As with part 1 of this feature, I'm ignoring any obvious trivial novelties (Talking Tom Cat, Naked Scanner, Face Effects, Fart Machine, and so on) - sorry, but they're beneath my (and your) notice. Listed here are actual free applications that perform an actual function.

Following criticism from part 1 that a 'top 20' wasn't enough, I've expanded this to the 'top 30'....!

In order then, and taken from the chart here (which is dynamic and always changing, explaining the slightly different order to the screenshot above!):

As with the commercial application line-up in part 1, there's quite a bit of equivalence for casual smartphone users (though geeks will, as ever, gravititate to the apps on Android which are of higher resolution and which usually have more in-depth features). However, there are more gaps here in the freeware line-up. 

From the freeware table above, I'd pick out these Symbian 'gaps':

• a poorer version of Skype without video calling
• the paucity of decent barcode and QR code scanners (Android has several that pick almost any code)
• an official Twitter client (despite the excellence of the Dabr layer on the mobile web)
• an Amazon Kindle client

With services like Skype and Twitter only handled to varying degrees (for free) and with Kindle not supported at all, you can see that we now have one or more possible showstoppers in terms of a user's choice of smartphone platform. Yes, Fring can make video calls, but that's a messy way to go in terms of interoperability with the wider world, yes, you can add Gravity to handle Twitter with ease, but Kindle ebooks are quite widespread and popular now and not being able to handle these at all has definitely put some people off the Symbian platform.

One good point was made in the comments to part 1: the idea that because a platform has multiple applications that basically do the same thing, there's competition among them to keep improving and be the 'best'. We've seen this in the sphere of Facebook clients on Symbian, where having three or four excellent options has spurred each on to get better and better.

And it's here that the relative size of the Symbian app ecosystem does perhaps have an effect - with something like 20 times the number of overall apps, given a roughly similar ratio of good apps to crud, we're left in the situation that there might only be one or two good apps to access a certain service or perform a certain function (remember I got the list down to around 100, famously?), rather than ten on Android or iOS. With the result that the single application only gets better slowly while the ten on other platforms iterate quickly to stay competitive.

In summary, it's not all doom and gloom in the Symbian application ecosystem - 80% of the things that even geeks might want to do with smartphones are catered for to some extent. Whether the missing 20% is important to you will be a personal decision - there are no showstoppers for me (e.g. I've bought Gravity for handling both Twitter and Facebook), but it's understandable if something's missing for you. Or perhaps you want an extra sparkle in terms of eye candy or performance?

With Symbian on the decline in the markets which tend to house the most prolific developers, it's unlikely that the above situation will improve significantly. Which means, ultimately, that we have a part to play. If you're hooked on Symbian and you want to see various apps improve, then contact the developer and ask away. If you want to see a particular service supported then write in to the service's owners (e.g. "When will I be able to use a client for your service on my N8?")

Comments welcome, as always!

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 10 January 2012