S60 “gets it”
During the recent SmartPhone Show 2008 in London we were showing off the S60 5th Edition software on new Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic. I expected a lot of folks to be interested in the touch enabled User Interface and I was certainly not disappointed in the reaction from the crowd. However, what did surprise me was the interest in some of the other things we talked about.
It seems that a lot of folks tends to equate S60 with Nokia products and assume that the only option for getting content like music and videos for playback on the device is through a Nokia channel like OVI and the Nokia Music Store.
That is certainly a great option, but when they saw how easy it is to use any of a number of commercial sites for acquiring music in addition to the Nokia Music Store, that’s when the eyes opened wider and the questions started to fly. MP3 was an expected format, along with M4A and eAAC+, but not so many knew that WMA playback is now part of the S60 Music Player’s capability (originally announced in Cannes in Feb. of 2005).
For example, the Rhapsody music store was dealing up Britney, Coldplay, Jason Mraz, M.I.A, Ne-Yo, Nickelback and Pink in .wma files that included Windows DRM, and they played like a dream on the S60 5th Edition product as well as the S60 3rd Edition FP2 devices we were displaying.
Another thing that was interesting to showgoers was the use of Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) for quickly and easily moving music or video content using either Windows Media Player or the stand-alone clients provided by the content shops themselves.
Amazon’s Video on Demand service was the source for some TV episodes of The Office, Heroes, My Name is Earl, and Eureka and the combination of the easy transfer of video and the beautiful playback experience on the 3.2″ nHD (640 x 360) 16mil color display of the Nokia 5800 really got some attention. The .wmv files with Windows DRM were handled perfectly by the S60 Media Player.
So where the heck is Ogg Vorbis support? You have the multimedia framework, so adding codecs is doable, and OggPlay makes it clear that it works just fine on the hardware. The format is also royalty free. This is a serious omission!
After a little more research, including reading http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=83618 - I can conclude that the lack of Vorbis support is made impossible to correct precisely because you’re NOT getting it. Apparently the Music Player app ignores the Vorbis MMF plugin because it does not have DRM garbage.
I’d much rather have a player capable of playing Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and the like, than the useless DRMed formats you’re bragging about.
s60 gets it?
don’t think so.
i like my nokia e71 but it has a lot of flaws.
* the nokia suite software is crap. it’s slow and akward to use. about once a month i use it on a windows pc at work (i use mac and linux at home) to check for software updates. every time without fail it wants to upgrade itself and downloads 40-50mb. what new features are been added to the software? none, it’s just a flippin software udate program. why is there no mac/linux version? a small but annoying thing is that it is the only program i know that insists on adding two icons to a windows system tray in windows. screen real estate is valuable and that really irks me,
* 2 years ago 8gb would have been great in a media player. that is the max that my e71 supports. but i carry an ipod classic for my media these days. 60+ movies and equal amount of tv shows. plus music. my music is about 12gb alone. i could just carry my music. but transferring to and from the e71 is a pain with large media files so copying on 1-2 movies every day or so would drive me bonkers. to get pictures off it is quicker to just eject the card and plug it in bypassing pc suite altogether. however this triggers media player when it restarts to claim that the database is corrupt and then it takes 3-4 minutes to search the whole card again.
* search. the searh on the e61 and e61i did exactly what i wanted. it started quickly and could be made to search one, multiple or all apps. the new pretty version takes forever to start as it loads all my notes. what is the point of all that memory if you’re expected to only have less than 100 notes? why is there no option to cancel the preload all data? and instead of the multiple search i can only search one or all apps. an upgrade to the app by somebody who doesn’t use the damn thing!
* minor problem in convert. when calculating temperatures it won’t take minus values.
sorry for the rant but they are bloody annoyances for what is other wise a very good device.
but adding touch i feel is like psion chasing palm when they already made the better device. the e71 can be used one handed which for a mobile device is important. i can be standing on public transport holding on for dear life and use the e71. carry shopping bags and use it. an ipod touch or iphone would be pretty useless. there are occasions when two hands can be brought to bear but it limits the device in my view.