Symbian programs for nokia 5800

The Nokia XpressMusic, a mid-range music-focussed phone, was launched today in London. It is Nokia's first touch enabled S60 phone. To underline its music potential, the has a standard 3. Read on for much more. The front of the device is dominated by the 3. The left hand side of the phone has a microSD card slot, the top of the phone houses a miniUSB connector, 3. The right hand side of the device has volume keys, a key-lock slider and camera capture button.

The back of the device houses the 3. The physical shape of the is closer to a typical phone than the wider tablet form favoured by many touch devices e. At x The crucial difference is that the touchscreen takes up the majority of the front of the device and there is no numeric keypad.

The S60 5th Edition UI is designed to be used with either finger touch or with a stylus. While the UI has a familiar S60 feel, it has been optimised for touch. In portrait mode, two enlarged 'softkey labels' work as virtual keys for accessing menus i. Options and other common actions; in landscape mode, there are four virtual buttons making up a toolbar which do the same thing.

On screen icons and menus all respond to touch interaction. Many applications have been optimised to take advantage of touch interaction and the extra screen space available. Web allows you to scroll around a page and select links using your finger, Calendar has a split screen view in landscape mode, Gallery lets you flick through media using your finger and so on.

The has a number of extra touch-related customisations. Firstly, the Media Bar, which gives quick access to the key multimedia applications. The device's twin stereo speakers are housed towards the back of the left hand side at either end of the device. This positioning is intentional, the result of which is, when the device is held in landscape orientation, the speakers face towards you and your hands form part of the auditory channel improving the perceived sound quality.

The top of the device has, from left to right, the microUSB port, the standard 3. It is a neat arrangement, and while the audio and USB ports are best placed here, the power port is inconveniently positioned for use with in car chargers. The right hand side, has from top to bottom, volume controls keys, a screen lock slider, and a camera capture key.

The back of the device has a 3. The LED flash has the traditional 'concentric-circle' windows rather than the enhanced 'diamond-square' windows found in the N The back of the device, which is removable as one piece, is made of a rubbery-plastic material which gives better grip than the shiny plastics used elsewhere on the device; it contains the device's stylus which is accessed from the lower right hand corner.

All variants also have WiFi TV-out support is provided through the in-box cable which plugs into the 3. In software, the uses the same 'Destinations' grouped access points as were first seen in S60 3.

This means the phone will automatically use the most appropriate access point e. WiFi hotspots, once set up, can be used in preference to the standard cellular access point. Destinations are fully implemented in S60 5th Edition; more of the in-built applications take advantage of destinations and as a result the annoying 'choose access points' dialogs are much less common.

It's still not perfect, for example, it can not hand over between access points, but it does address one of the main bug bears of S60 users. Connectivity settings, Destinations and a list of access point in the Internet grouping. In use, I found the device would comfortably last 2 days with typical usage, and even with heavy usage it should have no problem getting through a day.

Web browsing, video playback, GPS navigation and other activities that involve leave the screen switched on and constant processor activity obviously drain the battery more quickly, but even with constant, non-stop use you should get between 3 and 5 hours, depending on what you're doing.

For activities that leave the screen off, the figures are even more impressive, the is quoted as managing 35 hours of music playback and my tests would certainly support a figure fairly close to that.

It is a testament to the skill of Nokia's hardware engineers and the power management capabilities of Symbian OS 9. Forum Nokia specifications reveal that the has an ARM 11 processor running at MHz presumably the Freescale model as used in other recent S60 devices.

The processor speed is, as ever, fairly meaningless; the overall performance of the device is very good. The has around 80 MB of internal memory available to the end user, enough for a decent number of applications and important user data. There's an 8GB microSD card in the box, adding to the feeling of value for money, which gives a generous amount of room for maps, music, applications, videos and photos.

In some markets, there will be music and videos preloaded on to the card and you can also expect to find Maps for your local country preloaded. The phone worked fine with a 16 GB card and should also be compatible with the forthcoming 32 GB cards.

There's MB of RAM on board, of which around 72 MB is free after switching on the device, which should be more than sufficient for even strenuous multi taskers.

The most visible addition to S60 5th Edition is touch, and it clearly has a huge impact in the way you interact with the device. It enables both finger touch and stylus touch and supports several device configurations: those with D-pads and keypads, those which are purely touch driven e. The Nokia can either be used two handed stylus or finger touch or one handed with finger touch.

In pure speed terms, two handed use will generally be quicker and a stylus is more accurate than a finger, but this is set against the convenience of one handed usage finger. Having this flexibility is a real boon. After all, many short phone interactions making a call, writing and sending a text message are done while on the move or in parallel with another activity generally one-handed.

Equally, there are times when you'll be able to use two hands and certain activities, mainly centred around multimedia creation and consumption, definitely benefit from this mode of usage. It is important to realise that S60 5th Edition really is the enabling of touch interaction for the existing S60 UI.

If you look at screenshots side by side you see obvious commonalities; those that have used S60 devices before will find a marked feeling of familiarity as they use the new platform. I think it is fair to say the focus has been around enabling and optimising current UI elements for touch usage, although there are also some brand new UI components.

The basic elements are straight forward: applications launch when you touch their icon, menus are accessed via on screen softkeys and items are selected by a simple touch. But the implementation goes much deeper: touch the status icons and a status window opens with summary information, touch the clock and the Clock application opens, touch the profile and a profile switcher menu appears.

UI components are redesigned to optimise for finger touch: icons are bigger, the softkeys and menus are fatter, lists are more widely spaced and on screen buttons are larger.

Web and Camera both use dialogs which pop out from the toolbar to offer multiple shortcuts to key functions. There are also the multiple new text entry options, which are discussed in more detail below. Scrolling is harder to explain concisely.

S60's scrollbars were previously visual indicators, but with a touch screen and in the absence of a D-pad they too become an interactive component. It is also possible to scroll using drag methods. For canvases e. Canvas scrolling in Maps and Web. For longer lists, scrolling can be cumbersome and, as with earlier versions of S60, such lists e. When you start inputting text, the list shrinks to show only those items that match the search term.

When you touch the search box an on screen a-z keyboard is shown, but this keyboard is also adaptive, so as you enter a letter, the number of letters on screen is reduced to only show those that will result in a match. Given that such searches usually only need 2 or 3 letters, it is far more convenient than bringing up one of the text entry methods and means that, even for long lists, most entries are just a few taps away.

The has two important additions to the standard S60 5th Edition offering. The first of these is a customised home screen, 'Contact bar', which Nokia refers to as a 'people centric UI'. It shows four contact shortcuts on the home screen; when a contact is selected, an activity log of communication and recent feed entries for that person is shown, along with shortcuts for calling and messaging.

Contact bar is one of three choices for the home screen; the others are the standard basic home screen and the shortcut home screen which offers application shortcuts and notifications previously known as the active idle screen. It would be better if this setting were available on an application by application basis.

It is also worth noting that some applications seem to ignore this setting e. Google Maps , presumably because they declare themselves as being compatible even when they're not - which, again, makes something of a mockery of the current compatibility system. Picture removed. Of course, this will vary depending on the type of applications you use power users may find a higher failure rate in beta and hobbyist applications.

In any case, the compatibility issue will diminish in time as developers optimise their applications for touch and S60 5th Edition. Even for applications are 'fully compatible', its going to make sense for developers to repackage SIS files and to optimise for touch by taking advantage of the new enablers offered in S60 5th Edition the toolbar component is the most visible, but not the only, example.

A number of developers have already released S60 5th Edition versions of their applications and some of these are available via Nokia's Download! Once the device is on the market I would expect this trend to accelerate. Developers wishing to test their software can take advantage of the documentation and remote device access available via Forum Nokia.

For Java software, the main compatibility issue is around the touch screen; relatively few Java applications are specifically enabled for touch. As with Symbian applications, the standard Java UI 'widgets' have touch control and haptic feedback added automatically by S60 5th Edition i. Nokia have also added a compatibility layer for Java applications that shows an on screen D-pad, softkeys and game keys. Unless specified otherwise in the JAD manifest file, this virtual compatibility keypad will be shown automatically.

However users do have the option of turning it on or off manually via the settings in the Application manager. This means that these, unlike Symbian applications, can have the compatibility layer turned on or off on an application by application basis, making it much more useful.

This means that most Java applications will run on the , but those with custom controls will need modifying to take advantage of the full screen resolution and the rest need to take compatibility mode into account. In practise this means that most Java applications work well, even in full screen mode, but Java games tend to need to run with the compatibility controls in place.

Web Run Time widgets and Flash Lite applications will run on the , unchanged but, depending on how they are written, may not take advantage of the full screen. For example, most applications on this type are written for QVGA screen in portrait orientation. The same will apply to other runtime-based applications e. Python when these are released for S60 5th Edition. It will become more generally available in the first quarter ; it is expected to arrive on the UK high street at the end of January and will likely reach the US sometime in February.

The price point is based around Euros before taxes and subsidies, but the street price will vary considerably. In Spain it is being released at Euros, but that includes a Euro music voucher and a number of other extras. But, while this is instructive to a certain degree, it rather misses the point. The most significant thing about the is not in its hardware, but in its price. This means that the is really in a completely different market segment to devices like the iPhone, G1 and Samsung Omnia.

Moreover, device subsidies add to the complexity of the picture. Even the highest priced devices are generally available in the UK for free on a contract, which dilutes the impact of price differences in high end mobile devices. Perhaps more significantly, it will also mean better margins for operators who might be more inclined to spend all important marketing funds on the device though this is offset by the aggressive Nokia services drive that is an integral part of the 's offering.

Up to this point, the market for touch based phones has been relatively roomy.