S60 Open to new features

Nokia's Director of Multimedia Computers shares the details:

The N91 will play Windows Media format music and sync with Windows Media Player on PCs, but will not initially play protected songs purchased from online music stores, he said. That capability, including the ability to play songs from subscription stores like Yahoo! Music and Rhapsody, will follow in a free software upgrade.

The article is about Nokia opening stores in US, to sell high-end phones (ie. the Nseries) directly to customers. I liked the ending:

"Virtually anything that could possibly be available in this market will be there," said Nokia spokesman Keith Nowak. "The people who work there will be Nokia people, with knowledge that will be deep. And the luxury of having some of these new channels is, it gives us the opportunity to offer products which are a little lower volume, and a little targeted."

Hey, it worked for Apple.

Read the full article

Here is a tip that saved one boring flight for me. Well, at least almost..

Like you may already know many of the recent 3rd Edition devices from Nokia can talk directly with Windows Media Player using a special mode selected when connecting the USB cable. This makes syncing music from PC to phone extremely simple, and even fully automatic if desired.

There is a fixed version available for 3rd Edition phones at opensource.nokia.com. This fixes 'slow audio' problem related to wrong sampling frequency.

Petteri Kangaslampi informs us that he has made a "dirty" port to 2nd Edition devices (namely 6630, 6680, 6681, 6682, N70 and N90). There is also a version for S80 (the Communicators 9300, 9300i and 9500). Way cool!

Nokia's PC software for phone owners has been updated to version 6.8, and it's called the Music release. There are numerous big and little changes, but the most notable is redesigned Nokia Music Manager (click on the image below to get a bigger view).

If you are using PC Suite, go and update. Otherwise, why not give it a go? For me PC Suite used to be a pain, but that was a long time ago. I use the Synchronise feature daily, and with this latest version I got the feeling it is a bit faster than earlier. One cool feature of the new Music manager is the ability to notice if your phone supports eAAC+, making ripped music smaller in size without loosing any of the quality.

After downloading, give your comments, you never know who is reading! :)

Nokia PC Suite version 6.8

Phil wanted to know how to play iPod video to play on his Nokia E61. First of all, you can't without some converting. That's because current generation of Nokia S60 3rd Edition phones (aka Nseries and Eseries) don't quite match the performance of latest video iPod regarding MPEG-4 AVC decoding. In technical terms iPod's AVC level is 1.3 and Nokia devices are 1.2. The good thing is that both have the same profile, Baseline. For more details refer to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC at Wikipedia.

Isn't this embarrassing, I have never called a proper 3G video call. This is because until start of April my network operator (Sonera) didn't have the option to use this feature, which is after all standard stuff in 3G and supported in S60 since 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 2. Since start of April Finnish government allowed to bundle the phone and subscription, which I understand is the standard way of getting the phone in most markets. The catch here is that this is only allowed for 3G, goverment is hoping this will finally get Finnish people to really start upgrading to the next generation of phones. So far this plan seems to be working quite well, they say that demand for bundled phones has been surprisingly high. To coincide with the "new start" of 3G, operators are launching new services. The standard video call being one of those in Sonera's case. I will write more about the other services later, there are some pretty interesting ones.

This first video call is not really a proper one, since I am calling to myself :) To make it interesting (in a nerdy way) I initiated the call from Nokia's S40 phone (6280). This phone has a front camera, and you can see me in the picture taken from screen of N91. Since N91 doesn't have a front camera, it is shooting away from me. It's our cat in the little picture wondering what on earth I'm doing.. But hey, it worked as specified!

Now that I'm again using a 3G phone regularly, it will be so much more fun to call my colleagues video-style and see how they react :) Would be even more fun to call my friends, and maybe see something else than a cubicle or meeting room, but sadly very few of them have 3G..

I was wondering what kind of features actually one gets with the new 2.0 version (exclusively for Nokia Nseries phones).

Here they are:
- Free of charge and exclusive
- New flexible sync approach
- Windows-style user interface
- Audio annotations (from phone only)
- Search by calendar entry, location or contact detail
- Configurable automatic delete
- Undo/redo commands
- Local printing capability
- Editing via external applications
- 4 new languages (which are French (Canada), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish (Latin America))

(from Nokia Lifeblog 2.0 Product Info)

Too bad moblogging to other systems than TypePad is not supported. There are hacks out there, I hope our system gets enabled at some point.

Not about multimedia as such, but all you developing for Symbian OS 9 and S60 3rd Edition should take note:
S60 Platform: Symbian Platform Security FAQ v2.0 at Forum Nokia.

Happy Easter all, if I don't see you before that!

(Thanks to Steve for spotting this!)

Update: link seems to give randomly a 'Page not found' error. If so, just try again it will work.

Forum Nokia has some goodies for you developing multimedia midlets:

Mobile Media API Example - Media Sampler
This Java™ MIDP example demonstrates the usage of the Mobile Media API (JSR-135) by playing audio and video clips. In addition, the MIDlet shows how to check the MMAPI support on a device by using system properties.

Mobile Media API Developer's Guide
This Java™ MIDP document describes the Mobile Media API (JSR-135). The MMAPI allows MIDlets to use various media types more powerfully, for example, to play several kinds of audio and video files, capture images, and adjust many of these operations using special kinds of controls. The document offers recommended practices on how to utilize the API more efficiently.

Mobile Media API Support in Nokia Devices
This document lists the Mobile Media API (JSR-135) features that are supported in Nokia devices. The information is organized into categories that cover speech and music audio playing capabilities, synthetic audio playing capabilities, speech and music audio recording capabilities, video capabilities (playing and recording), camera snapshot capabilities, and supported controls.

This is the thing I hinted on some time ago.

This is a reference implementation of HTTP Internet Radio streaming (Shoutcast) for S60 3rd Edition. It is intended primarily as a learning tool for the S60 developer community. We also hope to stimulate the creation of innovative S60 audio applications.

Go check it out at opensource.nokia.com. The application originated in my team, and now we are very interested on hearing your thoughts about it! How about a little challenge: who is the first to "backwards port" it to 2nd Edition?

Lots of interesting stuff on N91 product support pages: demos, user guides and software. There is even something for Mac users!

AAS did a great review, but there might be something to update after checking the support pages :)

A public announcement: all of the S60 3rd Edition based Nseries and Eseries devices from Nokia will include MPEG-4 AVC ie. H.264 video decoder. So the full list of products reads: N71, N80, N91, N92, E60, E61 and E70. We have been building this codec into S60 for some time now, and it is great to see it breaking through big time. AVC video decoding will be a standard feature in S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 so we can expect to see it widely supported in future S60 devices.

AVC brings video quality to a radically new level, be it streaming services (like Mobile TV) or downloaded videos. Your own ripped content will fit more nicely into a memory card, without sacrificing any of the quality. I will be writing more about AVC, and what do with it in the near future.

I'm excited, how about you?

A company called Woize promises to bring a VoIP client for S60 running Symbian 9.1 during Q2 (read the full press release). Their offering sounds a lot like Skype, but is based on standard SIP which is included in S60 3rd Edition.

Read more about SIP at Forum Nokia.

Via: All About Symbian

As of yesterday I am out of office, taking 3 months of father's parental leave. This might result in fewer posts, but I hope not. At least I will have more time to think about Life, Universe and Multimedia while changing diapers etc. :)

I hope you continue to send me feedback, either in comments or to email address on the right. What would you like to read about here?

The title says it all: wap.mobilethemes.com is up! No login needed, and downloads are unlimited. Theme installations don't work on my 3rd Edition -powered Nokia 3250, but that was expected. Might be a good idea to filter out non-working installations, since my phone was recognised correctly by the site.

(via: Darla Mack)