S60 Open to new features

Apple shipped 14 million iPods in 3 months. Motorola total 44.7 million mobile phones at the same time. It included 13 million thin phones, RAZR. ROKR volumes, hmm, something different. Nokia’s number came out yesterday. 84 million phones. How many S60 phones? That was not mentioned. But Multimedia group made good progress in 2005 and most of the devices are running S60. Sony-Ericsson shipped 16.1 million handsets including 3 million Walkman phones. So it’s very clear that mobile music is hot. Thin phones are almost as hot. Walkman brand is not dead.

Everyone remembers the time before polyphonic ringingtones or realtones. I heard recently “säkkijärven polkka” ringingtone played by Nokia 2110. Wonderful sound! I want that to my current phone. I don’t want to have mp3 or polyphonic, I want to have retro “piip-piip” -tones and sound should be authentic. I wonder can the loudspeakers of current phones do the job decently? And the most important question is where to find non polyphonic säkkijärven polkka –tone?

I’m concerned about innovation speed in telecom business. On the other hand I’m quite impressed about things happening in internet, Skype, podcasting, blogs and RSS just to name few. We have seen shrinking profits of telecoms and telecom stocks underperforming stock market in general. The problems of the giants have been noticed widely.

Did you notice news some time ago that Nokia and Grameen Foundation are delivering affordable telecommunication to rural villages in Africa? I’m really happy to see these activities happening in Nokia. This is not S60 achievement, but shows that the company as a whole is doing something valuable, more than just adding shareholder value.

Few articles in S60 blog have already referred to S60 360 user study . From the user demographics we can see that about 80% of people taking part to study are male. I believe that study gender distribution is very close to general S60 figures so most likely less than 20% of S60 users are female. I can’t blame women. In general S60 products are bigger than other mobile phones and I’m very sorry dear licensees, but I wouldn’t call S60 devices particularly beautiful. There are some S60 products which have some uniqueness in design, specialty which doesn’t ruin the usability. I think Panasonic X800 is one of the best. Nokia’s E60 is also nice and slim.

Let’s combine couple ingredients from my earlier articles and add some facts and estimations:
1. File transfer between S60 memory card and PC is easy (S60 3rd Edition onward). No extra SW or drivers required.
2. Most of these S60 devices sold this year will be 3rd Edition or later.
3. There were 25 million S60 devices sold year 2005. It’s estimated that number will double 2006.
4. Tourism industry is growing steadily over 4% per year globally for next 15 years.
5. GSM/GPRS roaming is overcharged – mobile travel services can not be online services.

I don’t believe too much in ebook concept. At least I don’t want to read long stories from a small screen. But I believe in ebook version of Lonely Planet or any travel guide with good content (Let’s Go, Fodor’s). Travel guide on your mobile would be just great. Guidebook information gets old quickly anyway. I don’t want them to my bookshelf. When you have an electronic version, you can easily search the right item. If there is GPS integrated, it’s even more convenient.