Nokia Announces S60 5th Edition with Touchscreen Support

Nokia's use of the S60 variant of the Symbian operating system has seen several iterations. Today, the latest, S60 5th Edition, was announced.

This expands the abilities of the Symbian S60 platform by adding touchscreen and enhanced resolution support.

Touchscreens, at Last

Touchscreen support extends from enabling application to take advantage of the new input method  -- whether the application was written for touchscreen input or not -- to additional APIs so that developers can directly code in touchscreen controls for their applications.

S60 5th Edition also places an addition emphasis on the use of sensors such as accelerometers in order to enhance the user experience. A sensor framework allows developers to add those features into applications as well.

In addition, it supports a new screen resolution: 640 by 360 pixels, and haptic feedback.

New Multimedia and Web Features

On the multimedia side, S60 has a new image and video editor. Features such as cropping, red-eye reduction, cut/merge video content, and support for higher resolution videos means that the multimedia experience does not have to be compromised because of the size of the device.

The S60 Web Runtime environment has been updated to increase the ease at which users can add widgets to devices. Widgets can support Platform services, which allows for personal and context awareness to be used along with widgets to accent calendar, contacts, GPS, messaging, and multimedia content and applications. The S60 Web Runtime environment supports JavaScript and Adobe Flash (FlashLite 3)-based widgets.

5800 XpressMusic

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was announced alongside S60 5th Edition as the first model in to feature the new operating system.

Positioned as a music-oriented smartphone, it boasts a 3.2-inch touchscreen (640 x 360 pixels), dual stereo speakers, a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus and dual LED flash, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0+ EDR w/A2DP support. A microSDHC card slot with an 8 GB card will come with the device.

Special features include the ability to silence a call by flipping the device, an enhanced home screen featuring four favorite callers and a call log specific to those contacts, a quick action side bar to access multimedia functions, and video playback at 30 frames per second.

The 5800 XpressMusic will come in black, red, and blue variants

This smartphone will be available in European 3G, North American 3G, and plain GSM versions,. It will be released worldwide in Q4 2008 with a price of 279 EUR (just under $400 USD) before taxes and subsidies.

An enhanced variant of the 5800 XpressMusic, featuring Nokia's Comes with Music Service, will debut in Q1 2009. The price for this model has not yet been announced.

For more information about S60 5th Edition and the 5800 XpressMusic, visit the Nokia website.

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