S60 Open to new features

Now we lucky scandinavians (Link to Finnish, Swedish, Danish pages) can order a free FON access point. By joining to FON you promise to keep your FON AP active and to share it for other foneros.
I definitely will join. Has someone tested this with S60 Wifi phones?

X Series was launched by 3 Group last week. Lot’s of stories, here and there. “Walled garden has fallen”. This was not the first flat rate packet. Even in Republic of mobile stagnation (some call it Finland) we have one operator to offer it. Flat rate is not main stream and sure this is a one step ahead and more operators will follow.

When I was reading about this deal one picture from James Enc's presentation came to my mind.

Is X Series ready mixed salad or salad buffet? Is it both ready made salad and buffet?
Now when 3 has come to flat rate, let’s think about operator profitability. More the people use these services, more capacity is needed and smaller profit they get. Or is there some short of revenue share already? Surely internet service provider has to pay to get preinstalled to devices. Why to include only devices without Wi-Fi? The operator gets anyway the same fixed montly fee. If some of the traffic goes through WiFi and to the competitors broadband, profitability actually increases. Collect the money and let the others bear the cost.
There are people who are not living in UK or not interested about ready made salad. They can use this buffet:

1. Open your flat rate data packet with local operator
2. Download MS Messanger from here
3. Download Skype from here (only for E Series) or use EQO.
4. Yahoo messanger user, Agile helps. (2nd Edition users can download Yahoo Go!)
5. Just use S60 browser and www.google.com.
For Obr and Sling I don’t have a solution. Orb is going to be part of Nokia N80 Internet Edition. Sling announcement was about co-operation with Symbian and them so hopefully it becomes widely available.

Thanks Horia about posting comment. Couple of weeks ago I wrote about Nokia New Year’s Eve concert. It’s true, it’s happening! Stay tuned to www.nokianewyearseve.com

Feature Pack discussion in Tommi’s blog kind of surprises me. Feature Packs are not a new concept. We had them already on top of 2nd Edition. It has never been possible to update from one FP to newer one and it’s still not possible. You can be sure that we’ll make big noise in marketing, if updating becomes possible:-)

There is no business reason not to allow updating. See Intel and Microsoft way of doing business with HW and SW. The business model works fine. Most likely new FP would make your device work slow and you would upgrade it soon to new HW. So it’s bad business of Nokia not to have FP updates, not the opposite.

There was also comment about feature packs and internal releases and naming. There haven’t been 10 different internal releases for 2nd Edition as claimed. Only 2 were not publicly released. One didn’t get licensee phone projects and one was related to CDMA. As you may have noticed S60 CDMA phones doesn’t exist although they were in plans couple of years ago.

Looking from product angle UIQ and S60 have been quite similar packages. Both are using Symbian OS and providing user interface and applications on top of that. One big difference has been ownership situation. UIQ has been owned by Symbian. Naturally it has been separate independent unit but steering because of the financial background has been different to S60. Now this situation is changing and UIQ position becomes very similar to S60. We have Nokia as owner they have Sony-Ericsson. In my opinion this sounds very fair.

Rafe has written excellent article about Symbian history. Very recommend reading if you are interested about early days of smartphones from industry perspective.

LG announced the first S60 device on Smartphone show. I haven’t the tried it yet, but at least spec looks good. HSDPA, 3rd Edition FP2 and small size in the same packet. Development of JoY is going to be finished on 1Q 2007.

There is a one video clip about JoY on Youtube. It was interesting to check what’s there if you just search by S60. Naturally lots of Volvo stuff but also some software related videos. Also clip about Samsung’s latest S60 device (SGH-i520) is there. This seems to be recorded in Symbian stand.

Have you noticed this? Nokia is planning New years eve concerts. I don’t know is this true at all, but sounds interesting and I certainly hope this is true.

Some time ago I was reading this story about Heineken skypecast and thoughts started to fly. 3G phones with videocall capability are getting more common. However usage is not that high. Early technical problems have been solved and video call is quite mature for mass market usage. There is an awareness problem, which has to be corrected. I have one idea for marketing.

Ingredients:
A concert (live aid type)
1. Tickets to physical concert in traditional way.
2. Webcast with advertisement based funding. Broadcasting. (Live aid was broadcasted on TV, but that’s so tv1.0.
3. Virtual presence by videophone.

What I mean by virtual presence by videophone, is a service where users call to specific local number and can see the concert by using the video call function of the phone. But more important is the broadcasting of own video. Thousands of people take part to concert remotely. Big screens on the stadium broadcast simultaneous video streams everywhere from the world. Would it be cool? World united to concerts. Part of calling charges could go to good purpose. Operators, manufactures and artists join together.

How about utilizing video calls to the other purposes? Think about SMS chat channels on TV. Sounds ultimately boring idea, but it is very popular. How to take user created content to new level on TV? Video phones can be utilized. Why this hasn’t happened yet? Is it about the poor penetration of videophones among young generations?

Actually concert with virtual presence sounds quite traditional idea when compared to some new phenomenon like this.