S60 Open to new features

VoIP area is really getting hot. We are still waiting for Skype for S60 but there are few SIP based VoIP solutions available. Try out Truphone. Truphone provides free phone calls across the US and Canada until end of this year and UK users can call free to landlines in 40 countries worldwide. IP calls between Truphone users are naturally free. I had old SW version in my E60 so I had to try famous Nokia software services. It worked perfectly. Then just installing of Truphone.

For some reason I was not able to download it OTA to device. I got SMS link for download as promised but error message “unable to download Truphone” was very persistent. Fortunately there is another solution. You can download sis-file and settings to PC and transfer to phone over IR, BT or cable. It worked. One small trick was needed. SIP registration has to be changed to always on (default on the phone is “when needed”). I’m also using this over WCDMA now, so some configuration manipulation needed there (as default and recommended mode is WLAN), but nothing too complicated. Anyway I made test call to Finnish landline and it WORKED! Finland was not mentioned in the country list with free calls, but seems to be OK in here as well. So here it is, feely available voice calls, unlimited minutes. Seems to work also to mobile phones now in Finland. You can start to make free phone calls over WLAN at home and hot spots. Supported devices are E60, E61, E70 and it will be soon release for N80, N70, N71, N90, N91, N92, N93.

Overall this is a step to the right direction. Nokia led group agree on a series of new initiatives to improve environmental performance. But have a look to this:

To reduce the energy consumption of mobile phones the manufacturers have agreed to take action by equipping phones with reminders to unplug chargers once the battery is recharged. Nokia plans to have these alerts in new phones by the middle of next year. Nokia estimates that if this measure led to only 10% of the world's mobile phone users turning off the electricity supply to the chargers after use this would save enough energy in one year to power 60,000 European homes annually.

Is it really so that charger consumes energy all the time when it’s connected to phone regardless of battery situation? At least I’m charging my phone over night. It’s my daily routine and that’s the easiest way to remember to do it. Reminder on the phone to remove charger sounds very weird solution for me. How about developing chargers to be able to detect battery status and power off automatically? Doing like that would mean that after few year 100% of used Nokia phones are saving energy regardless of end users attention to this issue. Making a difference requires sometimes more effort than writing 2 lines of sw to have a remimder.

Lot’s of interesting events happening during this autumn. I will take part to 3GSM Asia in Singapore and it’s time to plan the demo for that event. This time my focus is S60 and enterprise segment so demos are about utility and productivity. When figuring out something new, actually something very old come to my mind. Typical me. Do you remember Irma? It was small accessory to connect Nokia 9210 communicator to projector and you could use Communicator to run powerpoints and connect it to normal projector. Now 4 years later, you don’t need anything special to do the same trick. Only S60, powerpoint office application in it and for example N93 which has TV-out connector. Just plug to the projector and it’s ready. This would be easy to demonstrate and we haven’t done before in any event. “Complete S60 business tool, leave your heavy laptop at office”. Sounds nice but lacks credibility. I believe that in the future normal business user could survive without laptop in short business trips and just have smartphone, connect to emails and even use it for showing presentations. But honestly, I wouldn’t do that today. Demos must have reality base and this is lacking it. I wonder what happened to Flander and Irma on 2002? When introducing new technology products, you shouldn’t be too much ahead of time. My 3GSM Asia demo planning continues. Come to see the outcome on 16th of October, Stand number D15 in Suntec Singapore International Convention & Exhibition Centre.

My blog entries have been short and rare. Sorry about that. The reason is that I have had quite busy weeks because of coming internal milestone in our development next software version or S60. I can tell that quite visible changes and improved usability will come but yet it’s not the right time to tell more. More interesting to everyone is now to wait and see how the 3rd Edition FP1 products look like. PF1 platform software has been ready for a while so we can expect quite soon to see products based on that.

But now I need to catch a plane to UK. On tomorrow morning I will be speaking in Orange & Nokia learning institute. If you happen to be there, please come to say hello. It’s always nice to see readers.