Enhanced Features for S60 Platform

By Aimie Pardas

USERS can look forward to more than just an intuitive touch user interface in the new S60 on Symbian OS smartphone software as Nokia has also expanded the platform with other innovations to provide a richer mobile experience.

Nokia has publicly announced in 2008 there will be a touch-based devices based on the S60, says Nokia Asia-Pacific S60 Market Development director, Mahmood Kalantar.

However, since the S60 is also licensed to other manufacturers, it’s not necessary to have the first S60 touchbased phone being a Nokia brand.

Still, users can expect S60 touch interface phones to come in many different designs or form factors.

“The touch user interface can be used with devices with touch screen and traditional keypad, or with a Qwerty keyboard or touch screen alone, supporting both finger or stylus-optimised input,” he explains.

However, since the touch user interface offers a different physical experience, tactile feedback is even included.

“Tactile feedback has a physical feedback to your finger on the screen. It gives you the feel that the action has been performed. So you get a feedback on the screen that resembles the feedback that you have on touch and we believe that it is going to make the user experience much better,” he explains.

Additionally, the new S60 even allows a device to “understand” its own orientation.

“Sensors is another innovation that we have added to our next release. Your phone will be able to understand its direction,” Mahmood explains.

This allows an incoming call to be dismissed or an alarm silenced just by flipping the phone over. Additionally, these features also offer new opportunities for application and game developers. However, existing S60 3rd Edition applications can run on touch- enabled devices unmodified but tools will be made available for developers to optimise the touch experience of their applications.

The latest S60 will also have new features that enhance the user experience and enable manufacturers, developers and operators to design new types of mobile devices, applications and services.

Apart from the touch user interface, the S60 will also integrate Flash video into the Web browser, allowing people to view Flash- enable videos and Web sites like they would do on a desktop.

“We want to capture the user excitement by providing different consumer segments with experiences that can be customised to fit their needs and devices. It is about ensuring simplicity and smartness in layout and navigation, so that users can enjoy Internet browsing, music, e-mail, photography, videography, mobile TV and navigation, while maintaining the familiarity when people switch from one device to another,” he says.

Mahmood says that people embrace having more functionality and being able to do more out of their phones.

For example, Nokia’s 360 Smartphone Study found that about 80 per cent of people use a camera-enabled phone to regularly take photos on a weekly basis, while 64 per cent do use the music function on their phones.

“We see experiences converging and people demanding more and more of the functionalities that smartphones offer,” he says. “The focus of our strategy is to give people choice and simplicity – both key to delivering the best user experiences to add value to people’s lives.”

Mahmood adds that research companies expect anywhere between 400 million to over 500 million smartphones in the next four years.

“The message is that phones with a navigation function enabled by S60, phones with full Web browsing capabilities, phones with user interface which are compatible are going to be available all over the place,” he says.

Don’t just expect these capabilities to be available in the high- end phone models only. The S60 gives power to the mid-range or average users the same way it does to the highend phone user, as any applications that can run on a high-end phone, can also run on a mid- range phone, Mahmood explains.

Thanks largely to the S60 open platform, by end of the first quarter this year, there was close to 5,000 thirdparty commercial applications, targeted for the S60 smartphone, he says.

“We will work with co-and developers so can develop applications and services based on enablers, t4 more and more services for people.”

(c) 2007 New Straits Times. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.