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 .

This one I really gotta have! This jet black multimedia computer enables you to geotag the images you capture with the date and location info. The device automatically tags images with capture location metadata, making it possible to view the capture location on a map either on the Internet or on the device itself. This adds to a line-up of compelling photography features, including a 5 megapixel camera, Carl Zeiss optics and a Xenon flash. Not only does the Nokia N82 take great pictures, array of advanced connectivity features makes it easy to share discoveries, journeys and locations.

The Nokia N82 in black is expected to start shipping within weeks, with an estimated retail price of approximately 400 euros, before taxes and subsidies.

Read more from nokia.com.

Support for Microsoft's Silverlight will become available on S60 extending opportunities for developers to create rich and interactive applications that run on multiple platforms. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications.

Silverlight is intended to be available to S60 developers later this year with initial service delivery anticipated shortly thereafter for all S60 licensees. This will allow S60 application developers to use an even wider range of development environments for S60 in the future. Today S60 developers can use: C++ and Open C, S60 Web Run-time , the Java(TM) language, Flash Lite from Adobe, and Python.

Microsoft will demonstrate Silverlight on S60 during the opening keyote at Microsoft's MIX08 conference on March 5 in Las Vegas. The keynotes will be streamed live today, find more from here

For more information, read the press release.

I promised to write a bit more about the Touch UI demo, but instead I thought that why not shoot a video of it. S60 is expanding the UI offering by Touch UI with tactile feedback to create new type of devices and applications and by UI Accelerator Toolkit to create graphically stunning applications. On the same go I shot a video of the sensors demo too. You can read more about the new innovations on S60 UI from here.

S60 Touch demo

S60 sensors demo - Updated version!

Thanks again Phil for your kind words! We’ll definitely miss you here. Indeed, I’m glad to tell you I’ll be your new host on the See into S60 blog from the beginning of January onwards.

To tell you the truth, Phil’s boots feel quite big to fill as he’s done an excellent job on the S60 blogs during the past years. At the same time I’m super excited about this new challenge and am looking forward to get to know you all! I hope I’ll be able to bring the same enthusiasm about S60 to this blog as Phil has – with my personal touch of course.

My intention is to develop this blog according to your wishes and needs, so I’m looking forward to hearing your comments, suggestions, and criticism too!

In the meantime I could share some news about the latest developments on S60.com that we’ve been busily working on. The first thing you’ll probably notice is the front page face-lift in addition with many other tweaks that'll hopefully improve the usability of the site. If you are registered to My S60, please go ahead and complete your profile with your unique username after logging in.

I’m also happy to tell you that from now on you’ll be able to write your own reviews about all applications downloadable from S60.com. Check out our application downloads section and write your review.

Thank you also for your excellent ideas and suggestions on our Feature wishlist! We have examined them closely and taken them into consideration. Take a look at the analysis & feedback. Please do not hesitate to send us any further ideas and suggestions you may have.

Stay tuned – new stuff will launched already in February. Happy holidays from all of us at the S60 team!

Chinese readers come to the S60 Blogs more than any other nation excluding Finland and the United States. S60 has a LOT of fans in China, so naturally they should have their own blog! So I'm happy to introduce the latest blog to join the S60 Blogs family, "玩转" (Play around S60), hosted by Jim Lee & Samuel Leung of our Beijing office. I know these two guys quite well, they're two of the most knowledgeable S60 enthusiasts I know - they're guaranteed to author an excellent blog.

I wish I could say I'll be a loyal reader, unfortunately my knowledge of the world's most spoken language is something left to be desired. Maybe my good friend and colleague from "Consumed by S60", Dan Shugrue, will send me the updates - little known fact, he's fluent in Chinese! But for all you non-speakers like myself, be sure to check it out anyways, they have a lot of nice photos and videos on there for the rest of us.

Good luck Jim and Samuel! Visit them at: blogs.s60.com/play

《玩转S60》博客讨论和S60有关的智能终端、软件应用、游戏、以及其他杂七杂八好玩的与S60沾边的东西。 我2001年参加诺基亚，现在负责S60的市场和销售，刚刚告别诺基亚6120c，我现在用的是诺基亚N95 8GB（港版的行货），我对于手机见异思迁，总喜欢用最新的。 我是自封的S60超级粉丝，但是江湖中卧虎藏龙，所以希望大家多多指点，多多交流。

Flash Lite 3 is coming to S60...

Flash Lite from Adobe brings Flash technology to mobile phones and consumer electronics devices - with additional features designed to meet the specific needs of mobile phone owners. With Flash Lite on S60, the graphic richness and easy development capabilities of desktop Flash are available on tens of millions of S60 devices. Currently, 33 different S60 devices support Flash Lite, which has been available since S60 3rd Edition. Bringing desktop-like experiences with Flash Lite 3

The S60 platform will soon include the latest version of Flash Lite, Flash Lite 3. With Flash Lite 3 and the Web Browser for S60, you will be able to view Flash animations on Web pages, just like you do on your desktop computer. You can also enjoy web video content from your favorite video-enabled Web site, including YouTube, MySpace, and other popular sites.

Flash Lite 3 will be available on selected S60 device models from the first quarter of 2008

You love Jaiku. I love Jaiku. We all love Jaiku! So follow all of S60's happenings on our official Jaiku page: s60online.jaiku.com

It has it's own dedicated Nokia E61i that will follow the S60 crew wherever they go. This week I'll be Jaikuing from The Smartphone Show in London as well as the All About Symbian Pub Meetup tonight and An Evening with S60 tomorrow night.

So if you haven't added us as a Jaiku contact already, please do!! Just click here to get all the latest S60 news and join in on the conversation: s60online.jaiku.com

Jukka Eklund from the S60 Multimedia Blog has been heading up one of S60's most innovative apps, the "Mobile Web Server". And now he's launched a blog that's centered around it, say hello to the "Mobile Web Server" blog...

This blog is for everybody who is interested in Mobile Web Server. Blog is run by members of the development team at Nokia. Purpose of the blog is to share information directly from the people who are developing the service: new features, tips and tricks, problems - you name it. In true beta spirit it works the other way around too: all feedback from the readers will be analyzed, commented on and taken directly into the development process at Nokia.