HowardForums has a wealth of information collected over the years by S60 enthusiasts. Here's a few highlights....

Series 60 Wiki - Detailed specs of every S60 device all on one page. Towards the bottom you'll find tips and tricks, guides, application reviews, hardware reviews, and useful links.

Ultimate Nokia Series 60 help! - Dozens are great questions with detailed answers.

Free apps/games for S60 devices - Links to free applications and games for your S60, along with useful descriptions.

FAQ for Symbian (Series 60) - A huge FAQ full of S60 Symbian info.

Symbian FAQ for newbies - A great place to start for new users of Symbian.

Ringtones - An active discussion forum devoted to S60 ringtones.

Themes and Wallpapers - An active discussion forum devoted to S60 themes and wallpapers.

Please join me in welcoming S60's latest blog, "S60 Multimedia Blog", hosted by Jukka Eklund of the multimedia team in S60 platform. His blog is about "all things multimedia on S60" and will be giving us insight on imaging, audio and video related applications and engines in S60 platform. If you've ever listened to a MP3 or watched video on a S60 device, you've seen his and his team's expertise in action...

Like the name implies, the blog is about all things multimedia on S60. The idea for this blog grew out of the need to have an informal channel towards advanced users (prosumers) and developers. Just as important is to have a return channel back to us, something I admire on Nokia Linux Internet Tablet efforts

Smartphones can do a lot of things - but how many of you honestly thought it could ever run Apache web server?! (the web's most used web server) Well the Nokia Research Center is making that happen...

For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that the modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of webservers when the web was young, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.

...think of the possibilities. For one, instead of you sending photos and other content to your friends, they could just connect to your smartphone and grab it themselves. What other cool new things could we see if smartphones were running web servers?

We've got a lot planned for these S60 blogs in the upcoming few months, I'd tell you all about it now but that would just ruin the surprise. :-) Plus, we're reading and responding to your feedback daily - your comments dynamically shape the direction of these blogs, so who knows where we'll be in six months time.

I'm quite new to the S60 team, just finishing up my second week here. This past week we had a meeting to discuss the future of S60 blogs. I was expecting an abrade of questions as to why we need blogs in the first place - and I was ready to defend the blogs. But not once did I hear such things, only talk about how we plan to implement blogs to fulfill to wants and needs of S60 users, enthusiasts, and developers. It was a fantastic meeting and really demonstrated to me that the S60 team are serious about blogging and the S60 community.

The "World's #1 Gadget Magazine", T3, wonders if the new Nokia N91 is the new iPod. With a 4GB hard disk, 2-megapixel, 256K color screen, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, S60 platform and MP3 player built into the front panel - this baby can do everything an iPod can do and a whole lot more. It'll make you leave your old MP3 player at home...

This is a power-packed handful that genuinely offers you the choice of leaving your iPod at home – it’s just a shame it’s a little too big to love.

But Apple Computer's CEO, Steve Jobs, drops more hints about a possible iPod mobile phone...

Four trademark applications submitted earlier this month by Apple are adding grist to the rumor mill concerning the launch of an iPod phone, which has been the subject of speculation almost since the launch of the company's popular digital-music player.

As filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the applications for the term "Mobile Me" cover a litany of technologies ranging from telecommunications and satellite networks to computer services and portable devices.

Let's hope Apple's iPhone is running S60!!

This blog is all about one thing: You. Not only are we trying to provide you with the latest and greatest information surrounding S60, even more importantly, we want to hear your feedback, thoughts, suggestions, criticism, advice, ideas...anything and everything concerning S60.

You may not know it but our S60 developers are attentively following these blogs, searching for ways to improve and advance the S60 platform. The S60 team take your comments very seriously.

So my question for everyone today is: What do *you* want to see on the S60 blogs..?

- There's so many great mobile-related blogs out there already, what can we do differently?
- What kinds of things are missing from the S60 community?
- What kind of insider information should we provide?
- Which specific topics concerning S60 do you want to hear about?
- Which kinds of people within the team (developers, marketers, hardware, software, platform, applications etc..) would you want to hear more from?
- Other than dialog, what other interesting stuff can we provide?

Many kudos to everyone who has already particapted in our comments section, it has provided some very intriguing discussions - we hope to get lots more of it!

Looking forward to hearing from you!! :-)

Inspired by Russell Beattie:

...Lots of people have even used their mobile browser to access their email via a webmail account. That’s very cool - and points to the idea that people continue to fall into similar patterns. They *could* set up their phone to access email directly, but they’re most likely used to getting their mail via a web interface.

I got to thinking how easy would it be for the average user to pick up a phone and start using webmail. I decided to do a simple "could my dad do it?" test? My dad (60+) is using Hotmail often on a PC. Thinking of mobile email, I could see my dad managing to type the webmail url to the phone's browser and after that expecting things to work in a similar way as with the PC. If the current webmail services could offer this, there might be a change my dad would one day email me from his phone.

The test:
I used an Nokia 6680 straight ouf of the box with an Elisa SIM card. Getting the necessary settings for the Nokia 6680 was simple. Elisa sent them as SMS soon as I started the phone. That settled, the next thing was to try the services. The test would be to add one contact and send one email to that person.

Google's Gmail
I opened the Nokia 6680's browser and typed http://m.gmail.com. Gmail UI is very simple but VERY usable. Adding a contact was really simple and took very little time and of course the contacts already added (with the PC) could be used.Within a couple of minutes after keying in the Gmail url, I had already sent my first email.

Yahoo!
Tommi wrote about the Yahoo! Go mobile which is a nice app, but perhaps a bit too much for my dad. Sticking with the simple test I wrote www.yahoo.com to the browser and hit OK. The user experience was basically like Gmail, except after logging in there was a lot more choices (Calendar, Messenger...). Clicking "Mail" got me where I wanted to go. Adding a contact was a bit confusing at first but nothing too difficult. But composing and sending the message was very easy, and the first email was sent in couple of minutes.

Hotmail
My dad is actually using Hotmail, so this would be his first choice. After keying in the user name and password the mess begins. Hotmail's UI is a bit different from the rest. Everything is done in steps. You get one screen where you enter the address and hit OK. In the next screen you write the subject and hit OK. The next one is for the message body. This is very confusing. At least on my Nokia 6680 I had to type the message body to a text box which is one line high. This makes writing messages longer than "Hi" virtually impossible.

(composing a message in Hotmail (left) and Gmail (right))

...and the result?
The points would go to Gmail. It may not be all bells and whistles in terms of UI design, but it for sure gets the job done. The only shortcoming is the ability to send attachments. But if an average user feels the mobile email experience is very close to the PC one, chances are they'll continue using it.

It would be nice to your comments on using webmail from your S60 device.

The presentation on our Smartphone360 studies seems to have aroused people's attention (Simon Judge, Russell Beattie). Nice to see that all the hard work we put in swimming in the endless pool of user data has produced something interesting and useful ;-)

As is often the case, just looking at the slides without knowing the context can be a bit misleading. The results only represent the panelists who voluntarily took part in the study. The results cannot be generalized to cover all smartphone users in every country. Instead they merely suggest how a regular S60 user might behave.

There's been a lot of talk on Russell Beattie's blog about Browser and data costs. True, browser results were interesting. But, also the extensibility, i.e. being able to install 3rd party apps, came out nicely. The panelists were installing a fair amount, with Symbian apps being more popular over Java. Also personalization in various ways proved to be popular. At least these two should be interesting news for developers.

This is by no means the only Smartphone360 study done. It is a continuous effort aiming to get as much knowledge of phone usage as possible. And it's always nice to share some interesting results with you guys. Hope you find something useful.

Working for the S60 team has definitely its benefits :-) one of them being that we get access to the whole portfolio of S60 devices. Lately I have been using Samsung’s SGH-D730.

Taking the phone into use I was first a bit skeptical because of the clamshell design, which has never been my favorite form factor. However, I have had to change my opinion on that one very quickly – the D730 mechanics is excellent as the cover opens and closes very smoothly, and the keypad is large and has very good feel. Dedicated sidekeys for Profiles, Camera and Volume are nice plus on design side and work well. But the first thing one realizes when taking the phone into hand is that it is amazingly small and light! It can really be easily slipped to a pocket and carried comfortably. This has been partly achieved on behalf of the main display size; although it is otherwise bright and good quality (176x208 pixels, 262k colors), its physical size is fairly small which does have effect on usability of some applications.

On SW side Samsung have added on top of S60 suite a Document viewer for basic Office files which works pretty well. They have two printing applications that allow printing of Images, Messages, Contacts, Calendar entries and Notes on a Bluetooth enabled printer. Unfortunately I didn’t have BT printer to try this with. They also put in a speaker independent voice command application. For music experience there is a dedicated MP3 player that allows for example to change background of the player and has equalizer with some settings for different music styles. For image editing they have “ImageCook” application that allows quite versatile editing options but takes also some time to learn to use. Finally, they added an avatar application called “Mounut” which allows choosing a character that will show up with certain applications and display its emotions based on various inputs. Not my personal favorite :-) but for some reason almost all the females I showed it seemed to enjoy it. The Sales Pack included PC suite, manuals, headset, charger i.e. the normal stuff, but for some reason it did not have memory card included which is a big minus in my opinion (btw the card format supported is MMCmicro). The phone is based on 2nd Edition of S60, and 3rd party applications that I installed worked without problems. Also, the PC Suite worked well, but it required uninstalling any other vendor PC Suite (e.g. Nokia) versions before the installation.

Overall, the phone is very stable and solid. I have been using it as my main phone for over one month now, and it has not crashed one single time. It’s fast and responsive, feels very good in hand and is small and lightweight. Even considering the absence of the memory card in sales pack, this is a very strong phone for anyone looking for S60 smartphone functionality in a very compact and solid package.

Don't get me wrong - I do agreee with the importance of decent imaging capabilities in mobile phones. But personally I find the capability of listening music or radio even more compelling. It's my way of killing time when traveling by bus or when sitting in the airport. How about you - do you use your mobile phone for listening music?

Music capabilities of S60 devices have been radically improved in recent times. Not only in terms of adding MP3 player to our standard application offering, but also in terms of audio quality both with headsets (the standard 3.5mm plug is great) as well as with built-in loudspeakers (check the Samsung D-720 with dual speakers). Also the specific music keys are great when using the phone often for playing music, my favourite being the Nokia 3250 which rotates nicely between standard phone keys and music keys.

Having all those capabilities calls also for more storage space for music. Luckily you can already get 1GB SD and MMC cards with less than 100€ even here in Finland. And 256/512 MB cards are really quite affordable. And then there are of course those phones coming with a built in hard disk drive, like the Nokia N91.

So what next? Could you imagine using your phone not only for listening music but also for purchasing new songs, sharing recommendations with your fiends etc. These are the kinds of things we vision, and are building enablers for - like support for advanced music codecs, standards based digital rights management, etc.

BTW. while writing this I'm listening to the new Rammstein album, Rosen Rot, from my E70