S60 Open to new features

I just received the first question via email, but I'm not allowed to answer it. Damn.

Please don't ask about future Nokia products or other things that are clearly trade secrets. I can't comment anything about these - I can't even deny false rumours, as otherwise people would guess which rumours are true and which are not.

Otherwise, the floor is yours!

Personally, I'd like you to talk about the problems of putting VoIP and WiFi on your phones, but keeping the carriers happy at the same time. Can Nokia keep both the carriers and the power users happy?

Hi Tommi,
One simple question coming from my daughter. It was addressed to me a few days ago and now I'm passing it to you. She's got a St.Nicolas gift from me in Dec 5th. It is a N72. She previously had a 3660. Question: "Dad, why Nokia wasn't able to put a recurring alarm in that phones. You said this is a smartphone, right"?:-).
Hmmm... my daughter starts school at 7.30 a.m. and she TRIES to wake up at six. For me, that's a hell of a problem, not the S60 ecosystem theory, LOL.
Sorry for bringing down the level of this blog:-(, but hey, here comes the weekend!
Have a nice one all of you!

Thanks Horia. Good question - I'll try to answer your daughter on Monday :)

Why S60 phones doesn't have the option to record above 1 minute or 60 minutes???(why not all the memory?)
Why don't NOKIA put a scientific calculator in S60 phones with plot graphs, etc.(it has that stupid calc since 7650)???
Why NOKIA don't put a "message counter" -showing ALL/SMS/MMS/E-Mail counters- implemented into "LOG" ???

-In recording also why not selecting "Record Quality": WMA(high), MP3(medium), AMR(low)???
-Also Nokia says that are multimedia computers but they don't support files like: wmv, divX/Xvid, avi, mov, ogg... why???
-When you are going to call someone that is from another country and you type "+" before inserting the area code of the country, why it doesn't show all the codes of all countries???(like Siemens)

Since you've got a fairly general blog, i'd be more interested in general stuff rather than specifics really.

First, what are you actually doing at S60? (apart from blogging of course; you mentioned a little while ago that your boss asked you to spend only 10-20% of your time blogging so you must be doing something else :-) ).

Also, how is it like to work at S60? What kind of mood, atmosphere is there? What kind of people are working there? Is everybody stuck in their offices all day long or is there a more "connecting people" kind of ambiance? How new applications and / or features are chosen? Is there some kind of "S60 lab" similar to the Google Lab?

Do S60 guys actually enjoy Symbian C++ and PlatSec and dream about a world where the only programming language would be Symbian C++ with PlatSec on top? If they don't, why isn't there more action taken to develop and promote alternative languages such as OPL, Python or, why not, C# (.NET S60 anyone? Yes, i know, Red Five Labs are working on it).

And last but not least, does everybody at S60 who doesn't use a S60 phone? Or put in another way: are you eating your own dog's food?

Why Nokia Music Player doesn't have fast forward and fast rewind functionality? It is especially bad if you are listening podcasts and if by some accident music player dies (which happens sometimes if you launch web browser in parallel) in the middle of an episode (which might be an hour long) then you cannot continue it from the middle when you restart the application.

In such cases I use OggPlay application (which has the possibility to do fast forward) to continue to listen the podcast episode from the middle.

My last sentence rephrased: does everybody at S60 use a S60 phone?

To Raimonds: Nokia Music player has fast forward and fast rewind functionalities. It works as it does with just about every CD and MP3 player on this planet: press and hold the Next or Previous button to fast forward and fast rewind.

Something that impresses me about Nokia is the fierce loyalty of many Nokia users to the Nokia brand. I can't imagine using a non-Nokia phone, and know I'm not alone in that!

My question:
To what do you credit Nokia's success in becoming such a beloved brand (I think Nokia ranked #6 most-loved brand in a recent study -- clearly, Nokia is doing something right!!)

As a Nokia customer, I've thought it's due to the quality and feature richness of Nokia products (my N73, for example). I also think Nokia makes a significant effort to engage with and listen to its customers.

Thanks for taking questions -- I look forward to the podcast!

Posted by: karen | December 9, 2006 12:35 AM

Where can I buy E50 in black metal at the moment? Thank you. Any English online store in Finland/ Thank you.

OK Tommi, posted my questions on my blog, even if they don't get selected I hope you could answer them whenever you have some free time.

Posted by: Stefan Constantinescu | December 10, 2006 12:47 AM

Im relativly new, when it comes to smartphones, but there seems to be a lot of uncertainty regarding firmware updates...

At almost every site i look at, I see discussions regarding firmware. The biggest problem seems to be patience from the customers... They want their phone fixed, and they wanted it done yesterday :-).

My personel problem is the lack of information from Nokia regarding updates.. You can offcourse check NSU regularly for updates, but youre still not informed about what it is that the firmware does for your phone.

Sometimes it looks like a gamble to update your phone, so if my phone really hasnt anything wrong with it, it might not be worth the chance to install new firmware.

And why cant you install the previous firmware on your phone? lets say you screw up big time and need to reload the existing firmware... as i understand it, you cant!

So to sum up:

Is there a official Nokia website where Nokia post information regarding firmware update with info on ETA of the firmware, what it can do for your phone and so on...

If there isn't, why not???

Hi Tommi,
My questions is about S60 3rd edition as a "platform" I am a fairly recent convert to Symbian. While I understand the economies of scale of having one platform for a multitude of devices I think it creates a less than ideal end user scenario.

Case in point - someone who buys an Eseries device have much higher expectations on the PIM apps (address book, calender and such)and SMS/messaging applications than someone who buys (for an example) a Nokia 6290. Yet, the PIM and SMS apps are almost identical.

As a convert, with a different platform still fresh in my memory, I feel that the PIM applications are "weak" on the Eseries devices (or rather - they are weak from a "prosumer" / "soho" point of view.

Would be interesting to hear your take on this.
Thanks

For what reason Nokia are planing to be one of the players on Windows Mobile devices market in the end of 2007. This information was officially published by HTC (the major producer of WM devices). Thanks in advance for answer.

Thanks for your questions, folks. I'll try to to answer all of them, unless I'm not allowed to due to confidentiality reasons. If there isn't time for all of the questions in the podcast, I'll answer the rest offline.

We postponed the interview to tomorrow morning Finnish time, but I'll hope we can air it during during the same day.

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