S60 Open to new features

If you're in Boston on January 8, you might want to join the next Mobile Monday Boston meeting at the Nokia Research Center in Cambridge. This month's topic will be Mobile VoIP, with speakers from Polaris Ventures and IDG Ventures. More information on the MoMo Boston blog.

Until then, Happy New Year to all of you.
-Oren

Here's the source code for the codec discovery application I posted a couple of days ago. Use it as you wish; we have already heard from some developers who want to include automatic codec detection in their applications, so that they can use the right codec or format for a particular device.

Update Dec. 21: Here are the codec trace files for the devices we tested. These include more detailed information than is listed in the table in the previous post.

-Oren

Some of the most common questions we hear from S60 multimedia developers concern the differences in multimedia support among different S60 devices. Because the multimedia feature set in a given device depends in large part on the device hardware, different devices may support different audio and video codecs. These hardware dependencies also affect the SDK; a particular API may only work with a subset of the supported codecs in the device.

My colleague Florin Lohan came up with a clever way to get to the bottom of this problem, and find out more about these hardware issues for you in the developer community. He wrote a simple S60 application that lists the codecs supported in the device, and ran it on every S60 device he could find to compile a comprehensive list of devices, API's, and codecs. You can download it and try it out on your favorite S60 device.

Read on for more info about the codecs and API's. We plan to publish this information to Forum Nokia as well in the near future.

-Oren

From my position inside the S60 world, surrounded by mobile phone experts and mobile tech, it's easy to assume that every mobile phone user is as excited about mobile multimedia as I am. It was a useful reality check, therefore, to read a couple of reports from mobile operators that describe what mobile phone owners are doing out in the real world. I was happy to find that we're not the only excited ones - many people (who don't work in S60) also enjoy music, video, and other non-voice applications and services on their phones.

From the UK, 3 published a report on mobile music, that claims 75% of the UK mobile music market, and describes great interest among young Britons in mobile music and mobile music videos.

On this side of the Atlantic, Sprint published its 2006 Productivity Survey, "a nationwide index of wireless phone users and their productivity". The results don't quantify the actual usage of mobile multimedia services, but do demonstrate strong interest in these services. Sprint asked users which mobile services (one or more) "help maximize their lives". 60% chose Camera, and 58% chose music. (For our friends in the Browser team, 59% chose Wireless Web)

Pretty encouraging, I think. Let me know if you've come across other interesting data about how people are using their mobile devices.

-Oren