S60 Open to new features

I am on a holiday, enjoying the beach and sun. Good thing about holidays, besides the obvious, is spending time with old friends.

I was talking with a colleague from a past life, who is a java veteran. We were discussing the java integration on his mobile phone.

The integration on his phone was simply a menu item for java applications. He was not happy about this behavior at all. Unfortunately for him, he is not using a S60 device.

S60 does not treat java applications special. There are no special menus for java applications, they appear as any other S60 application. The integrated behavior goes beyond application's icon appearing on the menu, covers installation as well. It is possible to install java applications via browser directly from a web site, with the PC Suite or directly from the memory card. The end result is java applications provide the familiar end user experience.

I do not know, if first class java experience is enough to convince my buddy to get an S60 phone but I was able to brag about for a good half hour.

I have been craving to write about one of my most frequently used java application, Google's GMail client for mobile. It is an application that provides quick and easy access to GMail. As you may have already guess by now, it is a java application.

Installing the GMail's mobile client is easy, just point your phone's browser to www.gmail.com/app and download the application your S60 will take care of the rest. Application provides all the features that I expect to find, besides reading and composing, the familiar "archive" and "star" functionality is there. Search works the same way in the web based GMail application, including searching for fields such as from, to, subject etc. It also provides the possibility to view mails with certain labels, but I could not find a way to apply labels.

Google pays special attention to attachments and converts them so that they can be viewed within the application without any need for special viewers. I have tried pdf and word documents and it works fine. Unfortunately application does the same treatment for the links inside your emails. Instead of directly opening the link, application tries to open a Google generated mobile friendly version. This is a futile and annoying feature for S60 devices that has the new S60 browser.

Another feature that is worth mentioning are the key shortcuts for certain menu items. For instance pressing 1 on the keypad fires up the search screen. Although It is a very handy feature once you get used to the application. I still miss the common S60 shortcuts such as pressing the clear 'C' key to delete items etc.

I must also say something for the user interface before I conclude this post. The user interface uses custom components instead of the standard components. It works quite well with devices with traditional layouts such as 6290, but on devices such as E90 where layouts are unusual and two screens (or screen orientations) exist things start to get rough. If the application is started on the outer phone screen and the switched to inner screen, it does not scale and becomes hard to use until restarted. Another annoyance is due to E90's inner screen menu buttons.They are on the sides, but GMail client seems not to be aware of that so the menus are harder to use. Actually these problems with the user interface are not specific to mobile GMail client. Any application that uses custom widgets do have similar problems and due to the limitations in the MIDP UI toolkit (aka. LCDUI) most applications do render their own widgets. Fortunately, we have been working on a solution to resolve these limitations and we will have it available soon, but this is subject of a different post.

Bottom line, GMail client for mobile is a fast, and easy to use java application that runs well on S60 devices.