Hip-hip-hooray! Let me introduce the first 3rd party application publicly available for S60 3rd Edition: Handy Weather by Epocware:

It seems to work great with my Nokia 3250. Although I wonder did I really need an S60 application to tell me that the weather in Finland makes you want to kill yourself...

Thanks Andrey for the heads up!

Ewan Spence just wrote in Allaboutsymbian a detailed review "Series 60 and Music on your Smartphone".

Highlight:

Windows Media Player and Nokia’s Music Phones In Practice

There’s not a lot to write about here. You plug your USB data cable into your music phone, and choose ‘Media Player’ from the three options (the others are ‘[USB] Mass Storage’ and ‘PC Suite’). It then shows up as a music device, and Windows Media Player will allow you to synchronise the device with your music collection. Once the sync is over, you unhook the cable and away you go. Very painless.

Yay! I'll forward your feedback to my colleagues here in Nokia who have worked hard lately to make this happen :-)

Seems that Chris Heathcote noticed me adding him to my blogroll... As a response, he just wrote a very insightful post about Flickr uploader applications for S60. He reviews in detail Shozu by Cognima, Meaning by the Helsinki University of Technology & 3eyes, Context Watcher by the EU Mobilife consortium, and ZoneTag by Yahoo Research.

Definitely worth a read: Flickr off!

Steve Litchfield has made again good work, this time reviewing Nokia 3250 - in Allaboutsymbian and in Smartphones Show episode 7.

I would like to highlight:

The upshot of all this is that, for the first time, you can pop a (legally owned) CD in your PC's drive, allow Media Player to grab track info off the 'net, rip the music to WMA format and then click on 'Start Sync'. Switch the 3250's keypad into music mode and use 'Options | Music library' and then 'Options | Update Music library'. This sounds like a lot of steps but in practice it's simple, intuitive and quick. I popped in Camel's excellent Rajaz album and the whole process to starting to hear music on the 3250 was only five minutes, of which by far the slowest part was waiting while my PC ripped the CD to WMA files. Impressive stuff and long overdue. Almost as easy as music in the iPod/iTunes world, and with all the functionality of the S60 smartphone to boot.

Well well well, it looks like Nokia S60 devices, even the cheaper ones, are starting to become "good enough" to disrupt the dedicated mobile music player market (see my previous entry about this). Congrats for all of my colleagues who made this happen! I believe you will hear this kind of feedback much more in the future...

About your other point:

By including a 3.5mm stereo jack in the remote control section, it's easy to substitute your own noise-cancelling or in-ear headphones for Nokia's ear buds and this will make a big difference. Nokia, I'd like to see these shipped with every smartphone from now on...

Dream on :-) As people update their phones quite often, it is just too expensive (and to wasteful) to have high-end headphones shipping with every device...
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Update: I misunderstood the latter Steve's comment completely. Sorry. I thought you wanted Nokia to ship Shure E3c headphones or something with every Nokia S60 device...

Note to myself: must-not-write-when-tired. Now tired.

Remember when I wrote about our Speaker Independent Name Dialing (SIND) functionality, available in Nokia S60 devices starting from N70 and N90?

Well, Niko Nyman and his friends are using it, but not exactly the way we intended it...

Niko: And then I noticed every one of my contacts has a voice dialing fingerprints. An automatically generated voice fingerprint, that even pronounces and recognizes Finnish accent. Wow. I must say that after discovering the feature we had a lot of fun with my friends, typing in words from 90s techno pop songs into the Address Book.

Ville says: Best use for this function I have found is to use N90 as a modern “magic eightball” omen to make prophecys of future. I’ve got over 1200 names in my addressbook, and every time I press the voice regonition button (red dottet camera button on the side when lid is closed) and ask something like “who is ripping me of” or “who should I love” it gives me an answer. Try it out!

Niko Says: I tried asking “who is ripping me off”. Shortly a message appeared on the screen: “Calling Luottokunta…”

:D !!!

I wonder how much we should focus on enabling this kind of fun features... What do you think?

(the usual disclaimer: my colleagues here in Nokia are free to implement whatever you say in this blog. I might buy you a t-shirt and give public praise, but don't expect any monetary rewards...)

I am currently updating my blogroll (= the stuff I read regularly, and to whom I have static links in the right sidebar).

I think I have already quite a good collection of mobile/Nokia/Symbian/S60 related blogs and websites listed.

But can you help me out - are there any blogs or websites that are unjustifiably missing from the list?

Janne wrote yesterday in ButtUgly about why people keep old SMSs. Janne and other like-minded people: you might be interested to try Best MessageStorer by Smartphoneware. My-symbian says that the application "lets you easily and conveniently save your SMS, MMS, emails in a text file and send them to your PC".

Hmmm... I just realized that this is already the third time I promoted Smartphoneware applications. I really don't do it on purpose - they just magically happen to be there, when I think about something. Creepy...

When I started this blog, I got an unofficial mission from our coffee-table gang to get linked or commented by Russell Beattie. Why on earth? Well, Russell was one of our favorite bloggers, until he changed his belief system from Symbian/S60 to Linux. And we thought it would be a good idea to get engaged in the conversation.

I just heard that Jukka got exactly the same mission from his team, totally independent from me. Now that's funny.

So come on, Russell, please come and autograph my blog and Jukka's S60 Multimedia blog! Pretty please with brown sugar and marshmallows on top? ;-)

Go and check out our brand-new S60 User Experience blog.

The blog is a group blog written by Riitta Nieminen-Sundell, Maija Savolainen, Jesse Maula, and Wendy Furst. The writers are employees of Idean Research. So technically speaking they are not Nokia people, but they have been working on S60 user experience issues with Nokia. I would consider them as recognized experts in this area.

Welcome to the club! Let's meet face-to-face some time soon :-)

Note to my readers: please go and drop a comment to the UE blog if you find the topic interesting.

I just received a hot tip about a free P2P file sharing program called PeerBox Mobile developed by a company called Nareos.

They are currently looking for beta testers. They say that PeerBox supports the following phones: Nokia N70, 6682, 6681, 6680, 3230, 6670, 6630, 6260, 7610, 6620, 6600 Lenovo P930, Panasonic X800, X700, Samsung SGH-D720, SGH-D730. Even though the site shows pictures of S60 3rd edition devices, it doesn't support them, at least yet. But hey, it is still in early beta.

They say that it's going to be legal, but I'm a little sceptical. Applications such as PeerBox and Symella are quite controversial, and I'm sure we'll hear some noise from music labels etc. In any case, I don't want to go to this debate. Please don't drag me into it...

Does anyone of you have time to check this out and write a proper (p)review? Unfortunately, my own calendar is fully booked for the rest of this week.
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Note: I had written this blog entry ready, as I noticed that Jukka was faster :)

Let me tell you an exclusive story about what we have done for making it easy to take a new Nokia S60 device into use. What I talk about applies to new Nokia S60 devices based on S60 3rd Edition.

Agony of setting up a new device

This is a story we have heard over and over again during the last years:

You have just bought a brand-new gadget and you unwrap the package with shaking hands. You power on and... Errr... The browser doesn't work, it just complains something about missing access points... Err... Email doesn't work - it just asks difficult questions about mail servers... Err... Your 476 contacts are firmly stuck in your old device, how on earth are you supposed to transfer them? Err... What is this weird icon... oops... what did it do now... oops...

Does this sound familiar?

Read on. I hope this stuff will give you some relief.

Solution #1: "It just works" + Setting Wizard application

When you insert the SIM card and turn on your device for the first time, the device silently sets up the basic operator settings. It just works - just try browsing or sending MMS. You can find more info from my previous entry.

Unfortunately, some settings, such as email, cannot be confiugred automatically. That's why we have a separate application called Setting Wizard. It helps you set up Email, Push-to-Talk, and Real-Time Video Sharing, depending on what services your operator supports.

Solution #2: Easy to switch with Data Transfer application

We had the first version of Data Transfer application already in Nokia 6630, Nokia 6680, N70 and N90. With this early version, you could transfer your user data from an old S60 device. Now, the application is able to transfer your data from old S40, S60, S80, and S90 devices (the ones that support synch). In addition, you can continue using your old device in parallel with your new device. Data Transfer application synchronizes your user data allowing easy switching between devices.

The interoperability table is quite complex, but let's see if we could publish that.

Solution #3: Tutorial

The purpose of Tutorial is to be your guide for first-time use, and whenever needed.

People of earth: give feedback to the developers!

I drink coffee every day with the team behind the apps mentioned in this post. Believe me, they are listening your feedback. Steve, Rafe, Ewan, Michel, Darla, Jayvee, Martin, GSMArena, Mobileburn, Mobile-Review, infoSync, Engadget Mobile, and everybody else: please comment this post (or write product reviews, or whatever) and give feedback directly to the developers!

Hehheh... About 3 years ago, I had a small application idea about making a built-in answering machine for Nokia S60 devices. I pitched it around here in Nokia, but for a couple of (valid) reasons, people didn't want to do it. Now Smartphoneware has just released Best Answering Machine, which seems to do the trick.

But then again, this is old news. A quick search from My-Symbian revealed that there are similar applications such as Avista Answering Machine, MTIT Answering Machine, and Smart Answer already available. Oops... I should have made my homework before starting to write.

Disclaimer: I didn't test these applications myself, because I'm now a happy user of Nokia 3250. As far as I know, there are no anwering machines available for S60 3rd edition devices yet.

Since last Friday, I have been using Nokia 3250 as my primary S60 device. The device is based on S60 3rd Edition, and I think it is pretty cool. Unfortunately, there are not too many 3rd party applications available for S60 3rd Edition yet. And the old S60 applications, as such, do not work in S60 3rd Edition.

Houston, we have a problem.

Here's a plea for Handango, My-Symbian, Allaboutsymbian, SymbianOne, SymbianGear, and others: please make a separate section for S60 3rd Edition applications. And please, make a separate RSS feed for them. I promise to subscribe immediately :-)

Bonus links:
See into 3rd Edition
Migrating from S60 2nd Edition to S60 3rd Edition
Mobile-Review.com: Series 60 3rd Edition

We seemed to have a little technical glitch yesterday... You couldn't download the new Lifeblog 2.0 PC software, even though the Nokia press release and my blog post said so.

But now it is online: http://www.nokia.com/lifeblog

Sorry for inconvenience.

Niko Nyman attracted me as a subscriber of his blog today, by linking to my blog with a provocative entry about the State of Series 60 visual design.

Bonus links (totally off-topic):
Microsoft Re-Designs the Ipod Packaging (probably the most-watched video in tech industry this week)
Visceral design: do looks matter?

Nokia has just announced Lifeblog 2.0, the new version of Nokia Lifeblog. Among other things, the press release says:

The new version of Nokia Lifeblog builds on the previous versions by adding audio notes as well as other valuable context information, such as calendar entries and location information, to the diary. This means that images and video clips are surrounded with the context in which they were taken, rendering them as part of the rich tapestry of items that make up your personal Nokia Lifeblog timeline.

You can download the new Lifeblog PC software for free from www.nokia.com/lifeblog. The mobile client will be exclusive for Nokia Nseries multimedia computers (yes, that is what we call them nowadays...) and it is expected to become available by the end of April.

Sounds interesting. Sorry that I didn't have any insider info to share with you this time...

While egosurfing Technorati about what people talk about this blog, I bumped into Antti Vähä-Sipilä's good post (in Finnish), in which he recommended his favorite S60 applications.

Among others, he recommended Instant Messaging with WirelessIRC, but complained about the tedious typing experience with the standard ITU-T keyboard. Antti, did you know that you can use a wireless keyboard such as Nokia SU-8W? Of course, it costs currently €117.90 in Verkkokauppa Finland or $108.95 in MobilePlanet (Expansys USA), which might scare some people off.

As far as I know, surprisingly few people are aware of the possibility to use a wireless keyboard with S60 devices. But the geeks, business users, and other heavy texters who have tried it, have like it quite much.

Some reviews I am aware of:

Allaboutsymbian: "...and 'Wireless keyboard'. This last knows about the common Bluetooth keyboards available and worked flawlessly with my Think Outside unit. 10 out of 10 for ease of use here."

infoSync: "Perfect for quick bouts of instant messaging or e-mail sessions where T9 or multi-tap just don't make the cut, the Nokia Wireless Keyboard SU-8W is perfect for Nokia smartphone owners who want to speed up their communications."

Darla Mack's: "So far I'm very satisfied with it. Even though we have used mobiles long enough with their wierd keypads (if you can get used to the Nokia 7210 and Nokia 3650 you can use anything!) having a nice functional keyboard is a much better option. Especially if you text message alot"

Cyrus' Weblog: "There’s no doubt: it’s a luxury item price at US$150, with no real use for anyone but the geeks. ... all of us must accept that ther’s no real use if you are not into “heavy texting” and you don’t have a computer with you."

Uh-oh. MobHappy, Techdirt, and Textually report that a 16-year-old boy in South Korea killed himself after receiving a $3800 bill for mobile data services.

This is not funny anymore.

In last December, Jouni criticized GSM/GPRS roaming charges, and I commented about Joi Ito's infamous $3500 data bill back in 2004. Joi was able to pay the bill, but apparenty, the South Korean kid was not.

This is a wake-up call for everyone of us. I think we really need to get some sanity to data pricing, or at least an easy way for end-users to keep track of their data bills. In South Korea, the country’s top two mobile carriers, SKT and KTF, responded to the tragic incident by offering flat-rate data plans for about $30 per month.

What will you do?