S60 Open to new features

Just found this blog dedicated to N91, thanks to my colleague Johannes. Lots of speculative stuff, but at least the real pictures of the phone, accessories and UI should be interesting.

Seems that many times comments including URLs are automatically filtered, and I need to put them back manually. This week I've been away in Texas, USA and not been able to catch up with blog and emails. Sorry Stephen and all!

BTW, Sonera: could you please fix roaming in US, it's "only" been like 24 hours now without coverage..

S60 supports a wide range of codecs, so why not take advantage of the more advanced ones when packing your music in the phone? MP3 is fine, but with AAC and its latest evolution eAAC+ you can save memory space without loosing any of the quality. My colleague wrote some tips how to do that, thanks Florin :)

When working with AAC, you need to check first which codecs your phone supports. If you have Nokia N70 or N90, you can rock eAAC+. The same applies also to all of the upcoming S60 3rd Edition phones, and that really means all. If you have S60 2nd Edition device they can all do AAC (Nokia 6600 being the exception here). From the more older ones only N-Gages can play out AAC. If still unsure, you can check all the details at forum.nokia.com/multimedia.

To get your tunes into AAC you have two options: either rip your music directly to AAC or convert your existing MP3's to another format. For ripping you can use the latest Nokia PC Suite (get it here). For both ripping and converting a good choice is Winamp 5.1 or later.

When ripping with Winamp, select AAC options from "CD ripping preferences" in Rip menu: "Raw AAC" for AAC, "aacPlus Encoder" for eAAC+. If choosing the latter one, also select "aacPlus v2" as Format. About the bitrates:
- for AAC: 128kbps, or 96kbps (44100Hz, Stereo is fine)
- for eAAC+: 64kbps, or even 48kbps

To convert (ie. transcode) your already ripped music to AAC, you need to get a plugin for Winamp. With the plugin installed, select your tunes, right click Send to: and select Transcode. There you have the same options as for CD ripping.

The final step is to copy your newly created music to your phone, and enjoy!

Now that I have been "online" for couple of weeks, it would be nice to get some more feedback from you! What kind of subjects do you want to see covered here? So, speak now :)

Here in Finland mobile operator Sonera is offering its customers the chance to watch the winter Olympics from a mobile phone. They offer both live coverage and recorded events. Video service requires RealPlayer ie. an S60 device. 3G is not required but seems to be needed in practice. The nice thing about pricing is that each cheap: 1€ a week. The video quality was acceptable, at least for curling which was on when I checked :)

Do you watch the Olympics on your mobile?

The Web 2.0 phenomenon is starting to show up on S60 devices, and what would be a better place :) Merkitys is a neat tool which uploads photos from phone directly to Flickr, with minimum trouble. In addition to uploading, it can add context related information to the image: location (also from GPS), calendar info, BT neighbourhood or what ever you choose.

Merkitys is Finnish word for meaning, and like they say in the site:

Mobile phone + Flickr + Context = Meaning

Do you have other Web 2.0 and Multimedia related links? Thanks once again to All About Symbian for pointing this in our direction!

A little J2ME tip for today: starting from S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 3 (Nokia N70 and N90 for example) you can create a player also for RTSP streams. Just create the player with Manager.createPlayer with a URL starting with "rtsp://", simple as that. The Mobile Media API (JSR-135) implementation in S60 supports all streaming formats and codecs that are supported by the native RealPlayer.

Have you seen any streaming players created with J2ME?

Is it just me, or is this seriously cool? The CoreCodec people are working on a Symbian port of their TCPMP player, and there is already a test version out (check this thread). This is an early alpha version, but having seen the versions running on other platforms I am really looking forward to seeing this on S60.

I installed the test version to a Nokia N90 and watched the Star Wreck trailer in DivX format :)

You can follow the progress on Forums.

The scripting language Python port for S60 (now called PyS60) has been around for some time, and is now released to open source. The new version also adds some features, like expanded audio API. Generally you can playback any local audio file that is supported by the platform. Recording is also possible. Now that the source is published, you can write your own extensions to the library.

PyS60 at opensource.nokia.com

Get the latest version from SourceForge. More resources at Forum Nokia.