Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Interesting. I still think that S60 needs a drastic UI overhaul and simplification to compete with the iPhone long term and that Nokia would be better off with a Linux core for their mobile phones rather than Symbian and S60 but we'll see. Go Open Source S60 go! Does this mean both S60 and S40 will be 100% open source within 2 years? As the cliché goes, the devil is in the details!

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Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. Tonight the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source

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From The Symbian Press Release :

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Contributions from Foundation members through open collaboration will be integrated to further enhance the platform. The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

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Don't usually play these tag games, but this will be the exception that proves the rule. My first Symbian device was the Nokia 7610 which I bought unlocked in August 2004 from a Vietnamese grey market vendor here (thanks Harry!) in Vancouver.

I bought the 7610 because of its 1 megapixel camera which was fab for its time and also because S60 was and is a platform where I knew I could get 3rd party apps and possibly develop my own. I bought the 7610 as a belated 40th birthday gift to myself (much better than a sports car :-) and much cheaper!). I was was smart enough to also buy an unlimited GPRS data plan for my phone which is no longer available in Canada and allows me to monthly use about 250 MB of data traffic photos and videos which is a lot over GPRS.

Took plenty of photos and uploaded many with HuginAndMugin (which my friend Simon wrote in Java; the Java mobile platform annoyed me back then because it couldn't take 1 megapixel photos and it annoys me now because there is a new JSR released seemingly every month and every phone has a different implementation of the Java mobile platform but I am still willing to be convinced that Java on mobile is actually a viable platform ) and via ShoZu.

Went to BloggerCon III where I spoke about HuginAndMugin at the mobile session and met Andy who later became the man behind Nokia Blogger Relations.

From there, the rest is history. N70 and then N91, N93 and N73 and many, many photos and videos taken with all of these phones. Hopefully N95 soon. Oh and I also had a Newton 2000 and one of the first Palm Pilots. I used the Newton alot and the Palm for about 3 or 4 months; never liked Palm; too simple, really ugly fonts compared to the Newton :-) and didn't meet my geeky needs!

Except for the memory problems and the user interface problems of S60v3 (both of which can be fixed or improved, more on that later in a future post), I am quite happy with Symbian and S60.

I truly believe that if the iPhone is 1/4 as usable as it appears and ships 1/2 of the units Apple expects to, then this will be great competition and cause S60's memory problems and usability to be fixed rapidly. Vive la competition!

FROM atmaspheric | endeavors » My Symbian History:

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Ok - that was probably far too long and rambling, but I suppose that’s the point of this exercise. For the next round, I will tag people from my Twitter and Jaiku contact lists and ping Matthew Miller, Roland Tanglao and Ken Camp.

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UPDATE: I don't really expect Nokia to respond. "Can't wait for Nokia's response to this!" was a crude attempt at humour that obviously failed.

Hmmm. If it's really this bad (I am unencumbered by technical knowledge :-) when it comes to Symbian other than the user level knowledge that S60 on the mobile phones I get for free from Nokia crashes and hangs a lot), I'd suggest to Nokia to "pull a Mac OS X" and move to another OS or acquire one or develop one. Can't wait for Nokia's response to this!

FROM Readers Write About Symbian, OS X and the iPhone:

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One developer writes, “In most regards, Symbian's reputation as a modern, robust, stable and advanced OS for smartphones is not well deserved. Sure, Symbian works, it has a very long feature list, and it's probably even the best smartphone OS available today. But it's mostly because the competition is pathetic than anything else.

“I have a done several Symbian projects and have a thorough knowledge and low-level understanding of Symbian. And I just hate it. It's a very bad and uninspiring OS even from a programmers point of view.”

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This is the final post of my N91 Review series. One sentence summary: The N91 is an awesome music phone if you are a power user who's not in love with Smart Playlists and if you are not looking for a blogaphone.

LIKES:

1. Great iPod phone if you can live without iTunes Smart playlists OR you don't mind drag and drop
2. Great Standard hardware ports - Down with the pop port. Up with headphone jacks and USB jacks!
3. WiFi rocks - I will never pay my own money for a phone without WiFi. The value of having WiFi cannot be underestimated if you live and work in a sea of WiFi which is almost everywhere in Vancouver and elsewhere that I frequent.
4. ShoZu over WiFi rocks

DISLIKES:

1. Symbian Series 60 v3 is not stable enough
2. ShoZu on S60 is not stable enough (not to diss Cognima or Symbian, it's just the way it is, hopefully fixed in firmware upgrades and ShoZu upgrades) - in my opinion ShoZu working stably especially with WiFi phones should be used to test S60 and if it's not stable enough that S60 v3 phone should not ship. But I am biased :-) !

Here's what I did:

1. updated firmware on N91
2. reformatted hard disk
3. installed LifeBlog

At this point everything was OK

I then installed Opera Mini (latest version, the built in web browser based on Apple's Web Kit doesn't work too well on my N91; it runs out of memory when you go to flickr for example! It's fine on Boris's E61 with flickr so this may be an N91 specific issue) and noticed over the next couple days several spontaneous reboots of the phone. Was this because of Opera Mini or is this just a coincidence? I have read (but can't dig up the link) of other people having the same problem

Needless to say I am not impressed with the stability of Series 60 v3. As an ex-developer I can however see that: i) it could very well be Opera Mini (but Java programs are sandboxed and shouldn't cause reboots right :-) ? ) ii) no software is perfect (although I didn't experience reboots like this with the N70) iii) this is Nokia's first phone with a hard disk which is much slower than flash memory which most Nokia phones use instead

My hope is that this will be fixed in future firmware updates and/or Opera Mini updates.

I've downloaded this now and I am patiently awaiting my Gateway ID! Go Raccoon go!

FROM NRC - Phone Software:

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Apache Modules

The following Apache modules have been built in: mod_alias, mod_auth, mod_autoindex, mod_dav, mod_dav_fs, mod_dir, mod_log_config, mod_mime, mod_rewrite, mod_setenvif and last, but definitely not least, mod_python.

Mod_python integrates Python for S60 with Apache and thus you can create content using Python scripting and also Python Server Pages. As it is possible to write your own Python extension modules, the entire S60 API is in principle available, even though the source for the Symbian port of Apache httpd is not yet provided.

The port of Apache httpd is based on version 2.0.52 and the port of mod_python on version 3.1.3.

...

In order to be able to browse to your mobile website you need to have an account on our gateway. Simply send a mail with the subject Raccoon Account and we will create one for you. If your name and preferred email-address are not evident from the mail headers, then specify them explicitly in the email body.

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Just re-posting this because the URLs have changed and people are looking for it. NOTE: that it may no longer work because flickr have changed their authentication APIs and this software is UNSUPPORTED!

Here are the files:

1. Hugin/Mugin binaries
2. Hugin/Mugin source

From Roland Tanglao's Weblog: Hugin/Mugin 1.0 - J2ME Flickr uploader for Series 60 Nokia cameraphones.:

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LATER: I have added a Public Hugin/Mugin Flickr group. Please post your comments there.

After a prolonged testing and development period, Hugin/Mugin (Hugin and Mugin are Norse gods that Simon likes! This program was formally known as FlickrLive) is available for general release:

WHAT: Hugin/Mugin is a J2ME Flickr uploader for Series 60 cameraphone phones. It enables almost real time uploading (e.g. with a 30 second delay on the Canadian mobile carrier Fido's GPRS network) of photos from your phone directly to Flickr. No muss, no fuss, no chain of pain. It comes as two midlets: one to configure called Hugin/Mugin Settings (Flickr userid, password, tags, etc.) and one to actually upload called Hugin/Mugin

WHO IS THIS FOR: Power Users, techies and geeks. Sorry, but with the current cameraphone state of the art, I can't recommend this to normal people!

HOW TO INSTALL: download this Hugin/Mugin Zip file (60 K zip). Unzip it and transfer the .jar and the .jad files to your phone. Install it by opening the Jad.

HOW TO USE: Run the configuration midlet, Hugin/Mugin Settings, and put in your default tags, title, camera resolution and flickr id and password. Then when you want to take a photo, run Hugin/Mugin. Click to take a picture and upload!

LICENSE: Free, GPL

SUPPORT: none, ok, best effort :-) which means leave a comment here or on your blog and I'll do my best to answer any questions

TESTED ON: Nokia 7610 ONLY! I believe it should work on other Series 60 phones like the 6600 and 6630 but I don't know for sure.

REQUIREMENTS: Series 60 Nokia phone AND some kind of mobile data service like GPRS, EV-DO, 3G, 1X, etc.

SOURCE: will be available tomorrow when I have time to post it and it will be GPL'ed

AUTHOR: Simon Lewis, my programming maven (really! Simon can and has almost programmed everything from CORBA frameworks to apps from Lisp to C, C++, Java, Smalltalk etc.) friend in the UK; I didn't write one line of code. I'm just the product manager :-) which means I just did the testing and helped with the requirements.

PROBLEMS: More details in the release notes tomorrow with the source but J2ME on the 7610 doesn't appear to let you upload true 1 megapixel images. Instead you get pixelated 640x480. Sad but true! Still it's cool to have pixelated 640x480 images uploaded to Flickr in pseudo real-time. I hope that by releasing the source tomorrow that somebody will be able to work around this.

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