Hi everyone. I'm Oren Levine, from the S60 Marketing team. Saara invited me to join the See Into S60 blog to post from time to time about what we in S60 offer to software developers. Of course, S60.com and Forum Nokia have plenty of detailed information about the languages and tools that you can use with S60; I'll use this space to write about more general issues, and announce upcoming events and presentations.

Speaking of which... I'll be at the SD (Software Development) West conference in California next week, along with folks from Forum Nokia and our S60 browser team, to help deliver two sessions about mobile development and S60 to the collected developer audience. We have two sessions on the agenda: a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session to discuss how to take advantage of open source software in mobile platforms, and a free in-depth tutorial on Open C and how you can use it to port open source code to S60 and Symbian.

-Oren

It's only two days until the Evening with S60 in Miami and we've got something for you. We have created a theme for the event. Please go ahead and download it and let me know what you think! The device compatibility info can be found below.

At the event we'll be running a contest based on the Breaker game. Please downlod it to your S60 device, if you have one, before you come to the Dolores. The winners will be given exciting prizes!

Please share your photos from the event with us by posting them to our Evening with S60 Flickr group too.

Update! I added a public channel for An Evening with S60 on Ovi Share, if you prefer using that.

• For Nokia 3250, Nokia N91, Nokia N70,N72
• For Nokia E50, Nokia N71, Nokia N73, Nokia N75, Nokia N76, Nokia N77, Nokia N93, Nokia N95, Nokia 6110, Nokia 6290, Nokia 6120, Nokia 5700, Nokia 6112
• For Nokia E62, Nokia E61, Nokia E61i
• For Nokia E60, Nokia E65, Nokia E70, Nokia N80, Nokia N81, Nokia N83
• For Nokia 5500

It’s already a week since the Mobile World Congress ended and I guess it’s finally time for me to summarize some of the highlights from the event for S60 as well as for me personally.

We saw the launch of six new devices from three S60 licensees: LG, Nokia and Samsung. The announcements in Barcelona brought the total number of S60 devices launched up to 73. The S60 Team was also proud to tell that the number of devices shipped by S60 licensees by the end of January 2008 is over 150 million. Over third of the devices are S60 3rd Edition.

With these new devices S60 is the first mobile software platform with integrated widget support. The devices launched in Barcelona include widget support enabled by S60 web run-time application development framework. I had the pleasure to have Ganesh Sivaraman as my guest on the Voice of S60 podcast to talk about widgets and web run-times.

Another exciting news was the announcement of Nokia Maps 2.0, which takes mapping and navigation experiences to the next level by enhancing pedestrian navigation, adding multimedia city guides, offering satellite images, and sporting a redesigned user interface. Nokia also announced Share on Ovi, which offers a community where people can socialize, interact and collaborate.

This was the first Mobile World Congress for me and the experience all in all was great, though standing on your feet for 10 hours in a day, four days in a row is certainly exhausting. I was really happy to have a chance to meet some of the people face-to-face whom I’ve met online and also hope to stay in touch with them all!

Below’s a nice video shot by Neil that summarizes some of the things that went on in Barcelona. Have a nice weekend!