16 November 2007

S60 Touch UI
Forum Nokia Mobile Application Summit 2.0?

Forum Nokia held its Mobile Application Summit in Bangkok, Thailand on 30-31 October 2007, which saw mobile developers from various parts of the region meeting and sharing ideas and current projects with the management teams from Forum Nokia, content partner companies, media and the S60 development teams.

One of the highlights of the 2-day conference was the presentation of the upcoming S60 Touch Interface and guys over at Hardware-zone have a great, very detailed and informative report from the summit and if you’re at all curious about how upcoming touch interface looks like and what you can expect in practice you shouldn’t miss this article.

As I said one of the highlights of the conference was the presentation of the upcoming S60 Touch Interface by Lee Williams, Senior Vice President for Technology Platforms, Nokia.

As most Symbian Freak readers should know by now, Series 60 is one of the three major platforms that Nokia uses among its devices – the other two platforms being the Series 40 platform and the Linux platform called maemo (seen on the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet).

It is generally perceived as a complete interface solution that sits on top of the Symbian core operating system that includes apps like Web Browser, email client and so on. Fit these instruction sets with various pieces of hardware and voila, you can rapidly build phones like there’s no tomorrow.

At the Forum Nokia demo showfloor, we saw a demo of how the S60 Touch UI might look from the context of transitions – basically page-screens will transition in a smooth, transparent style that adds aestheticism to the interface.

Lee Williams, Senior VP for Technology Platforms, Nokia, presented a video and details on what the S60 Touch UI can do and answered questions on what the future holds for S60 mobile device users come 2008.

Of course, the Series 60 group identified 3 major customers that form its ecosystem – internal business groups that produce Nokia devices, the licensees from other mobile device manufacturers (Samsung, LG) and the silicon community (chipset manufacturers).

The fourth customer group is the developer community who creates applications for the Series 60 platform.

According to Lee, two recent studies (Nokia Smartphone 360 and Nokia Consumer Study 2006) revealed the following patterns in consumer usage, beyond voice communications and text messaging.

• 76% has a desire to view mobile TV on their mobile devices
• 54% play games
• 76% shoot photos and/or videos
• 64% listen to music
• 51% has a desire to use maps and navigation functions on their mobile devices
• Internet becoming core mobile experience:
  • 81% use browser
  • 31% use instant messaging
  • 4% use podcasting
  • 8% use internet telephony (VoIP)
  • 5% use mobile TV

Lee also shared the prospects of seeing Widgets on the S60 browser. He cited a UK company called 3, which is best known for launching the X-Series mobile Internet service in various European countries, and is now introducing widgets in the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, with Touch UI in 2008.

Widgets are basically third-party items that can be embedded within a user interface like a web page, desktop or mobile phone, which the user can interact with.

Lee later showed what he felt were considerations that went into the S60 Touch User Interface, the new UI that the Series 60 team is working with various mobile device manufacturers on and introduce by 2008.

Lee explained that in looking at the user interface, one has to ensure the following:

Lee then went on to show us a framework of how the new and upcoming S60 Touch UI will feel or look. Basically, the new UI will have four key elements:

• Efficient and Intuitive Touch UI with Tactile Feedback – When you touch the screen, you get feedback.
  
• Advanced Sensor Technologies – Tap screen to do something specific or flip phone over to execute an instruction. There is the example of moving water on-screen that orientates itself based on how you hold the mobile device.
  
• UI Accelerator Toolkit – Allows developers to rapidly create impressive graphical effects and new forms of interactions. You can have stuff like a music player with graphical equalizer represented in a 3D form, and the accelerator gives very low power utilization so you don’t run down your mobile device battery.
  
  You can personalize the way you access your music and you can view files in 3D shadow-effected, transparency-enabled visuals that make it a rich experience for users. Developers can create third-party apps like they would on a desktop PC for the mobile device.
  
• Desktop-like Web Video Experience with Flash Lite 3 integrated in the S60 system – Access YouTube video direct and online content. Basically you don’t have to do anything special to access Flash-based content on Web sites.

Lee also shared what the Series 60 team sees as the future of the platform. "We see people really using these products to really participate in and have access to their communities. It is much more than accessing the Internet through a Web browser, which isn’t as compelling. It is about having some form of presence on the Internet so that your friends and colleagues now know you’re available, via IM, to share images with and so on."

As part of the Touch UI promotion NOkia has also released the Haze visual theme, which is available here by the wy, for 3rd edition devices only

"There’s also the concept of the contextual Internet, where if you’re walking by a store, you can, with some level of awareness, get an update that tells you about a sale at the store as you’re walking by. We’re enabling these technologies in the software so developers can create these types of products."

"Lastly, peer-to-peer sharing is one of our major focuses. One of the difficulties most users encounter is the challenge with which they can share, transfer photos from their galleries in their mobile devices to friends, families, printers and store them on PCs.

We’re going to a future where it is easier to access other users’ galleries. So your friends or families can literally add a relative into their contact books and behind the scenes, the software will configure a secure connection and as you or they add images into the phones, you will be able to see them, browse and copy them."