S60 Open to new features

We're all pretty excited about the new N95 multimedia computer, which was announced this week in New York. This is the first Nokia device to use S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (FP1), which introduces new tools for multimedia (and other) developers.

Here are some of the multimedia highlights of the N95 and other FP1 devices:
- Support for Windows Media Audio (WMA) in the Multimedia Framework (MMF) (Note: this does not include API support for Windows Media DRM)
- New Content Listing Framework API: your application can retrieve, filter, and sort information about multimedia content, such as music or photos, stored in the device.
- Java JSR 234 (Advanced Multimedia Supplements): support for 3D audio effects, music equalizer control, radio tuner control

In addition to the above, FP1 supports video ringtones and "talking tones", that combine your favorite tone with a synthesized spoken name of the caller.

The FP1 SDK is already available to Forum Nokia Pro members, and should be released through Forum Nokia soon. Watch this space for updates.

Update (29-Sept.): our Flash team informs me that the N95 is also the first S60 device to support Flash Lite 2.0 (based on Flash 7), whcih has lots of new features including "dynamic loading of multimedia content such as images, sound and video"

-Oren

If you read this blog, then you may have also read some of the many reviews of the Nokia N93. What those reviews may have missed is that the N93 can also play videos desgined for the video iPod (H.264/AVC at 30 fps). This means that you can download videos from Google Video (in Video iPod format), or from other sources, and watch them on your N93 without any conversion.

You can expect more S60 devices to support this format as we move to 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (FP1). As Jukka noted in an earlier post, FP1 devices will also support streaming video directly in the browser window.

The latest Forum Nokia Pro newsletter included an announcement about the Manhattan Story Mashup, an urban storytelling game, where players will run around Manhattan with Nokia N80 cameraphones, taking photos that illustrate words in stories written by other players. The play happens on September 23rd, and sounds like fun!

The game was organized by the Nokia Research SensorPlanet project, which explores "large-scale wireless sensor networks". The game was designed by Ville Tulos, a researcher at Helsinki University, and Jürgen Scheible, Forum Nokia Champion and huge proponent of Python for S60. Ville wrote the Python client that is at the heart of the game software. The client consists of 1100 lines of code, and communicates with a Python server using a JSON protocol.

Thanks, Tommi, for gathering those improvement suggestions from S60 users and fans. We're studying the results now, and will take them as input into our own product planning. We are happy to report that some of these suggested features will be included in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1. You will see them later this year, in the first products that use this new version of the platform. For example:

- The S60 Music Player will display album art from MP3's. (Some 3rd Edition devices, such as the N91, already support album art)
- We removed the 1 minute limit on the S60 Voice Recorder. It will support recordings of an hour or more

There was a suggestion for "Integration of Pictures/Videos with online sharing service" .This is already supported on some N-Series phones, thanks to cooperation between Nokia and Flickr. On other S60 models, 3rd party applications such as ShoZu already offer automatic uploading of photos and videos, available with one click after you take a picture.

Many other items from Tommi's list are on our roadmap and wish lists as well. Thanks again to everyone who contributed suggestions!

I'm in Los Angeles this week, demonstrating S60 multimedia devices and features at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment show. I'll be uploading photos from the event during the week; please take a look if you want to follow along.

Nokia is helping to bring free WiFi networks to 10 major parks in New York City, starting with Central Park and Battery Park. If you have an N80 or N91 phone, you can download a free software suite that will let you enjoy news and music when you're sitting in the park (or anywhere else with a WiFi connection).

The suite includes the ParkCast Internet radio player, which, we are proud to say, is based on the open source Internet Radio for S60 software we created in the S60 Multimedia team. The Park WiFi team also created a version of ParkCast for the Nokia 770 Internet tablet.

The ParkCast player is pre-configured with links to high-quality streams from four New York radio stations, which I was able to listen to from my WiFi network in Boston. Of course, it wasn't quite the same without the benches and trees.