Do you have a device equipped with a Flash Lite player? Then you could try out this application. It is the first version of a casual S60 tutorial.

This first scene takes place in a train car, and we will see how ringtones and mobile browsing can help to get new friends.

Try it out, and let me know what you thought about it... There will be a longer version later, stay tuned for that one too!

You should soon be able to download the "S60 tutorial" from http://www.s60.com/flashlite.

Have a nice day!
-BWi

We've started a new podcast, the "Voice of S60", and yours truly will be your humble host. Twice a month I'll be interviewing people from the S60 community, both in and outside of the S60 team. They could be developers, bloggers, marketers, enthusiasts...anyone with an expertise in the world of S60.

Each episode will last roughly 15-30 minutes long in both 64kbps mp3 format and 24kbps AAC+ format. I'll announce the guest 1-2 weeks prior to the release here on the blog. During that time I'd encourage everyone to leave questions for the guest in the comments section, I'll then ask those questions to the guest during the interview. After the interview I'd love to hear everyone's feedback, so please be sure to leave all your thoughts in the comments section. You can also send your questions and comments to: voiceofs60 >>AT>> s60.com

If you have any ideas for guests on the show or you'd like to be a guest yourself, we'd love to hear from you! Please contact us via e-mail. In the future we plan to do some live podcasts and use a technology like Skypecasting so everyone can pose their questions and comments to our guest live on the podcast. I'll announce about this later.

Well, I hope everyone enjoys the new podcast!! Looking forward to all your feedback!

http://blogs.s60.com/voiceofs60/

Wednesday was the S60 Summit, I'm probably the worst person to discuss the day's events because I was manning a demo the entire day. Some 40 demos were on hand including many from 3rd party developers. Throughout the day attendees could partake in the demos and watch presentations from S60's leading professionals.

Some of the presentations included "Extensibility and the Winning Ecosystem" from Tero Ojanperä, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Nokia. "Vodafone Terminals and Service Strategy" from Patrick Chomet, Director of Terminals Platform and Service Innovation, Vodafone. "Threat and Opportuniity of IP Convergence" from Anders Wästerlid, Vice Prresident, Products & Devices, O2 plc + Chairman, OMTP. And I've heard from serveral people that the event's best presentation was, "How Consumers Really Use Rich Mobile Devices", delivered by Esa Eerola, Head of Software Platforms Marketing, Consumers, from Nokia.

The event was amazing, I had great discussions with alot of the industry's leading innovators. It's really nice to see so many people from the S60 community all in one place, really looking forward to next year's event! Oh, and special thanks to those victims volunteers who I interviewed for our new podcast which will debut tomorrow. Be sure to check back tomorrow for all the details!

So today is the first day of a two-day event, the S60 Review and S60 Summit. S60 professionals from around the globe gather at Acropolis in Nice, France (France's 5th largest city) to discuss all things S60 and see the see the latest S60 technologies. Today is the review, tonight is the big party, tomorrow is the summit.

I'll be conducting a demo throughout the day tomorrow. I'm supposed to do "What is S60?". Now, if you've come all the way to France for the S60 Summit and you don't know "What S60 is"...then I should call security and kick you out. ;-) So I've changed my demo a bit, I'll be showing off the new redesigned S60.com website, our S60 blogs, and other blogs and websites in the S60 coummunity.

While I'm here, if you guys and gals would like me to talk to anyone particular, ask some specific questions, find out some info, please let me know!! And I promise to bring you many photos and info concerning the event. I'm not really involved in the S60 review, so today I got a be tourist. Here's some pics of beautiful Nice...

I was fortunate to get a Nokia 5500 Sport for testing, and here is a first evaluation of this extremely compact smartphone.

First, +/- for folks that do not want to read the whole thing:

On the sunny side of the street:
+ Idle screen, Music and Training application accessible with dedicated hard key and "always on".
+ Fantastic User Interface with lots of WOW in it, and a very cool form factor - one of the coolest out there.
+ The size and material used. This fellow really can take a beating - it seems to be very durable. I wouldn't go swimming with it, but it should survive some damp weather.

Speaking of weather, these are the more rainy items:
- No WCDMA
- Somewhat small screen (even though app menu grid is adapted to 3x3, which is good)
- My device has a hard key for push to talk -> not very useful if you don't have a PoC subscription....

Some other observations:
When starting up the phone, the first thing you notice is the flashlight next to the power on/off key (no, not Flash Lite, which is also included, but an actual Flashlight!)

Then, as soon as the startup occurs, you get a feel for the great user interface. The navigation key has a backlight that corresponds with the screen's user interface (see for instance the music player layout above). The colours used change depending on which of the applications you use (Green=Music, Red=Sport, White=Phone). Cool!
On the upper part of the right side of the device, you find the 3-in-1 hard key, with which you can swap between the music player, the application menu and the Sport/Training application.

There is also a second hard key, that in my prototype was allocated for push-to-talk. Not sure if that always makes sense, at least not in my case.... I think that it could be wise to change this at least for some variants/markets.

For application developers, it will be crucial to ensure that large enough fonts and appropriate UI layout are used. I personally do not have any problems with the small screen, but it takes some time getting used to. I also think that my parents would not be able to use this device fluently, due to the very small fonts used in some apps. But the "Sport/training" application" is adapted, with large fonts - good stuff. The resolution is by the way a square 208x208.

I very much appreciate the large keys - easy to text even with thick fat fingers like mine.

I have been using this pretty little thing when out running - and it has been a very good friend on the road. The accuracy of the steps, distances, etc.is quite ok. I have also tried it with GPS, but again the screen size causes some issues. Last, but not least: IF you like to listen to music when running, I bet it makes sense to get yourself a large micro SD card, if not already provided in your sales package. Should also help when storing your pictures taken with the 2MPix built-in camera.

The smallest S60 device to date from Nokia, but I bet it will not be the smallest one in sales..... Estimated usubsidized price of 300 Euros, available in Q3.

BWi.

I've spent a lot of time with the "Web Browser for S60" (formerly known as OSS Browser), I demo-ed it for four days at CeBIT, so I feel I'm quite experienced with it. Opera released their browser for S60 3rd Edition today, I've been playing around with it this afternoon. Here's my first impressions of how it compares with the "Web Browser for S60" which comes with your 3rd Edition device - I used a Nokia E61 for my tests...

- Opera will display a web page in it's native resolution (just like Web Browser for S60) but also has the option to revert back to the traditional mobile way of browsing where it formats the HTML to fit your screen...which can often look terrible, but sometimes is necessary for devices with small resolutions.

- Even in native resolution mode, some web pages that auto-detects mobile phones thought it was the old mobile browser and delivered different content. www.s60.com is a good example, when viewing this site with the Web Browser for S60, it displayed the normal pages. But with the Opera browser, it forwarded you to the mobile site.

- Full screen mode was nice on the Opera, it takes away those annoying headers and scrollbars to show you a bit more of the screen. I don't believe Web Browser for S60 has this option.

- When moving around on a web page, the Opera browser didn't render the page as fast as Web Browser for S60. So you'd see that "choppy" effect, Web Browser for S60 was much smoother when scrolling.

- Navigating through a page was possibly easier on the Opera browser. Web Browser for S60 provides you with a mouse-like pointer, when you're near a link it knows to highlight that link. Opera browser just jumps from link to link, which may be easier, but I had trouble getting the page positioned exactly how I wanted it.

- Pressing the "back" button on the Web Browser for S60 brings up the "visual history", thumbnails of all the pages you've previously visited in that session. It's awesome. Opera browser just takes you to the last page you visited. However, there is an option to display a text-only list of the previous pages you've visited.

- Opera browser allows you to turn off all images, which is really handy for longer-loading graphic intensive pages. With all the advertisements on webpages nowadays, this is a nice feature. To my knowledge, Web Browser for S60 doesn't offer this feature. Web Browser for S60 does indeed offer this feature as well (thanks Octave!)

- When you scroll around the page on the Web Browser for S60, a "mini-map" appears in the corner of the screen giving you an overview of the page. Think of it as the old "picture-in-picture" on television sets. This makes browsing in native resolution mode much easier. Opera browser does not have this.

- Opera browser has the option to used cached images when visiting previously viewed pages. With this feature turned on, loading a previously visited page was faster in Opera than in Web Browser for S60.

- In native resolution mode, Web Browser for S60 seemed to be more intuitive when rendering the page. For instance, blogs usually have two or three columns. Web Browser for S60 would make sure that the large main column would fit on the screen without having to scroll horizontally, Opera allowed the text to leak over.

- With the push of a shortcut key, Opera browser would jump up or down one screen length. This made reading long web pages much easier. With Web Browser for S60, you had to push the navi-key up or down quite often to scrolll up/down.

- Javascript/DHTML didn't appear to render as nicely on Opera as with Web Browser for S60. This was appearent on those fly-out/drop-down menus.

- Zooming in and out of the page was better on Opera. You could slide a bar left and right to get the precise zoom you wanted. Web Browser for S60 had two fixed zooms, and a few fixed font sizes.

- Web Browser for S60 comes with a RSS reader that will find that RSS feeds hidden in the web page. Opera comes with no RSS reader, although you can still read them, just not subscribe to them. (thanks Chiara!)

- Filling out forms was much easier with Opera, it was very easy to jump from one field/button/menu to the next.

- Most of the components in Web Browser for S60 are open source. To my knowledge, Opera is not open source.

- Opera remembers your passwords. Web Browser for S60 does not appear to do this.

- Opera browser costs 19 euros, Web Browser for S60 is free!

- Opera has user configuratable shortcut keys (very nice!) and the shortcut key numbers appear in the menus which is very helpful. Web Browser for S60 has hard-coded shortcut keys.

- Some other nice features of Opera: You can send URLs via SMS/MMS/e-mail. The UI is more friendly with helpful messages. Privacy options allow you to delete the cache, cookies, history, and logins.

Both browsers have their definite pluses and minuses. I honestly can't say which browser I liked "better". Hopefully each browser will borrow some functionality from the other to bring us an even better browsing experience.

I admit I've probably been a later adapter to these smartphones than most of you. I always thought these devices were more "fun" than "useful". You'd get an okay camera, an okay display screen, an okay GPRS network speed, an okay input device with T9, an okay CPU speed, an okay PC connection with the USB cable... I've been eagerly anticipating a true "computer in your pocket" for years. After spending the past three months with an S60 3rd Edition device (I've been using Nokia's E61) now and I believe I can declare that it's finally here. Let me tell you why...

1. 3G/UMTS - Once this becomes more affordable, the real mobile revolution will begin. Instant streaming of high-quality sound and decent quality video is possible, internet browsing is lightening fast, downloading big files such as podcasts is quick.
2. WLAN - Wireless LAN is almost everywhere nowadays, and will be everywhere quite soon. The possibilities are endless.
3. High-color, high-contrast, large display screen - There are certain limitations to the size of a screen in your pocket, it will never be like your monitor at home, but this big QVGA screen on the E61 is nice. Video looks superb. Browsing the web on your phone is finally comfortable.
4. Web Browser for S60 (formerly known as the OSS Browser) - Speaking of browsing the web on your phone, this new browser based on Apple's Safari is hands down the best mobile browsing experience ever.
5. Blogs & Podcasts - I'm a blog and podcast addict, the built-in RSS reader is excellent and the new podcasting application (to be released soon) is top notch. I'm downloading podcasts in minutes over 3G, I'll never be bored again with an S60 in my pocket.
6. QWERTY keyboard - After spending three years with a Nokia Communicator, I can't live without a QWERTY keyboard on my phone. I love to use SMS, I love to browser the web, and I love to quickly write down shopping lists...you NEED a qwerty keyboard for this (I admit though, I've never spent too much time with T9).
7. Everything wireless - Gotta have bluetooth. One wire to charge my phone's battery is one wire too many. Transfering files, synching my calendar, and installing applications without wires while my phone's in my pocket is a must.
8. DVD-quality camcorder - Okay, my E61 doesn't even have a camera, that's something I miss. But have you seen samples of the DVD movies taken on the new Nokia N93?!? Amazing.

...I could go on and on. But these are the features most important to me and I truly convinced that I'm walking around with the ultimate device in my pocket.