S60 Open to new features

I did once write a simple user interaction plus multimedia demo SW to customer in airplan from Copenhagen to Madrid using Handago's text editor and S60 Python in Nokia 6630. System did really work and save my day. My own laptop did broke just before the trip, so that was the reason to use text editor in phone. In anycase, the Python was fastest way to implement that sw, much better than J2ME and 100x faster than Symbian.

Ilkka Känsälä

I’ve found Python for S60 great for all sort of applications. At the moment we are currently field testing a pys60 application that enables medical field workers to interface with a 200,000 patient database out in remote Kenyan villages. We’ve got the phones connecting over GPRS and are using some of Python’s standard XML parsing and editing modules. Besides the GPRS connectivity, I’ve found it critical to have access to the location module so we can verify (to some degree at least) the location where the field workers are collecting the data. We’ve got interest from World Bank representatives as well as the United Nations in Nairobi, and have had many organizations conducting similar field work contact us asking how they can start incorporating phones into their field work. These organizations seem to typically be looking to dump their PDA field data collection systems in favor of mobile phones. IMHO, Python provides a great way to port an existing system to a mobile phone platform and perhaps most importantly, offers functionality you just can’t get on a standard $250 Palm Pilot – namely voice, data and location.

Besides health care applications in the developing world, I’ve found Python to be a fantastic teaching tool. Next week I’m headed to Ethiopia to teach an introduction to Mobile Phone Programming course which will essentially be a crash course in Python. Students, once given some simple API documentation, are almost immediately empowered to take advantage of a phone’s full functionality – the students who have already dappled with Symbian enough to feel the pain and MIDP enough to know the limitations seem to get especially (and justifiably) excited. Again, the most popular applications typically take advantage of having full access to phone functionalities - this has enabled all sorts of really complex location-based / context aware apps that would be impossible to implement in languages such as MIDP and really painfully time-consuming in Symbian.

I hope Python is able to continue to stay as open and as easy to use as it has been with these N70s we are using here in Africa. In my mind, porting Python to Series 60 has been a real gift to both the academic and research communities around the world...