Message #1050 From:
TheMachine Date: February 2, 2008 07:44:47 AM
Nokia to Demo Touch Interface at Mobile World Congress
By James Alan Miller February 1, 2008
Nokia introduced the latest version of
its S60 smartphone platform last fall, the first with a
touch/gesture-based user interface. It plans to show the upgrade off at
this month's giant Mobile World Congress (formally the 3GSM Wold
Congress), according to Nokia's 'See Into S60‘ blog.
The new S60 interface, which also adds
support for Haptic or tactile feedback, is obviously Nokia's response
to the iPhone and onslaught of other touch-run handsets, such as HTC's
Touch models, for example.
Nokia's blog say it plans to demonstrate new innovations in the S60 user interface at the Mobile World Congress:
While the S60 design is kept familiar and
consistent S60 renews and innovates to fill different user needs and
provides alternatives for developers, manufacturers and Operators to
design new type of applications,
mobile devices and services. Now S60 expands the UI offering by Touch
UI with tactile feedback to create new type of devices and applications
and by UI Accelerator Toolkit to create graphically stunning
applications.
It will also demo the platform's advanced
sensors and sensor framework, the full Web browsing experience, how
developers can bring their own Internet innovation to S60, technology to create innovative experiences, S60 and Internet community services, a S60 device showcase, and how to personalize or tune an S60 smartphone.
With touch or haptic feedback users feel a physical pulse when tapping a display.
Nokia says all current S60 3rd Edition
applications will be able to run just fine on the upcoming
touch-enabled S60, unmodified; although developers will be free to
enhance their software for S60's new and improved capabilities.
Like the UIQ platform, S60 runs on top of the Symbian operating system. Until now, if a Symbian smartphone vendor wanted to offer a touch interface, then UIQ was their only choice.
Nonetheless, S60 is by far the most
popular smartphone platform in the world, accounting for 53 percent of
the global market share during the second quarter of this year,
according to Canalys.
