S60 5th Edition - touch and sensor enablers, enriched Internet and multimedia
Published by Rafe Blandford at 16:32 UTC, October 2nd 2008
Today sees the formal unveiling on S60 5th Edition. The new version of S60, built on Symbian OS 9.4, adds touch enablers to the platform, which means it is possible for licensees to create devices that use finger touch and/or stylus interaction. Other additions and improvements include the new sensor framework (adds easy integration of sensors, such as accelerometers into the platform) updated web technologies (WebKit version updated, Flash Lite 3 as standard) and enhanced multimedia functionality (support for widescreen displays, image and video editors as standard). Read on for more details.
"Today sees the introduction of S60 5th Edition, the latest release of the world’s leading, open smartphone platform, S60 on Symbian OS. The S60 5th Edition has the most advanced set of features that enable new innovations and new experiences for consumers that want to fully embrace the use of smartphone products.
With S60 5th Edition, the user interface is extended by the introduction of touch and with full support for tactile feedback. Enhanced display resolution support and a new Widescreen mode further compliments the touch UI and enables engaging visual experiences. Also, for the first time, the platform includes a framework for the use of advanced sensor technology. This all allows S60 device manufacturers to create innovative new device concepts for a wider range of user segments, while preserving the rich capabilities of the existing software platform."
The first device to use S60 5th Edition is the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic which was announced today, see other news items.
Developers can download the S60 5th Edition SDK and tools from Forum Nokia from today.
Shown here is an example of the UI in landscape 'widescreen' mode.
Note the finger touch friendly toolbar on the right hand side.
Shown here is an example of the UI in portrait mode. Note the toolbars above the soft key
areas and the hand writing recognition input area. Text input is via hand writing recognition,
on screen QWERTY virtual keyboard or on screen virtual alphanumeric keypad.
Key highlights of S60 5th Edition
- Based on Symbian OS 9.4, which brings a host of OS level improvements, which should increase performance and battery life. The OS is also the enabler for many of the technologies described below.
- Adds touch enablers and tactile feedback to S60. The UI is designed to be used with finger touch or a stylus. The UI and base applications have been optimised for touch usage. Tactile feedback gives a physical signal to the user (buzz/vibrate) when an on screen interaction takes place.
- Standard S60 applications have been extended and optimised to take advantage of touch interactions.
- In order to help enable touchscreen devices there is enhanced support for higher resolution displays and a new 'widescreen' mode.
- Adds a framework to enable the use of sensors in the UI and by third parties. Such sensors might include accelerometers, which enable functionality such as 'flip to silence' or 'shake to unlock'. Third party access is enable by APIs which are available in the software development kit.
- Enhanced support for Internet technologies, including an updated Web browser (more recent version of WebKit) and Flash Lite 3. The browser has been optimised for touch usage, including the ability to scroll around the screen using a finger and finger touch-friendly toolbars and controls.
- Adds S60 Platform Services to the S60 Web Runtime (also known as WRT 2). This enables the creation of personalised and context-aware widgets. This gives widget developers access to many features of the S60 platform, including GPS, contacts, calendar, messaging, audio and video. These are accessed via custom javascript and actionscript API calls.
- Adds new image and video editors (i.e. now standard part of platform), making it simpler to edit media on the device. The image editor functions include red-eye reduction, cropping, image adjustments and the ability to add text and images. The video editor lets you cut, merge and add sound to videos stored on the device.
- Adds Open C++ (following on from Open C) to the platform. This brings the Standard Template Library (STL) and other popular platform-independent C++ libraries to S60.
Quotes from the press release
"S60 5th Edition’s new features and added functionality significantly enhances the products that intend to provide rich multimedia and Internet experiences for consumers. Intuitive sensor technologies, interactions via touch, and tactile feedback creates delight and excitement for consumers and unparalleled innovation opportunities for developers and internet content providers," said Lee Williams, Senior Vice President, S60 Software, Nokia. "With this release we will see manufacturers create and extend their portfolio of products with new types of devices addressing a broader range of consumer needs."
"The versatile developer support offered by S60 5th edition enables developers to write applications in a range of languages that they are already very familiar with," said Tom Libretto, Vice President, Forum Nokia. "That familiarity and being able to arm developers with the tools and technologies that best suit their needs will allow for further innovation of new applications and services, not only for S60 5th edition, but also for S60 3rd Edition Feature Packs 1 and 2."
"The S60 5th Edition SDK presents an exciting opportunity for mobile application development," said Erik Abair, senior vice president of engineering and co-founder of Kyte. "Development on this new platform will advance touch technology, provide more flexibility to create new user interfaces for our mobile application, Kyte Mobile Producer, and improve the overall user experience for consumers."
"Over the years, SHAPE Services have observed an astounding evolution in Nokia mobile platforms and development environments which have been further revolutionized by the latest Symbian S60 5th Edition SDK," said Igor Berezovsky, CEO, SHAPE Services GmbH. "It is great to see that Nokia was able to keep the original spirit of the S60 platform while continuing to provide compatibility for previous editions of S60. This allowed for quick and easy porting of Shape Services' IM+ All-In-One Instant messenger to the new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic."
You can read the full press release here.
We'll be bringing you more news on S60 5th Edition in due course.
See Also
Evolving S60: Touch UI, Sensor Framework and Accelerator Toolkit
S60 Touch video from last year
Categories: Software, Developer, Industry
Platforms: General, S60 5th Edition
News Discussion
Why are comments disabled on the 5800 announcement story?
| Sticking a touch layer to a 8 years old softkey based OS: guaranteed mess. They should have redesigned it from scratch. |
There have been touchscreen versions of Symbian since it began, Symbian UIQ was touchscreen based and Nokia's very own Symbian Series 90 was touchscreen based too.
S60 has used buttons until now, but there's no reason to think it cannot make the leap to touchscreens.
As for designing a platform from scratch, that would mean throwing away compatibility with a massive userbase (the largest of any smartphone) and many network operators who use S60 to deliver their own services. It would also probably mean abandoning compatibility with button-based devices which still make up the vast majority of phone and smartphone sales.
>>I wonder if any non-java apps for N95 (S60 3ed) will install/work on Tube, too.<<
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Originally Posted by Tzer2
The Symbian OS is not softkey based.
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Sticking a touch layer to a 8 years old softkey based OS: guaranteed mess. They should have redesigned it from scratch.
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What Nokia did not do was change the existing UI, the touch stuff has been added to the UI, not replacing bits of it. And rightly so, because this keeps existing apps compatible with S60 5th edition. Nokia already gets plenty of flak because of the lack of a proper appstore, they don't need more flak because of a new major compatability break.
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Originally Posted by svdwal
What Nokia did not do was change the existing UI
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
That's the point, genius.
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for me, i'm very happy to see what nokia has launched today... it is worth waiting for it... now anxiously waiting for it's review...
i was going to buy N82 next week but now i've to wait for it's review...
this is certainly going to be a competition to iPhone... n i think it should be compared with iPhone... in the categories of music, camera and OS (usability)
but there are few things that i'm concerned about:
1. how is the tactile feedback?
2. will it support to play current nGage games?
Maybe the SDK launch should be more stressed out along with the launch of the device, the Nokia 5800.
Also a special launch should be done in U.S. because there are a lot of developers that emigrated in U.S. from Europe, Asia, etc. and those should be the target of the revamped and full of features OS/SDK.
If you ignore the "giant" U.S. which is the top software producer, and the top multi-media producer (and also the top news producer) you are out of the game of mobile industry leaders in the long term. A special focus shoul have been accorded to U.S. market and penetration of Nokia 5800 and Symbian in general. I don't understand this, Nokia cannot sign a deal with T-Mobile or with AT&T? Right now, Nokia N95 is for sale only unlocked in U.S. for 800$, where in Canada it is sold for only 79$ with a contract.
Almost nobody in U.S has a Nokia or a N95 because of the lack of partnership between Nokia and AT&T or T-Mobile. I think AT&T has a signed exclusivity with Apple iPhone which prevents AT&T to sell any Nokia (N95 or else), and I see T-Mobile has an agreement with Google G1 Andorid - so Nokia is just left out of the U.S, market ? If this is true, and it seems to be the case, then Nokia will have a BIG problem in the future, because most of the media is coming from U.S. This could be the end of the dominating position for Nokia in mobile industry and the raise of Apple with its iPhone.
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Originally Posted by irfanil
2. will it support to play current nGage games?
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Anyway, this is in response to that story :)
Looks like the 5800 is a good initial touch-experiment phone. It seems to be missing Nokia Haptikos, which gives near perfect haptics, see here:
http://www.redferret.net/?p=9533
Also, no TV out which is interesting, and clearly a marketing ploy. Still, it's a good handset. I hope the high end touch device next year (presumably) will have proper haptics, and multitouch (oh that would be so nice!), VGA tv out all the time (not just for real player and gallery), a 5MP camera, Xenon flash, etc.
Still this is good competition for iPhone nonetheless, the HW is immediately much better than their lame 3G attempt.
| will it support to play current nGage games? |
Think that the 5800 screen (640 pixels) is double the size of the N-Gage current games which is 320 pixels.
So they can add a virtual D-Pad (touch screen Directional pad) in the first 320 pixels of the screen, large enough for easy screen touch and they can run the game in the other half of the screen.
However, this needs to be supported by Nokia Symbian OS. Not hard to be done, but not sure if they have even considered this idea.
Honestly, the whole UI is an utter mess, and they should have cleaned the whole thing up before adding even more stuff.
I'm seriously considering canceling my N96 preorder (it's released on Oct 15th in Sweden) in favor of the 5800, for a number of reasons.
5800 advantages (compared to the N96)
1) It only costs a bit over half as much as the N96.
2) The N96 has received lukewarm reviews, and may not sell very well. I fear it might go the same way as my current phone, the N93. That is, abandoned by Nokia a few months after release. The 5800, on the other hand, is the first in a new line of devices - this line is likely to get a lot of attention from Nokia for a while.
3) Higher screen resolution, and bigger screen (I think I read 3.2 inches, as compared to the N96's 2.8 inches). I'm sure this will be nice for movies and photos.
4) In the case of the 5800, I won't be paying for a DVB-H receiver (mobile TV) which I can't use since there are no broadcasts in Sweden.
N96 advantages (compared to the 5800)
1) 16 GB built-in storage. The 5800 only has a card slot (although, a 8 GB card is included when you buy the phone).
2) The N96 has more software available for it than the 5800 will, because it will take developers some time to make the needed adjustments. For example, it'll probably be a while before Python (PyS60) is released for the 5800.
3) The N96 has N-Gage, which me and my N93 have been waiting for, for over 2 years now (grumble). Because of the lack of hardware buttons and the new 360x640 screen resolution, it may be a while (if at all) before the 5800 gets N-Gage.
I think the 5800 will sell pretty well. I think a lot of people have been waiting for "a cheaper iPhone". And I think people will appreciate the fact that it has a semi-familiar S60-interface.
This beats iPhone SDK and Google "Customized" Java as development platforms.
C++ is very fast, not like Python or Java.
Also the Qt can be added now on the Symbian platform (Qt is written in C++) so this expands everything - maybe KDE can be ported on Symbian too, and then all the nice applications like KWord, OpenOffice and so on can be ported to Symbian. This depends also on the RAM memory that Nokia puts on these phones, but if they put a decent 256 MB of RAM, anything is possible. These phone devices will be really computers.
I wait to see Nokia's Linux Maemo also in a phone, to directly compete Google's Linux Andorid. Linux is a better OS than Symbian, and has far more applications and posibilities.
The new phone rocks. keeping my breath until the n-series version come out. Yes I think so. Perhaps an E-series touch with a qwerty. he, he...
Nokia Make my day!
I'm not saying they should partner with a major provider in the states - that would make sense- but they already are the #1 in volume and margin worldwide !
Cheers
Greg
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Originally Posted by architengi
N-Gage can be supported.
Think that the 5800 screen (640 pixels) is double the size of the N-Gage current games which is 320 pixels. So they can add a virtual D-Pad (touch screen Directional pad) in the first 320 pixels of the screen, large enough for easy screen touch and they can run the game in the other half of the screen. However, this needs to be supported by Nokia Symbian OS. Not hard to be done, but not sure if they have even considered this idea. |