S60 Open to new features

Jukka has written earlier about how to use MTP and Windows Media Player to sync your PC music collection with your S60 phone. Now S60Tips.com describes how to sync your S60 phone with iTunes, using the USB Mass Storage feature of many S60 3rd Edition handsets. As the entry notes, this will not work with protected files purchased from the iTunes Music Store, as S60 does not support Apple's proprietary FairPlay DRM system.

This tip should also make it easier to load your favorite podcasts to your phone for later listening. Of course, the easiest way to get podcasts to your S60 phone is to use the Nokia Podcasting application, but if you don't have a cheap data plan and/or good GPRS or 3G service, iTunes works very well.

Anyone know if there's a similar way to do this from Winamp?

-Oren

Jukka is still on holiday, but he still emailed to tell me about this review from All About Symbian of the new version of ShoZu for S60 3rd Edition phones. If you're not familiar with ShoZu, it's a simple, reliable app that lets you upload your cameraphone photos to Flickr or to other photo sharing sites or blogs. I have used this for a while on 2nd Edition phones (it's a great complement to the N90!), so the 3rd Edition port was good news (or perhaps bad news; I already spend way too much time playing with Flickr).

In related 3rd Edition news, several NSeries models have Flickr uploading integrated directly into the Gallery application. This works well, but does not let you add tags to the photo before sending as ShoZu does. Nokia Lifeblog is also available for some 3rd Edition phones, and will post to any blog that uses TypePad.

I'm Oren Levine; I'm based in Boston, and work in the same S60 Multimedia team as Jukka. Since Jukka is away for the Finnish summer holidays, I took the opportunity to contribute a guest post (or two) to the blog.

This month's MobileMonday Boston event featured Stephanie Rieger of Yiibu, speaking about "Creating Casual Handset Apps for the Long Tail". Yiibu uses Flash Lite to create, in their words, "small lifestyle and learning applications for those 'in-between-moments' you spend with your mobile devices".

Her key message was that mobile content and applications should be "snacks": simple, fun (and even educational) ways to spend a short time when you take a break or have a spare moment.

In the spirit of the Long Tail, this suggests that the real "killer app" for mobile may turn out to be hundreds (thousands?) of little apps that, by themselves, don't even cause a scratch.

Yiibu develops its applications in Flash Lite, because they found it to be the easiest way to prototype and test their applications. In their opinion, Flash was preferred to mobile Java (harder to program and test) and the mobile Web (still in flux).

What do you think? Could mobile Python (which Jukka mentioned in a previous post) also be a good way to create mobile "snacks"?

Update (July 18): On the subject of Python, Paul Coulton reports on the Forum Nokia blogs about his experience teaching mobile Python to pre-university students.

Update (July 19): Here's Stephanie Rieger's view on the subject in her own words.

-Oren

A while ago I wrote about how to convert popular iPod formatted AVC videos so that newer S60 devices would play them out. I complained about QuickTime not being able to produce files compatible with S60. Since then QT has been updated (to version 7.1) and now things look brighter. This update is highly recommended if you use QT, get it here.

Following tip applies to all S60 3rd Edition Nokia Nseries devices such as Nokia N71, N73, N80, N91 and N92. Note that Nokia N93 is able to play these files as is, without converting. Which is pretty cool :)

It seems during recent Nokia Europe site update the Nokia UK support discussions have been taken into the main Europe site. There is a separate Smartphones board (RSS feed here).

I might post in there from time to time. What do you think about this forum?

-Jukka

Like most of the people in Finland, I'm having my summer vacation in July. This is the month everything around here closes when Finns head to their summer cottages, rock festivals and such.

I won't be blogging regularly for the next 4 weeks, but might still write something up if I feel like it and check the comments from time to time. Have a great summer everyone, and remember to stay cool! :)

BTW. If you're in Munich on 11th or 12th July or in Berlin on the 14th, and want to meet up over cold beers drop me a note (jukka [thatweirdcharacter] s60.com)!

-Jukka

(Image © Finnish Meteorological Institute. They're the guys who contr.. er, predict weather around here, and boy is it looking good!)

Nokia's DVB-H "flagship" device, the N92 is not selling yet but I was lucky and got it for the summer to try out. Since there are not too many (p)reviews around yet I thought I'd share some honest thoughts about it. You can argue about the "honest" part me being a Nokia employee, but at least I try :)

Red Five Labs enables applications targeting Microsoft's .NET Compact Framework to run unchanged on Symbian OS powered mobile phones. (The operating system running the smartphones of, amongst others, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.)

Read the whitepaper.

(via: SymbianOne and others, title inspired by Anina)