An Evening with S60…

I had a great time at the S60 event last night at the Nokia Flagship store in NYC. Thanks to Phil from S60 for setting the whole thing up and to the warm hospitality of the Nokia store team!

It was great to geek out with Nokia staff and other enthusiasts! I really enjoyed meeting quite a few new people as well as actually speaking in person to a few familar bloggers: Darla Mack, Mark Guim and Stefan Constantinescu. The S60 brought out all the new and upcoming goodies so we got to really check out the 6110 Navigator, E61i, E65, N75, N76, E90, N93i and the N95 which seemed to captivate most people who were there.

I got a great overview of Feature Pack 2 (s60v3 fp2) which has some very slick animation transitions, awesome customization and of course media capabilities. I think Mikko finally resolved the issue for me with Feature Packs not being installed through firmware updates — A feature pack is an extension on the platform, that usually requires new hardware to run. The average lifespan of a device is about 2 years and the development path is tough to intersect — even for a total Nokia package (software and hardware). It’s quite a bit more difficult for S60 devices not manufactured by Nokia…

It’s clearly a business decision not to support things beyond the more “basic” updates which are generally to squash bugs or make smaller enhancements. We are actually lucky Nokia even supports that as it’s far from common for a handset manufacturer to enable end-user updates. While the hardware will be more powerful when FP2 ships, it will also be easier to use — meaning you’ll actually see in the UI that you can adjust a setting (obviously) and that multiple apps are running so that the capabilities are more easily understood. Now the audience last night was far from the average user and Nokia is making a move with FP2 to enable a broader suite of devices to become more capable rather than just relying on their ultra high end stuff…

I’m looking forward to the browser release which should arrive within the next 1 month. Apparently, the user voices have been heard and the browser will be pulled out from the FP updates so we’ll all be able to take advantage of the progress that’s been made without having to drop some serious dough on a new phone — just to take advantage of the browser…

Some pics I snapped are on flickr and include some GPS coordinates from my trip as well as a few shots inside the store. The flickr pool from last night has a bunch more. Phil also shot some video from last night which should eventually make it on YouTube…

Again – The night was a lot of fun and I hope we’ll have other opportunities to get together.

BTW — Congrats to the lucky winner of the N95 last night — I missed your name and stopped paying attention once I realized it was not me. 😉

Technorati Tags: N-Series, N93i, N95, New York, Nokia, S60, Symbian