S60 Open to new features

The short answer: S60 is the software your phone runs on.

Phones are getting pretty techy at an amazing speed these days, and sometimes it's as though features become obsolete before you even know they exist. If you're like the vast majority of people out there, you have no idea what's really going on inside your phone (and that's basically the way it should be). But the upshot is that now there really is a lot more choice of features when buying. The tagline for the new Nokia N95 is "It's what computers have become," and they really mean that.

So if you're buying a computer, you make a choice between Mac and PC, and between Mac OS or Windows or Linux, based on what you want to do with it. It's the same way with phones. S60 does sort of the same stuff on your phone that an operating system does on your computer: it gives you the look on the screen, determines which features are available, and also gives you a system to use those features. Email, calling, internet, the alarm clock, the calendar, voice commands, and games are all handled by S60.

S60 has, in my view, some clear advantages: the user interface has always been intuitive (if you've used one S60 phone, it's easy to switch to another one), and it's developed by Nokia, so there's a lot of mobile expertise behind it. Also, just as with a computer, you can add or remove programs (applications, as they're more often called) as you wish. Even one year ago, most of the applications were a bit clumsy and visually... unfortunate, but now mobile developers seem to have picked up the slack and there's a lot of great-looking, truly useful stuff.

So how do you know if you've got the goods? Well, if your phone is a Nokia, it's probably running S60 software—especially if it's a newer model. Some phones by Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Siemens also use S60, so it's not an exclusively Nokia thing. You can also take a look at the complete list of phones on the S60 website.