S60 Open to new features

So last week was CTIA Wireless 2006 in Los Angeles. S60 had representatives in Nokia's Enterprise Solutions booth and I was stationed in Symbian's booth demo-ing "Tune My S60" (shown below). This demo came in a giant wooden box that was finished the day before I flew out to LA, so I had to bring it with me on the plane. On the fifth anniversary of September 11th, I flew to the United States with a giant wooden mystery box. :-) Sure enough, it got hung up in customs but arrived at my hotel later that night.

Attendees on the showroom floor were attracted to the demo like a magnet. "What is 'Tune my S60?'" was a frequently asked question. Users could choose from ringtones, sms tones, wallpapers, animated images, demo applications, and themes and send them to their S60 device via bluetooth or over-the-air. While the bluetooth took a little longer than usual (there were hundreds within range, I think the bluetooth got a bit overloaded), I took the opportunity to talk more about S60.

Everyone at CTIA Wireless were pretty much people in the industry, so we were able to skip over all the novice stuff and discuss deeper issues. The announcement of the latest S60 device, the Nokia E62, came Tuesday morning and created alot of buzz around the event. As I'm sure all of you know by now, it's an E61 minus the WLAN and 3G and uses the Nokia 5500's internal parts...but it costs $150 (US) with Cingular compared to about 400 euros here in Finland. S60's market share in the US isn't quite up to our global share and I'm confident the Nokia E62 will be the start of very big things in the US market. However I was really surprised with the amount of people in attendence who were sporting an S60 device, there were A LOT of them.

So anyways, CTIA Wireless was nice, a bit smaller than I expected but packed of people that are in the industry which was a real treat. A met a LOT of great people, many of whom I've chatted with via the blogs/e-mail but not yet met. The demo is more geared towards consumers than prosumers, but who can't resist some new free ringtones and apps for their device?? I think it did a good job of "breaking the ice" and leading to further discussions about S60. Next event will be Symbian's Smartphones Show.