Nokia's S60 Touch Interface announced
By Thomas Ricker 
posted October 16th 2007 7:24AM
posted October 16th 2007 7:24AM
Update: The press release is out and with it, more information about the new S60 software: existing S60 3rd Edition apps will run on touch-enabled devices unmodified (but can be further enhanced, natch); generic proximity and light sensors supported; a UI Accelerator Toolkit enables "impressive" graphical effects; and Flash Video will be supported in the S60 web browser. Available to S60 device manufacturers "during 2008." A bit more specificity please, Nokia?
Read -- S60 Touch Interface launched
Read -- Nokia PR
It looks like a news report on fat people. No headshots..
Looks like Nokia is headed south as well. WOOHOO!!! less trash on store shelves! The world has no room for "me toos"
I can't believe Engadget didn't mention the iPhone once in that article!
=)
I'm also surprised the engadget writers aren't screaming iphone knockoff like they normally would.. oh wait i forgot it's not made by a chinese manufacturer, tells you a lot about the engadget staff doesn't it....
/sigh
itty-bitty stylus keyboard for the huge loss.
shame really. i was pretty interested until I saw drop-down menus, checkboxes and scrollbars (?!) all sized for stylus use on a 'touch' interface.
c'mon Nokia, it isn't hard. Get rid of the stylus. You have a product called "Touch" ffs and the model is using the stylus more than her damn finger.
Think about that.
-haptic feedback support
-full support for existing S60 apps!
-support for kinetic and light sensors (with Symbian 9.5 I guess, as it already supports that)
-a new toolkit for creating animated, modern UI's
-full Flash support (as in, with direct flash video support!)
http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1160272
Whoa... That phone better have 3G and GPS built in. It is incredibly thick.
Looks like 15mm imho. Not quite "incredibly thick" if you ask me. And I wouldn't bet on seeing the exact device from the demo video anyway. The screens were clearly put onto it on a computer afterwards, so I think it is a dummy shown in the vid rather than anything else.
And yeah, 3G is a no-brainer, and with Nokia's recent push into navigation services, GPS is in it for sure as well.
Being that thick, it better have optical zoom and a xenon flash.
it looks like a brick, just like the n95. though its powerful with features galore, i would love to have something slimmer.
> it looks like a brick, just like the n95. though its powerful with features galore, i would love to have something slimmer.
Sony Ericsson P1i, I've been using one for over a month, has grown on me a LOT. Didn't get an N95 because of the thickness. P1i beats it in all areas except it doesn't have GPS (so have to enter street name you're on in google maps instead, no big deal there).
The P1 is hardly slimmer than the N95 - 17 compared to 21mm...
And GPS is far from the only difference. If you really make an in-depth comparison, the differences are huge...
Nokia's batteries explode...!
And, that thing is SO FAT.
DogGunn,
I'm currently in Poland for a few weeks. While killing some time I wrote a little post on my blog (www.symbiosis60.com) after observing people waling in and out of the lobby...read it and then make comments that Symbian has gone downhill. I'm not going to throw any percentage but I saw about 8 people sitting in the lobby having conversation on S60 devices and a whopping ONE using Crackberry. This does indeed prove that S60 has gone downhill... Perhaps you should travel outside of the comfy bubble you live and then come back here and make another post with your observation. Also I personally don't feel there's much improvement needed in S60 appearance. It's clean, you can slap any kind of theme on top of it and it does what it needs to do. On the other hand I've used WM5 and WM6 - and I can say that this OS confuses the crap out of me and I'm not the one to be confused easily. Configuration of services is a BITCH bordering on the edge of higher engineering degree.
When I picke up my FIRST symbian phone about four years ago (N3650) It felt almost natural where to look for things and I don't get that feeling with WinMo OR Blackberry for that matter.
I do give a praise to Sony Ericsson OS...nice and clean as well but the platform itself does not allow for as much flexibility as S60 does.
Maciek
www.symbiosis60.com
Hey, look at us. We just made an iPhone knockoff. Of course, we didn't copy the iPhone. We had this on the drawing board for years just waiting until the time was right. An Apple spy infiltrated our headquarters and stole our designs. Our touch screen handset will be far better than Apple's. If they add one feature, we'll add two. If they have an X amount of memory, we'll double it. They use 3G, we'll use 4G. Their product weighs 12 ounces, ours will weigh 24 ounces. In the end, our product will be twice as good.
Besides we just figured people didn't need big screens and touch input in a handset, so we kept them happy with 2" screens, weird keypads and non-intuitive input menus. When the iPhone fad dies out, we'll return to the old designs which users love.
Love,
Nokia, the handset sales and market leader. Copier supreme.
Thinking helps. It really does.
And doing research helps as well, honestly.
And keeping quiet when clueless to avoid making a fool out of oneself works well too. Really!
Research more helps. There is Google and Yahoo for starters. Try searching LG Prada and Pocket PC phone editions into them.
you're really small minded, aren't you?
Development time, in the real world, doesn't work the way your feeble mind has it played out. It's not as simple as "hey look this phone came out! let's just copy it!" with the exception of the real knockoffs (and even those are just structural).
R&D takes real man hours. So to say that this device wasn't in development until the iPhone reared its head is idiotic, at best.
I think it's silly that anything that has a large screen and a touch interface is now "an iphone knockoff". Personally, I didn't even enjoy using the iphone. I considered buying it after the price drop (I rushed to get a 4gb before they were all gone), and when I used it...I didn't enjoy it. The gesture based interface IS in fact intuitive, but I didn't enjoy typing with it. Perhaps I didn't give myself time to absorb whatever learning curve there is.
Anyway, your attempt to be witty by pointing out what you feel is a valid point, is in fact, anything but. Thanks for playing, though.
Hey peeps. I was being sarcastic. You don't get it at all. Every handset manufacturer wants to have their own iPhone, no matter how they do it. If you want to scrap, look elsewhere.
great, another racist phone coming soon.
What do you mean?
Don't worry pal, this is no iPhone. After all, don't you use your fingers with the iPhone?
LoL people are on fire agen =D Its not that phone thats going to release...read the damn text.
PLEASE read the entry/press release again!
Sorry to disappoint every hater/fanboy, but this is not an actual phone. This is just a base (like UIQ or OSX). What you do with it is totally different. Therefore:
- finger or stylus support means, that Manufacturers can choose which of the three input interfaces they want to support
- haptic feedback support means, that if a Manufacturer does not build-in a touchscreen with this feature (like the iPhone did not have it with 1.0) then you will not get haptic feedback.
- UI Accelerator Toolkit is nice, but if you don't program with it, the UI is the same slow one
- available to manufacturers in 2008 means that the first phone running S60 Touch could be even 2009!
I really hope that 2008 means 1Q and first S60 Touch based phone means 2Q :-)))
I can live with my N95 8GB until then ;-)
Nice to see that someone got it ^^
iHype
Looks like Samsung SCH-W559 has haptic touch already.
Explained here:-
http://www.time4.com/time4/microsites/popsci/howitworks/cellphone_motor.html
But will it sync with my BMW...? =( I hope it does
iHype
Well, well, well!!!! It's really a copycat of the iPhone. well in more ways than one, nokia has settled again to mediocrity. hey nokia don't you have any better innovations up your sleeves? people need something revolutionary here. not just a touchscreen with a haptic feedback. we need more than that to kill the iPhone. i truly believe nokia could have done a better way to introduce touch screens on their phones. the stylus is a really bad idea.
I guess that it's time for Microsoft to leak qome Windows Mobile Photon info to counter attack all this lol. The damn thing has been in developement since 2004. Come on MS!
I have a great solution to solving the hard to use QWERTY on screen keyboard. Make it full screen.
But where do you see what your typing? That's where holographic technology comes in, and yes it has been invented (using non-star-wars methods).
Does anyone know what "depending upon the display technology used" means exactly? Are there two different versions. I mean, if the thing has haptics then the stylus seems like it should be secondary. Instead that they show her using it for most of the vid which is disappointing.
You know, IMHO, Apple doesn't make nearly the use of multitouch that they should/developers could so the thing just frustrates me. If they won't set all that creativity free I'd love to have something like this that we can set programmers loose on but the stylus just doesn't bode well. The UI for a stylus and finger are, and should be, different. Hard to mix them - which is why WinMo has those pitiful little buttons that ultimately mar the TouchFlo. Is that what is going to happen here? Or are their going to be two different devices?
Scroll bar and stylus? C'mon.
Nokia did this years ago....series 90 phone....the nokia widescreen or 7710....i still have it now...a quality phone with touchscreen and the first phone to have tv on it, plus email and all that other stuff...no phone today can beat it
@Ireland
2. Symbian? Woah, watch out iPhone only runs OS X.
3. 3rd party apps aren't here 'right now' but pretty much all know their coming.
Yeah, and they closed off the system making all of its power and potential go to waste. Locking down 3rd party apps was a dumb move by Apple. In fact, the iphone wasn't even an open system in the beginning. You'd have to jailbreak the damn thing just to get 3rd party software on it.
Yeah sure, you will "eventually" be getting 3rd party apps on the iphone. However, it's almost guaranteed that Apple will make you buy it off of itunes and they will probably only select a few 3rd party apps that they deem profitable or useful for consumers.
Thanks, but I'll stick to my open Symbian platform and free 3rd party apps.
Did they really have to make her eye twinkle at the end?
It took apple for nokia to do this.. They could've done this ages ago before apple, but apple had to come forth and move the mobile technology to a next gen level.
Just like always, apple paves the technology ahead, and others follow
there are plenty of immitaters, but only one original..
Oh well, this is good..atleast it's good to know apple isn't doing a failure but proving their side of the technlogy world is the future
True. There is only one original. It's funny how the iPhone/Apple zealots somehow conveniently forget to mention that the all-praised features of iPhone are mere knock-offs from MyOrigo (small Finnish company), back in 2003.
Big screen? MyOrigo
All touch operated? MyOrigo
Accelerometers, screen orientation? MyOrigo
Too bad the technology wasn't ready back then, for such a innovative product. (namingly the touch screen they were using)
It has been even implicated that Apple bought the rights (IP? anyone?) from Finnish company. (MyOrigo)
Only "original" feature is the multi-touch gimmick and that too wasn't their own invention, someone just merely saw Jeff Han's multi-touch clip on Youtube and decided to put integrate it to their upcoming handset. Hence, the principle was already there, they just put it to new form factor. The fact that these people somehow try to state that no-one has ever thought such things before is just utter bull... I'd rather state that pretty much every mobile UI designer has thought of this ever since that Jeff Han's clip. Apple just happened to made it first. (Maybe their UI designers just have more power over the technology engineers?)
As a UI designer myself, I'm ready to give iPhone one up, though.
The interface has indeed turned things around a bit. Maybe others are now more willing to think outside the box.
Although, Symbian has the same burden as Windows has: Wide userbase & long history. As every UI designer knows by heart, people tend to resist change. Rather, they tend to gravitate towards static environments with known variables. This makes it harder to completely overhaul such widely known products as Symbian or Windows. While I'm sure both of them (at least the UI design team) would gladly throw everything to trash and start from with a clean slate, it's just not possible.
I think a lot of your Apple freaks are missing the idea - it is a proof of concept of an OS with its options that 3rd party manufactuers can use, it not an actual product.
Therefore different models could use the stylus or not, and variations of a status bar - or not. I mean hell S60 today as is, does quite will with NO status bar and NO stylus. So clearly what they are proving is options for the mix.
The problem is you folks are too used to Apple's "Ford Model T" straightjacket: they lock you down in a ridig OS and firmware with no real options for customisation. S60 and Nokia is all about having a base OS that is spread over a variety of models and implementations.
You will fail to understand if you are unable to get your head out of your own....a--...em....paradigm.
this is the worst video ever made including porn movies
Because iphone is from Apple, that's all.
thanks to the appleboys strengthening the stereotype - it's the software - geez
The Apple Phone is the JUDAS PHONE okay?
Please read the initial post properly - we're talking about the software - from my standpoint I prefer a theme that allows me to group applications into categories which I can open with just a single tap of my finger - has that been patented?
I looked at the old HTC p4000 (aka TYTN) running MW 5.0 - it came with a stylus - and a side slider with a full qwerty keypad - the ONLY time I found myself using the stylus was when the slider was closed or the tip of my finger could not make contact with the screen in the correct place.
I did find it extremely annoying that he web and email buttons are conveniently located across the top of the touchscreens' border - so if I don't lock the screen, because honestly when I whip out my phone I want to use it - not go through the 2/3 tap unlock process.
And the best killer features yet to come because:
"generic proximity and light sensors supported"
Whoever gets this into a large display device with everything mentioned - I believe will have reached nirvana - but PLEASE give it a proper NAME not alpha-numeric gibberish - the AVERAGE user wants IT to have a NAME - reference Motorola and their thin phones of late.
Internet browser supports flash. > iphone.
Tacking a touch interface on top of S60 smacks of panic by Nokia. S60 is so creaky, that it's crying out for a major ground up rewrite, and the touch add-on is just going to kill it. This has become the Nokia way - a quick 6 month reaction to outside events, rather than a much longer term view. That's why *Phone caught them with their pants down in the first place.
yaa nice..
does this mean all future s60 device will have touch interfaces and no more it will have a single handed keypad layout?? this shocks me. S60 is the most advanced UI frame work for a smartphone. the main feature was the single handed input. but Nokia for a race with iPhone i think is losing there charm of S60 :( i may be egzagerating but this is what i think
how much is it ?
That "thing" sucks. It's not a cellphone anymore, it's a pocket computer.
A phone is usually used to phone, not to make coffee.
And... it smells like iCopy uh ?
For me Nokia is the best, the last products were awesome but they need more speed (N73, N81, N95) I have tried them all, We dont want to wait for the cellphone to do what we want it to do, we want it to do the things we want as fast as we can do them. We just need speed on this new one plus all the apps of the N95 and a good way to chat like with the old models (6230, etc.) No reduced keyboards please. A normal alphanumeric 12 keys keyboard on the screen with Predictive Text would be fantastic. Thanks!