Symbian Toys

A row of mid-2000s candybar and slider smartphones on a workbench beside a laptop showing firmware tooling

Symbian Toys was the personal software workshop of Marco Bellino, a freelance developer based in Turin, Italy, and one of the small independent projects that kept the Series 60 platform interesting for the people who used it. Between 2006 and the middle of the 2010s it published eight pieces of software for Symbian phones and for the PCs people used to service them: NaviFirm+, NokiaCooker, RomPatcher+, Guardian, SISXplorer, UnlockMe!, FlashSMS and IconHider.

Archive notice. Symbian Toys was an independent hobbyist software project for the Symbian Series 60 platform, which Nokia discontinued in 2013. These pages preserve the project's own documentation as it was published. The software is no longer distributed here, and no support was ever offered for it. Device and platform names appear for identification only; the project was never affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any device manufacturer.

The site described itself plainly. "In this website you can find some hobbyist software I developed during these years," the front page read, alongside a standing apology that the volume of email arriving every day made individual replies impossible and a request that readers check the FAQ sections first. That tone — technical, unpolished, written by the person who wrote the code — is the reason these pages are worth keeping.

What was published here

The catalogue divided cleanly in two. Some of it ran on the phone: Guardian, an anti-theft system that watched for SIM changes; UnlockMe!, which recovered a handset's own unlock code; FlashSMS, which sent class-0 flash messages; and IconHider, a small utility for tidying the application menu. The rest ran on a desktop and talked to the phone or to its firmware: NaviFirm+, by a distance the best-known thing the site ever put out; NokiaCooker, for building customised firmware images; RomPatcher+, an improved build of an existing ROM patcher; and SISXplorer, an inspector and extractor for SIS installation packages.

Almost all of it was freeware. Where a donation was invited it unlocked an optional feature rather than the program itself, and the site was explicit that everything shipped "as is", with no warranty and no technical support of any kind.

Close-up of a small phone screen showing a plain list interface of the kind used by Series 60 utilities

News archive

The front page ran as a dated news column. The entries below are preserved from it.

Guardian 3rd Edition — 3 December 2007

Subscriptions to the Guardian 3rd Edition beta-testing programme closed. A thousand testers were to be selected during December from the applications received, with the first beta builds going out to them and a public release planned for January 2008 on a separate site dedicated to the software. The announcement promised two site updates a week through December, on Thursdays and Sundays, to keep applicants informed of progress.

Guardian 2.2 — 16 September 2007

A substantial maintenance release. The change-log recorded: plugin syntax made case-insensitive; an integrated cleaner added to remove earlier versions; a confirmation message after writing a donation code; improvements to icon hiding and showing; general code improvements; a fix for shutdown and restart on the N70 in the Misc plugin; a fix for occasionally empty SMS sent by the Forward plugin; a fix for a crash when handling certain messages; a fix for the icon reappearing after a remote disable; the "Request Code" field replaced with the handset IMEI; and every UID changed to avoid conflicts with a very old beta build.

Guardian 3rd Edition announced — 23 July 2007

Development of a 3rd Edition version began, with a request — repeated in capitals — not to email about it, and an application form for anyone wanting to join internal beta testing. Only submissions containing real user data were considered.

SISXplorer 1.1 — 18 July 2007

Released with thanks to the artist P@sco for the graphics. New in this build: an option menu to enable and disable panels, a TXT viewer, an RSC viewer in beta, an MIF/SVG viewer in beta, an E32Image viewer, and a tooltip showing decimal values. The MBM viewer gained support for 12 bits-per-pixel images and better selection handling; tabs began showing and hiding automatically; unknown-format MBM images were handled more gracefully; and colour was removed from the hexadecimal viewer for performance. Fixes covered a freeze when resizing the form, a broken "Extract Selected" option, creation date and time, reversed UID2 and UID3 fields, hangs in the hex viewer, an exception when opening a read-only file, and the text-box cursor.

SISXplorer 1.0 — 17 March 2007

The first public release. SISXplorer combined Explorer-like navigation of 3rd Edition SIS archives with a theme viewer: it could extract every image from a 3rd Edition theme, let a user check that a program would not install anything suspicious, and inspect the contents of any file through an integrated hexadecimal viewer. At that point it handled 3rd Edition packages only, with support for 2nd Edition promised if the project found enough support.

Guardian 2.1 — 4 December 2006

A small update, issued because the internal uninstall procedure in version 2.0 did not always complete correctly; everyone running 2.0 was advised to update. The same entry announced that Guardian was now available in Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Dutch, Czech, Chinese, Arabic and Ukrainian as well as English and Italian.

Where the software went

Symbian was discontinued, the phones aged out, and the project ended. In September 2021 its author published the full source code on GitHub — Guardian, IconHider, FlashSMS, UnlockMe!, NokiaCooker, RomPatcher+, SISXplorer and the shared library behind them. That release, rather than any download link here, is where the work now lives. The release archive on this site records every version the project shipped and points at the corresponding repository.