I’m sure you all know of Offscreen Technologies when it comes to Symbian applications. Well today, I’m going to tell you about “Metal Detector Touch” a previously premium app that recently became free over at the Ovi Store. This is currently only for Symbian S60v5 and will probably stay like that judging on previous Offscreen applications.

Now, you could call this pointless but at least it actually does detect something as opposed to all the “smelly detectors” that are knocking around. It does this using the compass built into the Nokia N97, but all you who have tried using an application that utilizes the inbuilt compass will know one thing for sure; you have to stand waving your phone around in a figure-8 for 30 seconds before you can show off your “new awesome cool app” to your friends.

After you’ve calibrated the compass then it’s pretty straight forward from there on in, simply walk around putting your phone next to stuff that’s metal and, yes you guessed it, it tells you that it’s metal!

But on a serious note, this thing does actually work and can be quite impressive to say it is run from a phone. Anyway, it’s free so what have you got to lose – pop over to the Ovi Store and check it out! Whilst you’re there, you might as well check out the other applications that Offscreen offer, be them free or paid.

Now the obvious question, does it work for those all important treasure hunting times down at the beach? Well to be frank, I don’t know… I haven’t tried – I’ll leave it up to you to get your shiny new phones covered in sand.

- Aden Beckitt