Widget Widget

A restaurant locater, a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a weather monitor, horoscopes, stock quotes and network games are just some of the applications that you can now install on new smart phones like N97 coming from the Nokia stable. Mobile phone applications are the next big thing in the mobile phone industry and there is an increasing demand for third party applications to be developed similar to the development that happened in the PC industry few years back.The availability of high end features such as A-GPS, high resolution cameras, entertainment tools and large disk space and processing power makes mobile phone application development the next challenge for application developers around the world. These applications are aimed at various user requirements with major categories being productivity improvement, business tools, entertainment gadgets and games.
Nokia is entering the market of mobile phone applications for its N-Series platform with the concept of widgets. Widgets shall help Nokia N-series users customize their phone according to their liking and requirement. Widget stores will see shaping up of selling, licensing and downloading of widgets is in the times to come. The widget store could become the only mechanism supported by the operating system for installation and up gradation of applications. This shall ensure the stability of installed applications, verification of software conflicts and the ability to locate applications at a single point of sale. Apple has already taken a big step in this direction with the Application store launched along with iPhone 3G. The initial 3 months of this store saw more than 5000 applications being posted and over 200 million downloads. The advent of these applications is slowing diminishing the gap between smart phones, PDA and Pocket PCs. Seems like beyond a point, hardware improvements shall give way to software innovations in the dynamic mobile phone industry. Its happening.

Symbian S60 v5

Some comments were left to an earlier post regarding apprehensions about the operating system. We delved deeper into the design of the OS and have this to tell you:

Symbian S60 v5 was released on Oct 2, 2008 bringing new, advanced multimedia and Internet experiences to touch screen interfaces and sensor technologies equipped devices. The user interface has been extended by involving touch and tactile feedback. It also packs in support for wide screen and much better display resolutions. An entire framework has been added to handle sensors on new devices. v5 is an app developers best friend allowing them to push new capabilities and designs. Its the same OS that runs on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

The focus of the OS is on the UI experience. Web experiences are greatly enhanced with Adobe Flash Lite 3 inbuilt. The new OS gives the capability to create widgets. It has much more support for open source technologies. Security and privacy of user data have been improved further.

The guiding principles behind the design of the user interface have been user enjoyment, smart simlicity and expandable experiences. You can read more about the unique UI experience here. 

I also found an amazing video about the UI experience

Also hear a Podcast with Eero Kukko heading the S60 platform team (11:40 min, 5.33 MB).

Want a prelaunch N97?

A lot of visitors have expressed an ardent desire to own the Nokia N97. Well heres your chance... Nokia is running a kickass widget competition here. All you are required to do is to download the design package and get your creative juices working! Winners get to take home a N97 pre-loaded with a working version of the winning widget. Hurry Hurry... Last chance to steal a deal till February 27!

Were already competing ;)

Axel Meyer - II

We brought you a conversation with Axel Meyer earlier. More from him...

Comes with Music?

The question on all the current fans of the XpressMusic 5800 is whether the N97 will also come with the amazing 'Comes with music' service from Nokia. The idea is that any phone that offers the service will basically give you access to millions of tracks of international and local artists via the Nokia online store which the user can keep for free! Amazing.. huh?? The period for which you can download the music for free lasts a year. The official lowdown from the Nokia is here. If you have any updates, leave them in the comments section. With a boatload of storage at hand N97 users will have their ears ringing to sweeeeeeet music :)

Now how would artists and labels possibly earn any amount of money from the content that Nokia plans to give away? The deals seem to be hush hush and has almost everyone amazed. Probably the fee for the service would be included in making the pricing decision for the device. Even engadget has been wondering. 

Setting up the service on the other hand seems to be pretty straightforward as Dean Pattrick from the Nokia music team shows in this step by step video

More from the Nokia N97 design team

The person who designed the exterior of the Nokia N97 - Eguchi Shunjiro talking about the design process and how he designed the phone to feel. 

The Official Video

This is the official Nokia N97 video. Lets just say that were bowled over!

Office on the go

N97 users should be able to easily edit and view all their Microsoft Office files including the latest .docx, .xlsx and .ppt files. The Quickoffice group has recently launched Quickoffice Premier 6.0 for Symbian S60 v3 and Symbian S60 v5. It is widely regarded as the best office suite available for any smartphone and should be a pleasure to use with the powerful interfaces of the N97. 

You can find more here.