17 October 2008

Nokia 5800 - S60 5th Ed
Full Backward Compatibility!?

S60 5th Edition, recently introduced by Nokia, brings new benefits to users and developers, including a touch-screen UI. The new platform is based on Symbian OS v9.4, which includes enhancements to offer faster boot-up and application starts and reduce the likelihood of the annoying out-of-memory problems known from the 3rd edition phones, Nokia N95-1 especially.

S60 5th Edition also adds support for a new Widescreen 640 x 360 nHD displays to deliver a touch-screen capability with full support for tactile feedback using the device's vibrate function.

The touch capability uses a select-activate paradigm and offers gesture features such as tap, touch, drag, and stroke that can be used for tasks like panning within an image.

To support touch interaction, S60 5th Edition supports wide range of input methods, various different on-screen keyboards and handwriting recognition. Also, for the first time, the platform includes a framework for the use of advanced sensor technology.

The sensor framework in S60 5th Edition provides easy integration for wide range of sensors into vendor's devices, and enables them and developers to take advantage of sensor data to create new exiting and intuitive applications and features!

However, the most importantly, Nokia’s S60 dev team have managed to increases the UI speed and implement all mentioned improvements without code break and loosing the backward compatibility which is exceptionally important for an average end user of the S60 platform.

So if you are curious how touch UI devices impacts the old S60 applications optimized for lower resolutions screens there is a nice video, it’s mobile review video in Russian but I tweak it a little bit ;)

In addition, to provide a level of compatibility for existing applications, Nokia has implemented an on-screen keypad which allows users to use existing applications and games especially designed for keypad interactions. Handy on-screen keypad smoothes transition to touch-driven UI design and allows user to create key events pressing the navigation/select buttons on touch screen. User can also remove the keypad from application's settings via Control Panel.

By keeping the familiar UI environment and keeping the backward compatibility migrating from the non-touch S60 phones to 5th edition will be easy and seamless for millions S60 users! The early adopters should be comfortable with adaptation and will find it easy to learn the new features in the 5th edition of the S60 UI!

That's all for now, hopefully I'll manage to get Tube soon and than I'll be able to give you more info and answer to all of your questions regariding the first S60 touch device and 5th edition of the S60 platform.