A lot of startup companies showed off their wares at this year's Symbian Expo, including the impressive SpinVox system for converting voice messages to text, writes I must admit I've always been a fan of the Symbian smartphone platform and its predecessor, Psion, but when I decided to go to the Symbian Expo, I wasn't sure what to expect. I'd never heard of about 90 percent of the exhibitors, many of which were young startup companies who depend on Symbian for their existence.

I was fascinated by the technology demonstrated by Scalado. Its software processes images from camera phones in a clever way that is fast and uses very little memory. The Jpeg images are processed in compressed form rather than the usual scheme of expanding, processing and then compressing again.

This leads to all sorts of neat features that you wouldn't expect to see on a mobile phone. You can take an image and edit it in many ways before sending it or filing it. I especially liked the distortion effect that mimics the curved mirrors that we used to see at fairgrounds, and although I couldn't think of many business applications for Scalado, it's neat stuff.

SpinVox, although not reliant on Symbian, is a startup company with a unique and very useful product to provide more flexibility to users of voicemail services. What happens is that when someone leaves a voice message for you, the SpinVox system analyses it, converts it to text, and then forwards it to you as one or more SMS messages.

There are many advantages depending on the way you use your phone. If you spend a lot of time in meetings you can leave your phone on but divert all calls to SpinVox. Your voicemail messages will then be delivered silently as text, and you can easily bang off a quick reply without being too conspicuous.

SpinVox also makes it easier to deal with those great stacks of voicemail messages just when you haven't got a pen and paper to hand. Apparently, 85 percent of people never learn how to use voicemail properly and often make second calls to hear messages again. SpinVox should appeal to that group.

I must admit I was sceptical, since I thought that speaker-independent, connected-speech recognition was still in the research labs. However, I tried it and it works amazingly well, although the SpinVox people are pretty tight-lipped about the technology. The key seems to be that it doesn't have to work in real time, so the software gets more time to work on processing the message; and SpinVox claims that the system is adaptive and will improve as more and more people use it.

The system can sometimes fail with heavy accents, foreign languages or lots of strange words, but at least it has the grace to admit it and send you a message that tells you how to go straight to the original voice recording.

SpinVox makes a charge for each message delivered and there are pre-pay and volume discounts. I think SpinVox has a great product and a great future.

There's clearly an enormous amount of activity in the Symbian world and there was an air of confidence around that had not been evident before. I'm already looking forward to next year's show.