S60 Open to new features

This may be a bit off the regular topics of this blog, but I just had to pass on this story from Julie Ask of Jupiter Research about a new fan of the Nokia N91 and its multimedia features. Julie recently spent time in the Masai Mara region of Kenya, and sent a Nokia N91 to the manager of the safari camp where she stayed. As Julie reports in her blog, Timothy is a huge fan of the multimedia features of the phone: FM Radio, music, camera and video. (Julie hints that his data services seem to be free, so he might also enjoy the Internet Radio for S60 player as well!)

There's a key insight here for Nokia (and other) product marketing folks: in places like Kenya, a high-end mobile phone may represent the same level of investment and status as, say, a luxury car or big house in richer countries. it is also a practical investment, as it gives you instant access to the Internet and a range of other services. As Julie notes, her friend "is using his cell phone in ways that most Americans don't - and wouldn't bother because we have PC's, radios, ipods, etc."

This story reminded me of another piece of Nairobi-related S60 news from Stephanie Rieger. She pointed me to an MIT program at the University of Nairobi that teaches software development using Python for S60.

Lots of food for thought here - please let me know what you think.

-Oren

Via Tommi, this call from Kevin Sharp at the Forum Nokia blogs for success stories with Python for S60. I wrote about a couple of stories here, including the recent Manhattan Story Mashup and my own simple experiments with music social networking.

Any more experiences to report? Let Kevin know.

-Oren

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.