I came across this amazing article on digg today. Scrolling down through the list, I acme across some really great themes: Blue Moon, Quadruple Blue, Bloxpress and Blue Zinfandel. But the one I fell in love with is the Hemingway theme. I’ve adopted this theme on my blog and I will be playing around with it so as to get a feel of it. I would also like to get feedback from all my readers as to how they find the new site layout. Please do leave a comment with your suggestions.

Here is the press release:

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today introduced a new Feature Pack for S60 on Symbian OS(TM), the market leading smartphone platform. S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 is designed for innovation and significantly facilitates the creation of compelling applications and accelerates performance. S60 3rd Edition is targeted for mid-range devices and offers significant usability enhancements for this category.

Development of applications and services for S60 devices will be faster and more cost-efficient as S60 brings a major extension to the C++ development environment with Open C. This introduction brings the familiar standard C function libraries to S60 software, supporting increased productivity and improved time-to-market of applications. With Open C, developers can reuse existing code and focus on the mobility aspects of their applications.

Symbian recently introduced four of the basic POSIX libraries on Symbian OS. With Open C, S60 is extending the reach and implementing five additional C libraries for an optimized solution to migrate open source and desktop applications to S60 on Symbian OS. Open C libraries are part of the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 and will be integrated into the publicly available software development kits.

Feature Pack 2 comes with improvements in usability and software architecture focusing primarily on the mid-range device category. Usability enhancements support the ease of use in for example messaging, multitasking and downloading. Feature Pack 2 also enables instant media playback during downloading and animated notification of inbound calls. Architectural improvements focus on ensuring excellent performance and flexibility of S60 in various hardware configurations, and include for example support for demand paging virtual memory technique.

“Feature Pack 2 is a major element of our strategy to support handset vendors in creating devices for the mid-range market,” says Matti Vänskä, Vice President, Mobile Software Sales and Marketing, Nokia. “There are already five S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 devices launched worldwide by three handset vendors. The emphasis with Feature Pack 2 is on improved user experience, usability and ever richer development environment”.

“Supplier efforts to simplify the user experience of smartphone software platforms are a key factor in attracting and retaining users, especially as those platforms strengthen their position in mainstream markets. But the ultimate success of smartphones rests with attracting the widest array of application developers. Aligning handset development more closely with the desktop is a good step towards achieving this,” says Tony Cripps, senior analyst, mobile user experience, Ovum.

S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 will be available for all S60 device manufacturers in Q2. It is fully compatible with S60 3rd Edition, and applications developed for 3rd Edition will run on all Feature Pack 2 devices. The new Feature Pack 2 will be demonstrated at the 3GSM World Congress 2007 in Barcelona in S60 stand in Hall 8.

According to Canalys research (January, 2007), S60 is the clear leader in converged device software with 54% market share globally in Q4 2006. Nokia alone has cumulatively shipped nearly 85 million S60 enabled devices by the end of 2006. To date, 49 devices based on S60 and Symbian OS have been launched, 20 of which are based on the latest S60 3rd Edition.

Link to press release

Bloggers all over the blogosphere are talking about the this announcement. There have been some interesting blog posts about this, particularly from the S60 Blogs Team:

• Jouni a.k.a MRKTNGman from the S60 Blogs Team has a great article on the S60 Feature Pack 2 as well. Read it here.
• Tommi Vilkamo from the S60 Applications Blog talks about ‘Open C’ which has been introduced with S60 Feature Pack 2 and how it will ease application development for the Series 60 platform.
• Phil Schwarzmann of the See Into S60 blog is interviewing the head of S60 Platforms Marketing, Mikko Röntynen this Friday for his ‘Voice of S60′ podcast. So if you have any questions you want answered, head on over to his blog post and submit a comment.

Screenshots of S60 FP2:

Nokia is set to add another phone in its N-series line up at 3GSM this February. It will be a mid-level phone supporting DVB-H. Nokia hopes that the mid-priced phone (around 200-300 euros) will help boost the mobile television industry.

Now where did this come from?? This increases the handset count for 3GSM to four, along with the E61i (can’t wait for it to get released), the E65 and the E90.
SOURCE: Reuters, Darla Mack

Roberto Nunes from Forum Nokia Blogs talks about his experience with using the Nokia N91 on a plane.

I really don’t mind about the banning of cell phones on planes. I don’t believe that a cell phone can really mess up with anything on a plane. (If that was true we would see plane crashes every day, or you really believe that everybody remembers to turn them off). And cell phones won´t work anyway in most flights and everybody talking in such a crowded place will be probably awful.

But how about “multimedia computers”. I have a N91 and I really want to use it in flights without having to disguise it. An flight attendant make me turn it off just because she saw the name Nokia in the headphone clip. I tried to explain that I put it offline and now it is only an MP3 player but she insisted. She told me that some phones has a flight mode and even those have to be turned off (what is the point to have a flight mode?).

In another flight I told the flight attendant that my N91 wasn´t a phone, “Nokia just launch a line of MP3 Players”. I show the closed N91 (thus, she could not see the dialing keys) and she let me use it.

As soon as this music phones became popular I will probably have a hard time trying to use them. Why the guy next to me can use his notebook without bothering to turn the WI-FI off and I can´t use a my N91 or a E62?

I wander if consumers or cell phone manufactories can do something about it.

I’ve had similar experiences as well where I’ve been told to turn off my phone and all my attempts to tell the airline crew about the phone’s offline mode were in vain. Ever since then, I use the remote control and I keep the phone in my pocket. People think its a small mp3 player .
Link to Article