S60 Open to new features

Björn, which parts of AIW are exposed to 3rd party developers through SDK APIs?

Hi Björn,

AIW is the really one of the coolest aspects of S60 platform but IMPO multitasking is the most important benefit of the S60 platform and Smartphones at all.

Anyway lets go back to the topic; what I would like to see in future S60 devices?!?

Well, you know, as you said it’s possible to activate the messaging application from phonebook or dial a number or send a message to a number featured in an SMS or e-mail but it’s impossible to “call” Contacts from message editor and it’s the really quite annoying thing.

Let me try to explain, if you want to send a plain number, mail, or any other detail from specified contact you should open contacts application, look for contact, edit contact, select number, mail or whatever, copy it and after all switch back to the message and paste it. Pretty tedious isn’t it!?

Yea I know it’s possible to send whole contact or specified detail from phonebook, but this is something completely different. Correct me if I’m wrong but AFAIK even “dummy” S40 phones has such feature!?

Also I want to mentioned another thing that maybe isn’t related to AIW but its very important, as you might know, S60 phones keep birthday information under contacts and I have to admit it’s the better solution than keeping and storing birthdays in the calendar application but.. ..its impossible to synchronize this information between two applications at the moment, I mean we can’t import information to the calendar as appointments without assistance of the 3rd party applications.

And last but not the least powerful search application that can be activated from every application is simply must have feature, at least for messaging and calendar applications.

Kind regards,
Apoc

Hi Apoc.

Excellent use cases! I have noticed the same issues as you outline, and I have also forwarded it to our technical experts for review. That does not of course mean that there will be a quick-fix, but at least there are two or more of us who identified this. -:-)

I have not tried this use case on Series 40 though, so I don't dare to comment on that one...

Finally, your birthday-related case;
- It would be handy that if you enter the birthday in contacts, it would be updated as a "yearly repeated item" in Calendar. Dunno how tricky this AIW (coz I see it as AIW) implementation would be - perhaps not the lowest-hanging fruit - a normal user perhaps has 10-20 birthdays to keep track of. But I agree that it would be very beneficial and make the item "birthday" in contacts more useful.

Can you elaborate what capabilities the search app would include?

BW.

Jukka,
I guess that the answer to your question depends on how one defines AIW. My broad definition is roughly that App Interworking is the ability of one application to utilise the services located elsewhere in the platform or other applications. So, as an app developer, any additional intelligence that I can introduce to my application thanks to the features provided from elsewhere would belong to this category. So, a Java or Flash Lite application that has the ability to for instance access the gallery, send mms:es/sms:es, or make a call from within the application. I will not try to provide a full list here, but just conclude that there are quite a few opportunities for developers to increase the richness of the application in question.

-BW

Hi BW,

Sorry for delayed answer, to many tasks on SF everyday, together with forum administration and my regular job, my spare time is on the zero or even under.. .. .

Anyway.. ..

You know, I share same opinion and I’m glade to hear that you’ve forwarded it to yours technical department. I hope that it will be included in upcoming phones or maybe even in next firmware version ;-)

By the way, another feature related to AIW and messaging is ability to move specified message from inbox straight to the calendar as appointment, memo or whatsoever, it’s the really useful feature and I guess it isn’t so hard to implement it !? I know, you haven’t experience with dummy phones but I have to say that if I remember right there is similar feature on S40 phones?

As I already said, IMPO birthday field under contacts is almost completely useless at the moment, it just has to be somehow linked with the calendar it really doesn’t matter how many birthdays you care about. The only good thing in whole story is that there are few really good 3rd party applications for managing this information and/or importing them into calendar, sVcard is the great example.

I can but I’m in hurry right now and I’m going to be short.

If you are power user that has thousand messages and numerous appointments in the calendar you’ll know what I’m talking about. Its painful process to find right message or memo, and even worse sometime it’s almost impossible.

Oh yes, I almost forget to thank to the S60 developing team for the sorting feature under messaging. :o)

That’s all for know,

Stay cool 8-)

Apoc

Finally :D

The Nokia E50 also includes a search function enabling fast queries into critical data such as, contacts, emails and messages.

But why not calendar to, business phone without ability to search calendar appointments ?!

Apoc

T-Mobile begrüßt die weit reichende Anpassungsfähigkeit der S60-Softwareplattform über das Betriebssystem Symbian OS.