The KDE community continues to develop and improve the Plasma interface to make it suitable for use in mobile devices to provide a free and secure alternative for users of Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, and this month the community reviewed the latest features that the development team has added to the KDE Plasma Mobile in the previous month, May 2021, version 21.05.
The first change with Plasma mobile v21.05 is that from now on, the KDE team will release updates for KDE applications for Plasma Mobile every month, which will enable users to get the latest available features and improvements more quickly and enables developers to bring more Plasma applications to the Flathub store.
Support for multiple home screen pages has been also improved in this month's version of the Plasma mobile interface as many home screen components have been isolated, but work on this feature is not over yet, and developers still need to do more work to allow users to switch home screens. On the other hand, a more powerful audio overlay has been added to the shell, allowing for quickly controlling application volumes, switching inputs/outputs, and controlling their volumes, and a list version of the home screen drawer is also under development.
In other news, the lock screen now features a keyboard toggle, allowing you to use complex passwords that contain text and symbols instead of just numbers, a bug in the notification panel that prevents the "Do Not Disturb" and "Clear All" buttons from showing has been fixed, and the SIM pin dialog box now follows the system color scheme.
The KClock app has gained a feature that lets you create timer presets, allowing you to quickly set timers for frequent things, like making tea for example. A +1 minute button has also been added to the timer page of the app, allowing you to quickly increase the duration of the running timer, and an error message has been added in the application that warns you if the timer/alarm daemon is not running in the background. The KClock Plasmoid time tool also got some improvements this month, with a reworked look, and a settings page added to customize it.
The Calindori calendar app displays a confirmation message when the user wants to delete a specific event, and the app doesn't show more than two-page columns at the same time in the desktop version of Calindori. Kweather now works properly when running as a Flatpak. Also, the locations page was improved to properly handle long location names, so they do not overflow out of the screen, and the dynamic weather forecast page was improved to have a maximum width set with widescreen layouts.
The Plasma Mobile calculator app icon has been redesigned, and a few improvements have been landed to it, among them, Kalk now recognizes the decimal separator of the system language, and pressing "=" to add the result to the input field will not cause a parsing error in some regions (e.g. German) anymore, and fractions are now output as float types. Kalk is also now available on Flathub and Manuel has redesigned the app icon.
The Phone book application now uses a toolbar to display actions such as calling or texting a contact, which frees up space that can now be used to display more information about a contact, such as a contact’s birthday. Furthermore, scrolling the contact list is much smoother now, and the wording throughout the app is more consistent.
The dialer app got a lot of user interface improvements, you can now query your phone's IMEI number by dialing *#06#, long press 1 takes you to your voicemail, incoming call notification and in-call display now show the name of a contact and photo instead of the phone number. The dialer now also populates the dial pad with the number instead of immediately calling the contact to avoid accidental calls tapping an entry in the contacts list, and it's now possible to mute you and divert the audio to the speakers.
The Spacebar SMS app supports opening links in chats, the app now sorts chats by the last contacted time, and the development team has also added a warning that informs the user if they are trying to send a text message to a unique SMS number.
There are two new applications have been added to the KDE Plasma Mobile application group this month, and it comes to a Mastodon client named Tokodon, which allows you to browse the home, local and global timeline; show account information; post toots, and replies (with attachments) and lets you use it with multiple accounts at the same time. The second new app is the Kasts podcast player, which currently supports a play queue for episodes, has a lock screen and notification panel media controls on Linux, and will prevent the system/phone from suspending while listening to podcasts.
Last but not least, the settings application now includes more of the modules that are already in the Plasma Desktop version. These include AutoStart, Night Color, Displays, Software Update, Notifications, and Lock screen. The Angelfish default web browser has acquired a web application manager to enable the user to remove installed web applications, and A bug where the size of images was distorted in some cases has been fixed on Alligator RSS/feed reader.
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