S60 Open to new features

3GSM was last week and it was a good reminder about size of telecom business. Big companies, big business, money and influencing power. One nice aspect in telecom business is that you actually affect to lives of huge number of people. You can provide cheap phones to developing countries and give tools for economic growth and better living standards. Or you can deliver tech devices for people who have almost everything and make their life hopefully easier, more effective at work or more entertaining at freetime. I don't know how you others in the telecoms find motivation. Get food and heating for wife and children and money to travel to Seychelles- that's a good one too. One motivation booster of course is that I'd like to see everything done in more environmentally friendly way. Never really got change to influence to this in Nokia, but IMHO this is going to be important purchasing decision soon.

I'm naturally more focusing to TDD (Tech Device Delivering. 7 years ago I worked in the area of Time Division Duplex:-). I want the technology development and commercial adaptation to happen as fast as possible. Lot's of things have happened. When we entered to new millennium we didn't have color screens or packet data. The first S60 phone was also the first Nokia GPRS phone with email. Cool achievements during the years but when I compare to internet innovation, I'm not that satisfied. Youtubes, Myspaces, Secondlifes etc. I truly believe that Wimax or 3.9G is going to change lives less than Secondlife. Which one is getting more investments?

Telecom is big, HUGE and revenues are enormous. Fascinating! When talking with operators it becomes clear that the size of the business is actually one of the biggest problems. Voice and SMS is the business and everything besides them seems worthless tinkering. There has been significant growth in data services but business value is still clearly in POTS. If I look from operator perspective, openness and new services can actually mean more risk than opportunity. Look the iPhone, it's closed. The closed platform gives control to operator and removes risk that someone is going to use VoIP in a manner that is not contributing to revenues like CS voice today (Look the UMA promise). New service creation requires lots of work, service takeup can be slow and worst case is if it creates more risks for current revenue sources. When there is oligopoly in local market and not too much competition around, why to take unnecessary risks. Business might not be growing that much anymore but everyting is still ok. Enough money to buy 2 tickets to Seychelles.

In the certain market control and walls are higher than in the others. US is one extreme. There was a interesting discussion about net neutrality in RCR Wireless news. Skype is demanding net neutrality in wireless. Note the most humorous comment of the week. Award is given to Cellphone Association CTIA. "Skype's 'recommendations' will freeze the innovation and choice hundreds of millions of consumers enjoy today." I'm so happy that someone looks after telcoconsumer:-)

If you are interested to see more 3rd Edition PF2 screenshots in familiar use cases, have a look to s60 pages. The flash animation is now updated to FP2 level. Graphical UI transition effects are not included yet to this demo. We'll add them later on.

3GSM starts today. S60 is located adjacent to main Nokia stand in the Hall 8. Come to visit and see the latest S60 devices and features, operator services and customization on S60 and tune your S60 phone insideout. I'll be there whole week to demonstrate PF2. See you there!

In my initial FP2 post I promised to look into developer aspects of it. FP2 has strong emphasis of making life of developers easier. Open C is the biggest new thing but there are enhancements also in other areas. We have updated Flash Lite to Flash Lite 2.1 and the taken the first step in Java platform evolution to Mobile Service Architecture (MSA).

Open C

Tommi already told the most important points of Open C. For those of you who have been following Symbian announcements lately, Open C was not that big surprise. On 16th of January this came out:

Symbian Ltd today announced the introduction of POSIX libraries on Symbian OS™, which will significantly reduce the effort required to migrate existing desktop and server components, and mobile applications from other platforms, onto Symbian OS. The move will help broaden and deepen application development for Symbian OS and help improve developer productivity. Symbian OS is the market leading operating system for smartphones.

P.I.P.S. - PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian - will enable C programmers to more easily migrate existing middleware and applications, either commercial or open source, to Symbian OS by providing standard POSIX C APIs on Symbian OS. This has been achieved by supplying a new framework of POSIX C APIs for use by both C and C++ programmers. The new APIs are packaged into industry standard libraries - libc, libm, libpthread and libdl - and are tightly integrated with Symbian OS to optimize performance and memory usage. In addition, an updated tool chain will further reduce migration effort.

Now when Open C was announced with FP2 it brought 5 more standard C libraries available for S60 developers. Those libraries are libz, libcrypt, libcrypto, libglib, libssl. The result is an initial release of the Open C library that covers more than 70 percent of the functions contained in the desktop and server projects on which the mobile libraries are based. The implementation includes 100 percent coverage of libraries containing such mobile-critical features as password hashing (libcrypt), compression (libz), and loading DLLs (libdl), while scaling back coverage in libraries containing esoteric functions that hold little relevance to mobile developers.

This effort makes native development on S60 easier and is especially important when porting open source projects to S60. The core application logic and functionality is not dependent on the specific platform on which it executes but naturally also Symbian OS programming skills are needed when porting applications to S60. Forum Nokia pages provide more details.

Java

3rd Edition FP2Java technology supported is Java ME, consisting of MIDP 2.1 CLDC 1.1. For the first time we comply with Mobile Service Architecture. The idea of the Mobile Service Architecture (MSA) to minimize fragmentation of Java. The Mobile Service Architecture defines two stacks: a full MSA stack that comprises 16 JSRs, and a subset of eight JSRs. FP2 follows MSA subset implementation.

If you are thinking, what is behind this MSA and where it all started, have a look to this old Nokia press release. Two and half year ago Nokia and Vodafone were ready to announce MSA. Naturally MSA development work had started earlier than this announcement and development is still ongoing. As you know first PF2 devices are estimated to enter to market 2H2007 so 3 years after initial MSA announcement. I wouldn't call us fast in this case.

Flash Lite

FP2 Flash Lite version is upgraded to 2.1. It has been available from Adobe pages, but from FP2 onward this version is preinstalled to the devices. More information about Flash Lite 2.1 can be found from Adobe pages. A depth of integration is one big difference in FP2 Flash Lite 2.1 when compared to the downloadable version. The downloadable Flash Lite 2.1 is good for standalone Flash applications. Preinstalled works perfectly also with platform applications. S60 Browser is a good example application where Flash Lite components can be displayed. It's a good idea to utilize already available tools and environment to develop Flash Lite 2.1 compliant applications and content.

Nokia is providing free downloadable maps for different platforms including S60. Press release can be found from here. Smart2go mapping and navigation platform is going to be available for free download on Saturday, February 10th.

Navigation and mapping is usually needed when outside of home country. Then people face problems with outrageous data roaming fees. This application seems to be very clever. "When traveling to a new country for holiday one can download the relevant maps via PC in advance and subscribe to the navigation service for the duration of the holiday at affordable cost." Brilliant! When backpacking around the world, just pop in to internet cafe and download maps for next country.

S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 was announced today.  I have been marketing responsible of the release and finally it's possible to talk publicly about this fortcoming release.

Let's have a look what's in there. In the press release we emphasize development aspects. But let's start from the UI.

Usability has several improvements in applications and in general. Multitasking is essential feature of smartphone but the truth is that all S60 users don't know about it. Long press of menu key is not that intuitive way to find it. In FP2 onward multitasking works like before, but in addition to that it can be found always under options menu (right  left softkey). See the new line "Active applications". This will lead to same multitasker menu as long press of menu key. 

Another very visible change in all the applications and menus is having labeled softkey in the middle. The softkey has different functions in different apps and situations and labeling it makes UI easier to use. Less clicks, more intuitive UI.

Active Idle has gone through renewal as well. Original Active Idle with horizontal customizable toolbar has now vertical toolbar option, which makes possible to show more application specific information on idle screen. There is RSS/Atom feed support so selected news feed can scroll on the bottom of the idle screen. Everyone is familiar with thumbnail picture feature when phone is ringing and there is picture saved to phonebook. This feature is now enhanced so that better quality pictures can be used and picture takes whole screen, it's not just thumbnail anymore. Looks cool.

Own pictures can be used much more widely to personalize UI. There is a slideshow screensaver. It allows you freely select pictures from the gallery to be used as screensaver. Also  wallpaper has similar type slideshow functionality. Again any pictures from the Gallery can be used.

 Messaging application doesn't have separate mechanism to write SMS and MMS anymore. You just select create a message and bearer is selected automatically. If the final message has only text, it's SMS. If there are other media components included to message, such as pictures or video, message type is MMS. Small, but important change. Messaging toolbar improves usability further.

Phonebook has been able to show contacts data from phone memory and SIM card. However there has been one big limitation. You either have phone or SIM card in the same view. In FP2 this is history. Phonebook supports combined phone+SIM view.

Users of S60 are very aware of profiles and personalization of those. There is nice improvement in FP2, you can set timer for profile. So you can set the phone for silent for one hour and then it goes back to general profile automatically. 24h is maximum time if timer is activated.

Browser is the most used data application in S60. Browsing is popular and people like to download media files. Currently if you download music or video file, you have to wait until file is completely downloaded and then you can open an play it. FP2 supports progressive downloading from browser which makes possible instant playback during downloading. Feeling is more like streaming type of. This will definitely increase usability and usage of media file downloading. Downloading function has also other improvements. When for example mp3 is downloaded, phone will as "Save as" option so it's easy to set it as ringing tone. After picture download you can set it as wallpaper in similar way.

As mentioned in the beginning, there are many changes in developer platform which will make life of developers easier. I will dig into non UI features in coming days. Product overview of 3rd Edition can be found from here. It includes now also FP2 features.