modifications to counter the drop in size.

The mini is said to come in 8GB and 16GB versions. Other tweaks include the removal of the analogue touchpad and the reconfiguring of the keyboard, along with the removal of the camera lens cover. This 'downsizing' is also rumoured to be dropping the price by a good 100 euros.

As for official confirmation, Nokia World is next month... Keep your eyes peeled.

The same question pops up many times on the forum, "do I need a screen protector?". During our Nokia N97 stress tests we give the screen quite a hammering, trying to scratch it with the stylus, coins and a key and yet it remained scratch free.

But many of our users have found their screen has become scratched with general usage. Most of the reports are of faint spider scratches but scratches none-the-less. So contrary to what I said about not needing a screen protector, I recommend fitting a screen protector just incase, it's an expensive bit of kit afterall. Though these hairline scratches are only visible in certain lighting conditions and aren't going to bother everybody but I know for sure they'd drive me mad.

I have no idea why our screen didn't scratch during the tests, because we applied a fair bit of pressure with the key and during the pocket test, it was shook vigorously. Perhaps the lighting was wrong and there were hairline scratches on the screen. I'll double check tomorrow and let you all know. Though there were certainly not any deeper scratches which would be visible in any light.

There are many screen protectors available, one of the most popular appears to be invisibleSHIELD for the N97. Check out the forum discussion to see what other users think of it and for alternative solutions.