Mobile Survival Kit

If it weren't for the glaring link between mobile phones and violent muggings, we might have already had a Nokia Swiss Army Knife handset. Just imagine it – you could break your nails trying to get all sorts of pointless gadgets for modern urbanites to pop out of its sides.

With the mobile phone acting as strong encouragement to street violence, however, any such device would surely be met with arched eyebrows. Even an innocent in-built nail file would look like a gleaming machete waiting for blood.

This unfortunate state of affairs has created a gap into which the Mobile Survival Kit has slipped unbothered. It's not really a game at all, you see, but rather a collection of digital accessories to supposedly help you with the everyday difficulties of city living. Predictably, most of these digital gizmos turn out to be spectacularly useless.

For instance, now that many phones on the market have some sort of torch or light source built into them, the 'torch light', which merely lights up the phone's screen with a specific colour, seems rather laughable.

Or consider the massager, which sets off your phone's vibrate function in different rhythms. Most likely, this can only be of interest to certain dodgy-minded youngsters, since we don't foresee a qualified masseuse ever recommending a quick shoulder blade session with the latest Sony Ericsson.

A few components of the package are a little more useful, though. There's a calendar where you can input the birthdays of your loved ones if you have a bit of a hard time remembering yourself. You're given a reminder of the next birthday in line every time you start the Mobile Survival kit, which is a nice touch.

Along similar lines, there's also a password-protected section where you can store your more sensitive passwords and codes. (Provided, of course, you can remember the password allowing access to them.)

Then there's the almost obligatory world clock. You wouldn't expect to spend a great deal of time within this particular section (if you're actually abroad you should really be, you know, looking at temples or something), but it does offer a fairly impressive list of cities to check out.

The final aspect of the Mobile Survival Kit is potentially the most interesting. It's a dual dictionary of both text speak phrases and an encyclopaedic collection of smilies (in text rather than image form).

Any internet geeks out there may be shaking their heads, thinking their knowledge of the internet patois is unrivalled, but unless you already know the difference between the smiley for 'I'm ill with cold' and the one for 'I'm ill with flu', this part of the package is genuinely amusing, especially since it includes many celebrity smilies. Everyone from Homer Simpson to Hitler is here and, amazingly, they generally manage to spark a giggle of recognition.

Whether these dictionaries are worth paying money for, let alone genuinely useful to anyone other than middle-aged MPs desperate to get in-step with the latest gyrations of yoof culture is another question. But they are good for a cheap laugh.

With the usefulness of the Mobile Survival Kit in serious doubt, we have to ask whether it's actually any fun to use. Unfortunately, the package falls flat in this respect, too. The smiley dictionary is entertaining enough simply because of its content but, overall, this kit will bring you down rather than cheer you up, thanks to its dreary presentation.

Most of the game doesn't even offer a customised layout, instead using the standard graphics of whatever phone menu theme you're using. This is a major faux pas, since if you're using a theme that is too light, you won't actually be able to see the text in the two dictionaries given that it's all white.

Perhaps the Mobile Survival Kit could have won us over with a slick interface and an attractive palette, blinding our senses to the fact that nothing being offered here is going to engage anyone for more than a few minutes at a time. But sadly we'll never know, since we're actually served up an experience totally devoid of images apart from the simple clock used for, you guessed it, the world clock.

Mobile Survival Kit is an interesting idea, then, but without any real sense of workmanship in the package or any profound utility, it's difficult to see who'd buy it. The smiley dictionary may be good for the odd giggle, but it's hardly going to keep you interested for multiple sessions, or even many minutes. Meanwhile, most of the other semi-useful features are covered by the calendars built into most phones these days.

Our wait for that Nokia Swiss Army Knife phone continues.