S60 Open to new features

Have you seen this one already? Siemens SXG75, first announced already in CeBIT last year is finally shipping and it is indeed Linux-powered as reported by LinuxDevices.com. It seems to have all the latest multimedia stuff including 2 megapixel camera, large QVGA display, AVC video and all the major music formats supported. It's also one of the first smartphones to have integrated GPS.

It will be interesting to see reviews of this baby, and hopefully get one here also to look at. It is based on Trolltech's Qtopia Phone Edition, although not mentioned on their pages.

ps. The cookies ('Remember personal info' check box in comments) now works in my blog also!

Update 1st Feb: It seems it's not a Linux phone after all! Linuxdevices updated their story. Strange business.. Thanks to Simon for noticing this!

I was delighted to read Steve's Multimedia group test of smartphones over at AAS. And not only because latest Nokia Nseries devices running S60 beat Windows Mobile offerings by a margin :)

The article makes a good point about MPEG-4 video recording, which has been getting somewhat lesser attention lately than megapixel cameras and improved optics. Video recording has been around since the very second S60 phone, Nokia 3650. What has been disappointing is that the quality of recording hasn't really improved over the years, most devices still encode in the ancient H.263 codec and low resolution. Video clips don't look good even on the phone display, not to mention transferred to PC or shown on TV. Video recording was long time seen only as an application for MMS sending, and the limitations needed because of MMS interoperability have kept the quality low.

Starting from S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 3 there is an option to record video also in MPEG-4 format (or MP4 in short), which is superior in quality and quite suitable for viewing on PC or TV. You can check out the quality on Symplification (make sure you have Quicktime or some other MPEG-4 player installed), the clip is one of the Nokia's funny promotional clips for N90. Although it might not always be explicitly stated in the marketing materials, most devices running S60 3rd Edition have MP4 recording as a standard feature. You can check out the hard data at forum.nokia.com/multimedia.

There are some usability issues watching MP4 videos on a PC however. Windows doesn't support it out of the box, you need to download some player containing the MPEG-4 codec. This is not a big problem for most users, but might still come as a surprise. Quicktime is the most obvious choice, and also Nokia's PC Suite application package has a player. Apple user's don't need to care, Mac OS supports MP4 video natively.

Having shot your MP4 masterpiece, you might want to put it on your web site or blog for everyone to see. This might bring some problems, since many web servers don't recognise this format. There is a text at Forum Nokia that might be helpful in this case. Most video bloggers using a mobile phone as a camcorder seem to convert the videos to Flash or some other format to avoid problems.

I'm sure we will see lots of improvements in the near future, things like AVC encoding, higher frame rates and resolutions. Like most multimedia related features, those are also highly hardware dependent. It will be also interesting to see more multimedia-oriented Windows Mobile and Linux devices!

Like Mikko wrote in our "mother" blog recently, S60 has become a great platform for consuming music. One of the key elements in the S60 music offering is its multi-format approach. That is, you can throw almost any kind of music file into your phone and it will just play. One could of course ask why there has to be so many formats, but that's just something we have to live with. Besides, there is at least one good reason why to choose some of the other formats over MP3: you can squeeze more music into the (always too small) memory card without loosing any of the quality. I will be writing about some of the more practical concerns on choosing a format into the blog in coming weeks.

The latest format to become mainstream in S60 is Windows Media Audio (WMA). This was first announced with Nokia N91, but will appear in many of the Nokia phones using S60 3rd Edition. You can check Nokia ExpressMusic site for more details. In the already announced S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 the WMA support comes as a default feature, meaning most of the S60 devices based on that platform version will likely have it also.

While on the topic, I have to advertise WMAPlus! application that brings WMA support into S60 devices already in the market. In addition to WMA it also has support for MP3, OGG, AAC and M4A plus many more. Of these formats, M4A is not supported on older versions of S60 and OGG is a total stranger to S60. Unfortunately WMAPlus! didn't work on my Nokia N90 and based on comments it won't work on Nokia N70 either. I hope this will be corrected soon. WMAPlus! doesn't have its own site, but you can find it on My-Symbian.com for example.

I have a feeling that most people just transfer their songs in MP3, and don't realize using a more advanced format like AAC or WMA could save them the cost of buying a bigger memory card. What do you think about this?

The final SDK for developing C++ applications for S60 3rd Edition was published last week, as you may have already noticed. I just wanted to highlight a first-ever feature on the SDK: the platform video player is now part of the SDK. You will see it on the emulator grid like it is on the phone. I think this is a great addition, now you can try out video content on the emulator without the need for actual phone (though there are some exceptions that I'll explain later).

This also brings possiblity to watch streaming video in the emulator. There are however some issues with streaming through firewalls. If you are behind a firewall, it might be that the RTSP stream won't come through. You will need to either configure the firewall to route the traffic to your emulator, or try to use the emulator on a computer that is not behind a firewall. In a corporate environment this might prove to be quite difficult. When I was testing the SDK, I did it at home where I can have full control on the firewall.

As mentioned on the SDK release notes RealPlayer might have difficulties playing out some audio streams. Also it's worth noticing that some of the video or audio codecs found on S60 3.0 based devices are not available on the SDK. MPEG-4 AVC found on Nokia N80&N92 is one such codec. So, the emulator RealPlayer doesn't fully eliminate the need for the actual phone in all cases. In your opinion, how important an addition this is to the SDK and what do you think about the limitations?

You can get the SDK from Forum Nokia.

Hi all!

My name is Jukka Eklund, and this is the S60 multimedia blog. I tried hard to come up with a more fun name, but couldn't think of anything that would instantly tell what this blog is about. So I will stick with this name, at least for now.

I work at S60 Platform, more specifically in S60 Multimedia (surpise!). We are the people behind applications such as Camera, Gallery, Music Player, Radio and RealPlayer. In addition to these icons visible in phone interface there are engines, codecs and other "invisible" stuff behind the scenes that make it all happen.

This blog has been created to help users and developers using S60 platform: both to make most out of the more advanced multimedia features of the platform and to develop applications on top of it. In addition to these two main themes, I will be writing about everything that happens in and around S60 with a focus on multimedia. I want this to be a two-way communication channel: we can share some insight into the platform, and you can send us feedback that can very well affect our future directions.

So, welcome and let's start!

ps. The guy in the header is not me :) My face will be in the right column soon, I just didn't have a decent mug shot yet..