General information

Symella is a basic Gnutella client for mobile devices based on the S60 platform. It is capable of searching and downloading, but it does not upload any data in its most recent version. It supports multi-threaded downloads, which means that if multiple users have a particular file, Symella can download the file from several locations simultenously.

The number of search results returned highly depends on the quality of the peers you are connected to. Symella connects to peers randomly, and no algorithm is implemented for choosing the optimal (fastest) peers. Thus, searching for the same content, after restarting the program, can result in different number of hits, since the set of connected peers can be completely different. However, an anonymous profiling tool was introduced which helps us to improve the SemPeer protocol, which is used by Symella, in order to help you obtaining more relevant files and fight against spams. SemPeer and profiling can be disabled in the settings menu.

Be patient with the downloads! It can take some time until the transfer starts, since it can take some time until one of the target peers accepts your connection request.

Just like any other application which accesses the Internet, Symella generates network traffic. You should be aware that mobile network operators usually charge for the amount of downloaded data.

Symella is free software and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Main Features

• Follows Gnutella 0.6 draft
  Most things that could be solved on this mobile platform are in it. Handshake, standard Gnutella messages, Pong caching, connecting, querying, downloading (except Push messages). It doesn't have a sharing subsystem though, it has no sense having one on a small platform like Symbian - it concentrates on searching and downloading. It has no GGEP or HUGE implementation, just plain Gnutella messages.
  
• Uses GWebCache
  As the draft suggests, it uses GWebCache, hostcaching and a primitive message caching to make communication easier.
  
• Search
  Does the search by the book - collects files with the same hash into one result, resulting in faster download later.
  
• Swarming
  Uses swarming technique for downloading - splits the selected file into more small parts, and downloads them simultaneously - faster and more effective than the one-threaded download.
  
• Multiple downloads
  Only one search can be active at a time, but multiple downloads can run in the background, even from different searches.
  
• Opens downloaded file
  Open the downloaded file with the corresponding program, if available (MP3 player, picture viewer, etc)
  

System requirements

Currently, only S60 3rd and 2nd edition mobile devices are supported.

Installation

Symella is a self-signed application, which means it hasn't been sent to Symbian for testing. Before installation you should make sure your phone has the "Software installation" option of the Application manager set to "All" (Tools / App. mgr. / Settings), otherwise the phone may refuse to install the application.

Screenshots