S60 Open to new features

My better half was organizing pictures and videos in her PC. She came to me and asked, what is this file with 3gp extension. "My PC is not showing or playing it". Luckily there was a telco guy in the family who had the answer. File was from mobile phone and it was a video file and Windows XP was not able to show it.

You know that I'm traumatized by MMS. MMS rollout changed my view about telco services. Wireless Village was the final nail to the coffin what comes to my belief in telco services. There were many reason why I didn't like MMS and I have written about those in here earlier. One reason a poor interoperability with internet services and PCs (video format is a good example). I thought that things have changed during the years and maybe over 5 years old service has good support in different domains. Interoperability must be there, we have Microsoft in the game now, they have well over 10% global market share of smartphones and working closely with operators so there must be support some main telco formats also in PC. Out of box Windows Media player was not able to show 3gp file, fine. Maybe there is easy solution and plugin available for download. I spent some 30 minutes searching from web 3gp plugin for Windows Media Player, couldn't find it. My conclusion, Windows Media Player doesn't support 3gp files.

I know there are other solution like PC Suite, QuickTime or numerous conversion software. She doesn't want to install extra applications to her PC, they will slow it down eventually. Old 3gp videos from Angkor Wat remained black boxes in the Windows file explorer. 

Usually I don't comment about competition, but this time I want to do it because this is also relevant to S60 and smartphone market in general.

Apple iPhone was launched yesterday. I must say that it's touch UI looks really cool. HW design is really from 21st century and it's different than other smartphones have. No randomly placed buttons around the device in every surface. Fits to my personal taste. 

Some may say it's not a smartphone because there is no extensibility option i.e. it's closed environment, but for me it is a smartphone. There is also some short of extensibility option via Widgets. Multimedia features, email and full web browsing. I would recommend competitor intelligence guys to include iPhone sales to total smartphone market in future, no question about it.

Welcome competition! This proves that you can get to operator portfolio in US with Wi-fi. From the feature details on web I couldn't find other traditional telco services than CS voice and SMS. Nothing else is really necessary? Or maybe it's too early to say. Consumers will decide.  

This will increase awayness of smartphone capabilities, like web browsing, and boost the total market growth. Competition is not a new thing among mobile device manufacturers and I'm very happy that we have Apple in the club.