What’s Your S60 Story?
It was spring 2005. My friend came to me and told me she got a new phone for around 500$. I looked at her as if she said a blasphemy. Then she showed it to me and I was even less convinced. It was the Nokia 6630, a huge handset in my opinion. She told me it was a “smartphone”. I couldn’t care any less. Then a few days later, she started showing me features on that 500$ handset: we started off by playing music, then recording video, then editing videos with Muvee. She also showed me a program that allowed her to play sounds when on a call, like car honks to pretend she’s stuck in traffic. And one day, she was extremely excited to tell me she had Word and Excel on her smartphone, and showed me her whole 60-page training report, on that small phone. I was dazzled, and it is that day that I knew my next handset would have to run the same platform as the 6630.
A little research later, I was introduced to the name: Series 60. I didn’t have the resources to buy a handset at the time, but I kept visiting Nokia’s website each week, waiting for that perfect handset that won’t cost a lot but will allow me to have everything with me. This is how I spotted the 3250, how I fell in love with its twist design, how I learned it was one of the first handsets to come with S60 3rd Edition, how I decided to buy it.
Spring 2006. After having blabbered for months to everyone around me about the uniqueness of the 3250, I plunged down and bought it. At first there were very few applications for it, let alone freeware, and I was questionning my choice. Then came Mobireader for S60 3rd, and my whole world was turned upside down.
What exactly did Mobireader do? It showed me that this small “smartphone” can be much more smarter than anyone else would suspect. I was a 3rd-year Pharmacy student, and after digging for some free ebooks and buying some commercial ones, I had a great medical library in my hands. I could research each drug’s full information in less than 5 seconds, I could tell each medical term’s meaning in less than 3seconds. I had massive ebooks with me, on that almost invisible 512Mb memory card, that I could run using my trusty 3250. Compared to dozens of 2-3Kgs weighing books, this was a miracle. For months, my friends had to run to the library each time they had a small thing to research, I only had to open my phone. Then the 3250 became a celebrity among my classmates and teachers: I had many professors ask me to “look it up in my phone”, almost as if it was some kind of reference.
2 years and a great (at least in my opinion) career in blogging later, I decided to upgrade to the N95, then I won the N82. S60 had become a part of my everyday life, a way to interact with a lot of things around me, and the N95/N82 reinforced that. But most importantly, through blogging, I discovered that everyone around the globe uses S60 in a different way. I had a discussion with Nokia’s managers in our area lately, and each one of them told me a few ways he’s using his handset. I replied by saying that this is the beauty of the platform, it’s open to possibilities, to suggestions, to improvements, to adaptation, to everything. There are a hundred ways to perform an action on S60, and you are left to choose which way suits you the best. There are thousands of ways to use your S60 handset, but you will find the few ones that fit in your life. Then, if there comes a time when you ask yourself “oh I would like to do that on my device, can I?”, you research a bit, and the answer is 99% of the time “Yes”. The possibilities are endless, you just have to look for what you need and what you enjoy and carry them with you.
This is my S60 story. What’s yours?
I have a N95 and the one thing I love most about my phone is the GPS.
I do a lot of hiking and mountain biking and so navigating in the off-road is a really added benefit.
Instead of buying a cheap-limited ad-hoc GPS device (like a GARMIN or MIO etc..) or a really expensive device i get the best of both worlds using an application called smartcomgps.
Using Smartcomgps, tracks uploaded to http://www.gpsies.com (somewhat of a social network for trekkers where people upload their gps-recorded tracks for others to download) and satellite images scanned and calibrated (using smartcomgps on the N95), I am able to navigate off road and even report in real time where I am to my girlfriend :)
The only cost other then the device itself is the smartcomgps application, and it is worth it!
Other than that I use the N95 with mobbler hooked up to my bedroom audio system to stream music through the wireless network.
The two things I would love to see in future Nokia devices:
1. High resolution TV output (so I can stream divx to my TV. That would be sweet!)
2. A more resistant model for people like me who use the phone for adventure :)
my s60 story starts with ericsson r380 actually it’s symbian but not s60.it’s a touch-screen phone.afterwars 7650=>3650=>6600=> and at the end n95 8gb
That was a really nice story, which brings back many good memories.
My first encounter with Series 60 was with the fugly N-gage Classic.
As I liked to play games on my computer (Which I sometimes do even now).
Having a phone that would do this besides having radio, musicplayer and multiplayer was a blast, since I went from the 3210 to the N-gage Classic.
At that time I already knew about the 7650 and 3650. Both which looked very impressive. As the use was not suitable for me and because of the size I didn’t buy them.
N-gage Classic was ok to use, sluggish in the OS but smart enough to do several things at once. The “elephant” ear was a nice touch but mostly I talked in it with the handsfree that came included.
The game was quite costly besides having to buy the phone.
(Same arguments used for N-gage 2.0)
And I just bought three of the more popular games which were Tony Hawk, Sonic N and Tomb Raider.
The problem came when I was playing those for a while. One was the battery time. (Which in fact was not that bad)
Second was the internal memory which was easily filled up if you had a lot of contacts and having it to store game saves.
After finding different softwares from the net I installed the FExplorer and started exploring in the different folders.
And found the save files, a lot of .dll, .exe, .dat files similar to files often found on a PC.
In C:\ there was a file named donttouch / magicfile or something in that direction.
Opening it you only got to read a text saying:
“This is a magical file”.
I deleted it.
The device restarted itself and wouldn’t boot up.
After using the hard reset I managed to boot up, and of course lost my previous data.
A major flaw in the OS I must say. If one “magicfile” can make the whole system unusable that is simply just bold.
The N-gage Classic had no camera and mobile phones with camera was starting to be “the thing”. The choice was between the Sendo X (Had to be imported), Siemens X1 (Bad keyboard) and the 6600 (Easily available).
The choice landed on 6600, being a little bulky but yet sweet. I choose it.
Improvements of the speed of the OS was welcomed in my arms. However still suffering a bit from the lack of internal memory but manageable when installing most of the programs in the memory card.
And the best thing of all was that the “magic file” was gone.
When getting my nose on that the N-gage games could be installed on the 6600 I had to try. Buying myself a 1 Gb memory card which was easily accessed by the device. My attempt at playing N-gage games failed.
However having 4 times more storage than what was supposed to be supported by the phone was an achievement in itself.
This was also when I ditched my digital camera as I found out that the 6600 took better pictures in the dark (without flash) than my Sony DSC-P2.
6600 was later given to my little brother.
Time went by, some devices were interesting but none of them were really more revolutionary. Until the N73 came.
After thinking about the 6680 and it’s predecessor I was planning to wait even after the N73 before buying myself a new handset.
I signed up showing my interest in a pilot program for Telenor, to test their different services and giving feedback on it.
Starting with 250 people they then ended up with 500 because of the great interest.
I was one of the lucky chosen ones and I received a N73 which would be mine after the pilot program was over.
The N73 was my encounter again with the new Symbian, this time, not as Series 60, but in the form of S60 3rd edition.
Testing different services I became familiar with video calling and different expanded possibilities with owning an 3G device.
It was a bit hard to find programs for the N73 in the beginning but after a couple of months they finally arrived.
This was also the first time I got to know about Symbiansigned.com
Picture quality was one of the better I’ve ever seen before and the LED could be used as a flashlight (Using S60 SpotOn).
The N73 was later given to my father.
After the jump in skipping my purchase of a new device I went for the N95 with larger screen and better camera.
More improvements when coming to response time of the OS, unfortunately some things had to be changed.
There were no longer possible to use the LED as flashlight.
This device was given to my little brother and I swapped it back with my 6600.
(I had to use it with Psiloc IrRemote to unlock the region restriction on my Sony DVD-Recorder)
Sacrificing the screen size for a Xenon flash I purchased a second-hand N82 and my first encounter with UDP was quite astonishing.
Indeed the seller had done a great job deleting pictures and multimedia files from his device.
Unfortunately he had not taken a reset of the device. Lots of precious contact and messages was still left in the device.
I contacted the seller and told him that he should be careful next time selling a device to somebody without completely cleaning the device.
This device is still my main handset.
That is until my next target, the upcoming N85 have arrived. (Why can’t N96 also have usb-charging and fm-transmitter?)
Actually for me it was not a S60 story was a S80 story.!
My dad got a Nok 9300 from his carrier two years ago, he liked it because was like a PC but after a few weeks he noticed he only used the outer part and was wasting the full potential of the phone, so he thought of someone more tech-savvy and that was me. I was 13 by the time and I had one of the most expensive phones to date. And I loved it, I discovered the many possibilities a hanset like that brings and after receiving it I found myself adicted to it, and the communities about the phones.
Like 3 months later I was browsing PhoneArena and discovered my ‘’soul phone” the E90, that was February and I started saving, then October came and I got my 9300 stolen, luckly a friend of my parents had a spare E62 and he gave it to me.
Then I went to live in the USA and I bought the E90 on January, then changed it for the N95-4. So if I look back my first S60 was a E62!
“her to play sounds when on a call, like car honks to pretend she’s stuck in traffic.”
Naughty naughty.. ;)
June 2003 – I get introduced to the (then-new) 7650 by a friend of mine. I think it’s pretty amazing that I can edit!! documents on the go, and as an OS buff, the notion of a full OS on a tiny little phone strikes me as an amazing step up.
June 2004 – I get the said OS in the form of the North American N-Gage QD. For the next two years, I use that phone almost exclusively, until, in January 2006, my phone is stolen and I am relegated to using a 6230i until…
October 2006 – I get a N80. Amazing, simply amazing, except how slow it is to boot. Store manager at the Nokia Store Chicago (Rob…?) tells me that updates are coming to speed things up and sure enough in November, an incremental OTA update comes. I update on the 60 minute rickety bus ride home from work.
December 2006 – Discover short falls of multitasking – can’t open more than one app at a time, thanks to measly 18MB of free RAM. Waiting for the update.
January 2007 – Waiting for the update.
February 2007 – Waiting for the update.
March 2007 – Waiting for the update.
April 2007 – Waiting for the update.
May 2007 – Gave up waiting for a North American update, change the code to a Euro-3 code. Update sort of happens. Browser crashes. A lot.
June 2007 – Waiting for Godot. I mean, the update.
July 2007 – Waiting for update.
August 2007 – Waiting for . . .
September 2007 – …
October 2007 – Nokia NYC Store is _extremely_ rude to me when I show them bubbles developing under the screen. A magical crack appears on the front-facing camera when it is out of my sight. Still out of some misguided loyalty to Nokia, I continue using the phone.
November 2007 – Waiting for the update. Have a sinking feeling that it’s never coming.
December 2007 – Start eying the iPhone. Shiny. Pretty. Lots of updates. Oh, and actual multi-tasking.
January 2008 – Lowest usage of phone in the decade of mobile phones, thanks to unusable screen, ever ruder Nokia reps.
February 2008 – Switch to an iPhone, toss piece of shit N80 in the trash, never to return to S60 or Nokia again.
well, i got introduced to this world of s60 pretty late. My first s60 was e65. That introduced me to blackberry connect. And boom! My life was changed for ever. Blackberry to browsers and thats it. I was hooked. That phone had many other apps as well as support for 1 zillion 3rd party apps.
But no. Then came e61i. I am sorry but i did not find anything gr8 in that phone that my trusty e65 did not have.
About 6 months back, i switched to n 82. Now this has been the real induction of mine in the s60 world. This is where i have started to use my phone as a power phone. Office documents creation and edition, browsing, blogging, gps, modem tethering, camera, video and conversion in cd formats, mobitubia, mobi reader, n gage, music, tele conferencing and on and on!
Varun, I thought you had to close and open apps on iPhone (i.e. not real multitasking as such) all the time when switching between them. Am I mistaken (don’t have the iPhone and have only played with it for 15-20 min).
[...] under: Mobile | Tags: Nokia, S60 | Dotsisx at Symbian Guru has invited Nokia smartphone users to weigh-in with their stories about their favourite mobile OS. Rather than risk getting lost amidst the growing comments I’ll post mine [...]
S60 got me when the egg phone 6600 came out. I checked the phone stores very day until it was in stock. I fell in love when i first started it and i had it a long time until the release of the 6680. Though the 6600 did more crash than being at standby it convinced me of the s60 power. After the great 6680 i had the e65 and since 4 days i am a very proud owner of an e66. If you see the evolution of s60, it is really cool stuff how they did it. Oh, and i bought a n-gage (old school style) while having the 6680, just for the games. I didn´t even insert a sim card ever in it. :)
@Varun – I had the original iPhone for roughly 1 month, and I’m 95% sure it doesn’t multitask. Multitasking is when you can have, say, the web browser open, start loading a page, and then switch to your calendar to check something, then switch back to the web browser, and that page was loading in the background.
I know for a fact that the iPhone 3G doesn’t do this with 3rd party apps, as well.
I remember years ago when the N80 was coming out. I knew I wanted it. I honestly didn’t even know why. Maybe it was because it looked so cool at the time. Anyways I got the phone and had it for months before I loaded any apps onto it. I had no idea that it could do all of this! This thing was a powerhouse at the time now I have the N95-3 and this is an incredible device! So loading TomTom as the first app on my N80 is my story. Anyways I am not sure why Varun is on this site considering it sounds like he doesn’t even like Nokia devices and he doesn’t even have one. I have an iPhone 3g and love it for what it does, but you can’t compare it to what the symbian devices can do.
@Viipottaja, @TheGuru – Indeed, the phrase may be technically wrong but the principle is correct.
To wit – I am entirely able to, say, listen to music and check email and browse the web at the same time on the iPhone. Doing any two of those on my N80 would cause the first to stop – if I were listening to music and went to even a relatively uncomplicated WAP site, the phone would run out of memory and the music player would close. If I were browsing the internet, and an email came in, I’d start over at my home page when I went back, because the phone had terminated the browser without saving state.
What the iPhone doesn’t offer is S60-style preemptive multitasking or multithreading. It does however allow practical multitasking, which is more than I could say for the N80. (As an aside, I tried a similar usage scenario in the pre-v30 N95 8GB and found that while I was indeed able to switch apps, the phone would slow to a crawl. I never have that same feeling with my iPhone, and that is why I abandoned S60… the OS isn’t the problem; it’s the craptastic hardware that Nokia’s selling for an arm and a leg…)
My story is a bit like Varun but I never asked Nokia to help with the bad N80 display. My N80 was a beautiful lemon. My first SU8W died as well but that had a warranty in the United States. The first app I bought for the N80 was Opera Mobile 8.65 which I really miss.
I’ll never waste money on Nseries again.
Now I’m on the E51 which I love. I’m running WirelessIRC, Handy Calendar, Music player, SEVEN, Wireless keyboard, M!Weather, vox and CalSync60 daily. Thanks to Nokia for the poorly named “Nokia Multimedia Transfer” which I use for syncing podcasts.
If the E71 ever comes to T-Mobile USA I might upgrade again.
Otherwise the E51 and SU8W make an incredible experience and I’ll just be stuck on tzones and wifi.
@Varun, I understand what you are saying. Programs these days are probably more memory intensive so I can believe the N80 ran out of memory. Fortunately the N95-3 has plenty of memory and I am able to run multiple programs like Tom Tom, Truphone etc all at the same time and not just music. But as far as the email clients the iPhone is a lot better than the email client on the N95. I pretty much never use email on the N95. The iPhone does a better job.
@whosit – what I find disturbing is that people have written entire operating systems (in recent times, not the 1970s) that fit in less memory than the N80 music player and that is a pretty bare-bones music player compared to many alternatives, including the iPod. The N95 8GB has a lot of memory, I agree, but somehow it just doesn’t have… The Snappy.
@Eric in Cupertino – Aha, I knew I wasn’t alone! It just didn’t sound like something that could only happen to me. The woman at the NYC Nokia Store told me I must have tossed it against something in order to have had something like that happen (said she as she held my phone in its padded case…)
Unfortunately, there are basically no alternatives if you want S60 and don’t want to deal with Nokia “Service”. Maybe the S60 Foundation will help, but I fear that it’s too little, too late. S60 is a huge codebase that suffers legacy issues like Windows does, and will likely die through another code break (i.e.: S60v1 & v2 versus S60v3). Moreover, it’s not trivial (or fun) finding memory leaks and doing code optimizations: consider that Nokia has invested huge sums in S60 to date and it’s still as slow and bloated as it is!
Maybe we should take a line out of X-Files for the new S60 foundation tagline. Instead of S60: Open to Apps, maybe S60: I want to believe.
“Instead of S60: Open to Apps, maybe S60: I want to believe.”
That was a really nice one .-p
When it comes to OS in general I agree with varun as I e.g. know that D*** Small Linux is 50Mb in size and still is an almost fully desktop system. I know there are other that are even smaller but can’t come up with the name right now.
What I however do like is that they’ve packed more and more useful applications into the fw updates.
Downside is that when something of those applications fails, it fails pretty hard.
The S60 of Symbian in turning more and more into Windows without the essential RegEdit.
And by experience I know that there are many file residues / leftovers when uninstalling applications.
Without the “RegEdit” and manual cleanup of these files. Things can be pretty messy.
But as always a relationship with Nokia have been either love or hate.
@Varun
I noticed a couple other people with LCD issues on nokia’s forums. I was careful and always kept acrylic covers which sit well over the display and I had heavy padded cases, like you. I even went through the nightmare of replacing the video cable!
That said, I’m honestly happy with the speed of my E51 and now it’s only 250$ USD in the States.
I’m not sure how I heard about Nseries and Nokia. I must have seen the N91 on engadget when I was hunting for a media player. One thing led to another and I ended up a bit of a fanatic. Now I’m reading S60 related sites every day. I currently have about 4GB of music and podcasts on my 8GB microSDHC.
Eventually I want something like a Touch Pro running S60.
I still feel bad I paid about 570$ for my N80 and it failed.
My S60 story is long as well. I feel like I went through a lot of devices as a trial for Nokia before I finally felt like I was using a device like I really wanted to. The first device that gave me that experience was the N95-3 and after purchasing several other devices since my first N95-3 in October 07, I’m back to it in a shade of champagne this time around.
I thought the iPhone would be able to deliver the same experience with a more fluid UI (twice), but sadly, it only crippled what I could do on a day-to-day basis. I abandoned the iPod as my MP3 player for several good reasons, I should have known better thinking Apple’s phone would be any different.
which eBooks did you use? i could always help my mom lighten her load, she carries a drug reference guide with her everyday.
Stefan,
I used Mobipocket ebooks such as A2Z Drug facts which contains mostly USA brand names (http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/eBookDetails.asp?BookID=23349) as well as ADR, it’s the Arab Drug Reference, but since we import drugs from all over the world, it has European, Arabic and USA brand names (http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/eBookDetails.asp?BookID=23118). ADR costs 25$ whereas A2Z costs 65$ i think, and honestly I have found ADR to be more comprehensive and better organized. But A2Z has some additional appendices. So it’s her choice.
And here’s My symbian story. A long one so I wrote it on my blog.
[...] And thats my symbian story… [...]
[...] there, My blog story well guys thing when comes in my mind. When I’m reading a girl’s Symbian story. after reading all story I’ve decide to write my own blog story. It means your blog story. [...]
[...] and managed to remain consistently on my top priority list. Why? Because Mobireader was the reason I fell in love with S60 in the first place. On the E71, this application looks even more awesome and much better laid out in landscape and [...]
[...] And thats my symbian story… [...]