S60 Summit 2008: Innovate
1324: After a lengthy lunch and demo session, my laptop is fully charged again, ready for Lee Williams, who is the Senior Vice President for S60 Software at Nokia. Grabbing my attention, he claims that mobile internet is a ‘geek’s wet dream’. It helps the user with day-to-day activities.
1335: Williams describes Python, which allows you to innovate and design applications ‘out of the box’. Williams mentions their attempt at acquiring Trolltech, as they want to preserve these investments for the future. Web Run-Time is the most sophisticated mobile engine, he claims, although Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe Flash are also mentioned as being other companies Nokia has struck up relationships with. Nokia recognises the importance of what these companies are doing in the innovation space, and they hope to integrate them more so into their S60 platform.
1341: ‘Innovation is about reaching a different type of developer’, people who can help you ‘focus on the next Facebook plug-in’. Web Run-Time produces widgets for the S60-enabled handsets, giving you a ‘nice, discreet window’ to your favourite applications, that can be built in just days.
1344: Williams shows the WeatherBug application, which connects to GPS, calls up the location data, and then shows the weather in that particular location. Going further, you can find movie information for that location, and send your friend the mobile information via SMS.
1349: Williams finishes his segment with the catchy summary that ‘internet will transform mobility, mobility will transform internet’. Half the world, by 2010, will have a mobile device, with emerging markets accepting mobile phones, helped in part by Nokia with their recent range of budget handsets
1358: Benoit Schillings, Trolltech’s Chief Technology Officer, leaps up to talk about the future of software development. He starts by describing the role of frameworks, which are ‘necessary tools for usage evolution’, and that they aren’t ‘just a layer on top of an OS’.
1413: Looking ahead, Trolltech is integrating with Webkit, to create a hybrid tool. Multi-core and graphic acceleration will allow for a greater power when developing frameworks and integrating them with the S60 platform.
