I promised Saara that I would write more about our RC truck demo. As she wrote earlier, we used a Nokia N95 to drive a radio-controlled truck around the expo floor at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. This was a great way to attract visitors to our booth, and also an excellent demonstration of the sort of creative things that are possible with S60, when you combine software development tools like Python for S60 with smart programmers.

In this case, the smart programmers are a team from the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria, who developed the software and Bluetooth hardware that made this truck go. After we saw the video of their ShakerRacer demo (and showed it in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress), we got in touch with Andreas Jakl and Stephan Selinger from Hagenberg to see if they could help us build some vehicles of our own. They were willing to help, and worked with Juha Komulainen and others in our Nokia Demolab team to modify a truck in time for the Web 2.0 event. We built the truck, and they provided the Bluetooth control module and mobile Python program that turned the N95 into an RC controller.

We're now planning to build at least two more trucks for use in future events, including the upcoming S60 Summit in May. In the meantime, we shipped the truck from last week's demo to our office in Boston, so we can show it off the Nokians here (and play a bit more on our own).

if you're inspired by this to work on your own remote control projects, you can find the ShakerRacer source code (open source) and hardware instructions online for your experimentation and enjoyment. if you build something cool, please let us know!

--Oren

I believe the majority of you readers of See into S60 are quite familiar with what you can do with the S60 browser. Nevertheless, I shot this short video of Charles, who has recently joined the See into S60 blog crew, because I thought you might want to know more about us behind the See into S60 blog too. Charles is talking about what features that make the S60 browser handy to use. He also shows the latest addition, Flash Lite 3 support, which allows you to experience the full desktop-like web Video.

One of the greatest eye-catchers of the S60 stand at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco definitely has been the S60 RC truck. This little vehicle is controlled with a Python-based application, the Shaker Racer, on a Nokia N95. The application uses the accelometer of the Nokia N95 to communicate with the truck over Bluetooth. Check out the video below where Oren explains how it works.

This is a great example of the open source innovation that Python for S60 enables. As you see, it is a useful tool for prototyping applications and experimenting with new development ideas. Oren has kindly promised to blog more about this. If you have any questions about the car, please feel free to ask by leaving your comments here!

Early this morning in the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco S60 announced extended capabilities of our Web Run-Time offering allowing creation of personal and context aware widgets. Widgets will be able to access S60's numerous applications and services securely, including the calendar, contacts, messaging, audio, video, images, GPS, and camera, via JavaScript APIs.

This enables, for example, a weather widget can access the user’s current location via the phone's built-in GPS to provide immediate local weather data. Or a flight tracker widget can easily fetch a travel itinerary from an airline’s website, save it to the phone's calendar application, and set a reminder. A few hours prior to departure, the widget will automatically check the flight's status by retrieving the flight details from the calendar.

Read the more from the press release.

Yesterday Nokia launched yet another new S60 device, the Nokia 5320 XpressMusic. The device is S60 3rd edition Feature Pack 2 device and comes with features such as dedicated XpressMusic keys, a 3.5mm audio jack, up to 24 hours of playback time, an audio chip for hi-fi sound quality, extendable memory up to 8GB, HS-USB for fast music transfer and HSDPA for fast access to data. In addition the innovative new voice-controlled Say and Play feature will allow you to merely say the name of a favorite artist or song to automatically play it. We’ll see the Nokia 5320 XpressMusic shipping in the third quarter of 2008 with an estimated retail price of 220 EUR before taxes and subsidies. Find out more from www.s60.com .

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco in April 22-25, 2008 at Moscone West will feature a 30,000 square foot tradeshow filled with exhibitors showcasing all things Web 2.0 - tools, technologies, services and infrastructures. S60 will be there with a nice selection of demos and speakers too. S60 demos (stand #729, level 1) include: the latest S60 devices, demos of Internet innovation with web run-time and widgets, S60 & Internet community services, demos the technologies such as Open C, Java, Python that are used to create innovative experiences and applications on S60 among others. S60 will also take part to the Booth Crawl on Thursday 24th from 4:30 to 6PM. Please leave your comment to this entry or drop me an email if you’re planning to come! I (and the rest of the S60 team) would be happy to meet you!

As mentioned, there will be speakers from Nokia at the conference. Below are short descriptions of the people and topics.

David Rivas, current Vice President of Technology Management for S60 Software in Nokia’s Device business, will be talking about Internet services on mobile.

From Access to Interaction and Integrated Experiences: Unleashing the Power of Mobility to the Internet -- The future of mobility and the Internet will be about the complete integration of the user, the mobile device, and the Internet, providing seamless connectivity to the Web and use of mobile context for more exciting experiences and essential services. S60, the world-leading mobile software platform, offers the best Internet experience and brings development on mobile to mainstream.

Bill Plummer, Vice President, Sales and Go to Market, Americas for Nokia. Bill’s primary responsibilities include strategic portfolio management and go-to-market integration of the full range of Nokia devices and services, as well as subsequent solution launch, product marketing and life-cycle management.

Innovation in an Age of Mobility and Openness -- Mobile devices are developing greater capabilities to sense and make sense of the world around us. Nokia CTO Bob Iannucci will discuss how the compelling synergy of these devices with new innovative technologies and development tools have opened up opportunities for creative minds everywhere to build new applications, services, and experiences that fuse our physical and digital worlds.

Ganesh Sivaraman heads the global marketing of Web Technologies & Applications for S60 and has been instrumental in creating the excitement & awareness of the highly-acclaimed Web Browser & Web Runtime for S60. Ganesh will be taking part in a panel that explores the future of widgets as it relates to distribution, economics, and additional opportunities. Ganesh has been a guest on the Voice of S60 Podcast several times during the years.

Widgets Growing Up -- Widgets are portable bits of code that are used for consumption of content and expression of your identity across the Web, desktop, and increasingly mobile. Widgets include games, stock tickers, slideshows, utilities, music players, and more. If 2007 was the year of the widget, 2008 is the year of the widget growing up.

Once again we had an awesome Evening with S60 event, this time in Milan. In Milan you could already feel the winter receding and spring strongly gaining ground with the lovely sunny weather and blossoming cherry trees. I was lucky to have a couple of hours to spend walking around the city and seeing some sights.

From left to right Duomo, Duomo Square and Scforza Castle.

The evening started with welcome words by Giampaolo from the Italian S60 team and Mikko from the Product Marketing of S60. Check out the video below of the guys welcoming all and introducing the S60 crew.

After introductions everyone had the chance to play around with the latest S60 devices announced in Mobile World Congress a couple of weeks ago and talk to our S60 experts. In addition to the latest devices, our demos included S60 browser, browsing and Internet experience, widgets, sensors and touch among others.

The Breaker game game was once again great fun! The race was extremely tight, but finally I believe it was the grey team who won. The prize for the winners were headsets. Below's a video of the team showing off their shouting skills! Inviting Italians to be loud was not very hard :-)

All in all we had a great turnout of over 100 people and many great discussions. At the very end we raffled a Nokia N82 - here's a pic of the lucky winner with her brand new device! A very special thanks goes to the Nokia Store personnel who did an awesome job MC'ing the breaker game and also keeping us up to date about the Inter Milan vs. Liverpool football game during the evening! A big thanks also to all the S60 people, especially Carita who made all this happen.

You can find more photos from the event from our Evening with S60 Flickr group and the public channel Evening with S60 on Ovi Share. If you took photos or videos from the event please go ahead and add yours either to the Flickr group or the channel on Ovi Share.

Last, but not least, here's a little something for you all to remember the evening by! Just like for Miami, we made a special theme for Milan too.

• For Nokia N96, Nokia N78, Nokia 6220, Nokia 6210, Nokia N82, Nokia E51, Nokia N95, Nokia N81, Nokia 6120, Nokia 6121, Nokia 5700, Nokia N77, Nokia E90, Nokia E61, Nokia E65, Nokia 6110, Nokia N93, Nokia N76
• For Nokia 6290, Nokia N75, Nokia N95, Nokia E62, Nokia E50, Nokia 5500, Nokia N73, Nokia N92, Nokia N71, Nokia N80, Nokia E70, Nokia E61, Nokia E60, Nokia 3250, Nokia N91

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!