S60 Open to new features

The Symbian Partner Event is taking place in London on 9th of May. Lots of interesting presentations and exhibition.  If you happen to be around, remember to visit S60 booth. I have nice set of Widgets there to demonstrate. See you in London!

One more exhibition experienced and I'm back from Orlando. When comparing the last 2 events, 3GSM and CTIA, there is a huge difference. 3GSM is bigger having about 60000 attendees and CTIA about 35000. In 3GSM we had nice S60 branded booth and in CTIA S60 was presented in Nokia area. The Nokia booth was Texas BIG (although it was Florida:-). It's nice to have lots of space but area felt quite empty. That's not the impression we want to give. But it was same in the other booths, kind of semidead feeling. Of course situation was different when Clinton and Bush senior visited. I happened to have afternoon shift and still at hotel so missed that.

I didn't see any big announcements. We didn't do those and others were pretty quit as well. Of course vibe is different in US where S60 phone penetration is not that high but I was happy to meet so many people who were big fans of S60 and hoping to see S60 devices available in operator portfolios. And only one blogger came to say hello.  See you in Madrid on 25th, if you are coming to S60 community event called S60 Summit. 

I took part to the first ever Telco 2.0 conference in last October. I have already given my endorsements and I do it again. It seems that big conference organizers are just repeating same format every year and pulling together people to make advertising speeches of own products and solutions. Telco 2.0 was different. Truly interesting topics and great interactivity. It was easy to see the organizer's enthusiasm and the final outcome was awesome.

It's not possible for me to take part this time. CTIA Wireless 2007 exhibition in Orlando is held at the same time and I have to be in Florida then. (Florida hmmm. reminds me about some Bombay TV clips but I'm not going to post links to here:-).

The Telco 2.0 event takes 2 days and the first day about business models and strategies. The second day is divided to  4 streams: Digital Youth, Digital Home, Digital Town and Digital Worker. There are many familiar names on the confirmed speaker list. I'm sure that Tommi Ahonen and Norman Lewis will give you new perspective. Few weeks ago I had pleasure to see Rory Sutherland's mindblowing presentation about digital marketing, "open source brand" and "levitating virtual yaks". Rory is Creative Director of OgilvyOne and he is one of the Telco 2.0 speakers. I'm sure you won't be disappointed. Here is one interesting video podcast. Tommi Ahonen interviews Rory and they chat about customers and communities.

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!

I will be showing S60 demonstrations in HP Software Universe in Vienna on 13-15th of December. It would be nice to meet blog readers there. Come to say hello and see the latest S60 development.

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

I’m back home in Helsinki. 3GSM Asia in Singapore was held earlier this week. Event is much much smaller than 3GSM in Barcelona and honestly I was worried after the first day that being there is not a good investement. But we got more and more visitors on second and third day and it was ok event. Operators and developers were the biggest visitor groups. When I went around the exhibition, I was surprised about the amount of companies developing instant messaging solutions.

Operator IM solutions seems to be hot thing, but interesting to see how things are finally developing with famous internet instant messaging providers. There is already 2nd Edition Yahoo messanger for S60 (inbuilt to Yahoo Go), Tencent QQ is available in China and other big will follow. Most of the S60 users, which are going to use mobile IM, have already experience from PC IM clients. They belong to certain community and just want to be in touch to this community with mobile. In my opinion it will be very challenging to make successfull operator IM service. IM heavy users won’t start from zero community. Why people who haven’t taken PC IM into use suddenly want to start with mobile and go to operator IM service? Certainly operator IM can be some interoperabilitywith famous internet IM services, but users are looking for good IM user experience which is familiar to them. Also generic IM clients are making offering even wider. Remember Agile messanger.

We had new devices on display, demos about browser, office apps, GPS and maps, Flash Lite and video broadcasting. Nokia N95 attracted most of the interest in device showcase. I’m sure that new Samsung SGH-i520 and LG JoY would have been a big hit, but unfortunately we had prototypes only for Symbian Smartphone show in London. 4 million N-Series devices sold on Q3 + many many other E-Series and older Nokia S60 phones. Next year will start with beautiful new devices from LG and Samsung and let’s see what is coming out from Nokia in Nokia World Amsterdam 29-30 of November.

Last week I took part to very interesting conference in London called Telco 2.0. Wasn’t sponsored by Nokia. Our dear competitor Motorola had taken that role. Good choice. It truly was a different telco event. Lot’s of interactivity, because of Crystal interactive’s equipment. Speakers were mostly good or even excellent and presentation didn’t have too much marketing BS or own product information.

James Enck from Daiwa has done good work earlier and compressed 2 days to few pages. My favourite speaker came from operator side. Norman Lewis from Orange was incredible. Totally getting thinking to new level. He was talking obout young consumers and their way of using technology and sociological and behavioral aspects. Think about user created content, yes fine we have integrated cameras on mobile and Flickr client but that’s quite nothing. Vision has to be enabling user created content but also user created applications. We are so far away from this with Symbian, Java and Flash Lite. Nice developments are in the pipeline but they tackle more to the developer environment, which is needed indeed, but so much more is needed in few years.

Things really will get interesting with Wi-Fi. Mostly people use it at home or office but public Wi-Fi is real pain in general. Buying air time to hot spots is complicated and pricing is hefty. Boingo is changing this. You pay monthly fee and you get access to 55000 hot spots. Price is 22$ in US now and they are entering to Europe. Expect to see even below 10€ monthly fees and more hot spots. Welcome VoIP, welcome smaller world.

Quite many inspiring speeches and ideas which I will utilize later on. Sling Media deserves some attention, but now I have to run.

The next Telco 2.0 even is end of March. Keep tuned to Telco 2.0 blog.

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.