S60 Summit: Seminar, Expo, and full Summit 07 coverage and image gallery

I returned from Spain and finally had a chance to catch up on sleep (after passing back and forth through 9 time zones), celebrate my oldest daughter's 13th birthday, and get back up to speed with a marine salvage case I started working on the week before I left for Spain. The S60 team from Nokia invited me and a few other bloggers and podcasters to attend the invite-only S60 Summit in Madrid for a couple of days. The primary reason I was invited was for my discussions of the S60 platform on the MobileTechRoundup podcast. Full disclosure: Nokia did pay for my flight and hotel to attend the event. I then purchased a ticket for my wife and paid for a couple extra days to enjoy some of the sights and sounds of Madrid. This was the 2nd annual S60 Summit and the event focuses on the S60 platform's latest features, future developments, S60 hardware, applications, and services. It is also a great opportunity to meet members of the Nokia and S60 teams as well as other S60 business partners.

I posted a couple of entries last week covering a couple of key press releases announcing that 100 million S60 devices have been shipped and some thoughts on the Widget functionality coming in Feature Pack 2. With this entry I will try to give readers a full overview of the event and some of my thoughts from the seminar and expo. You will also find an image gallery of the event.

	Image Gallery: Check out images from the 2007 S60 Summit held in Madrid, Spain.

The event kicked off for the press with a cocktail hour where each member was given the opportunity to evaluate a Nokia E61i for the next day and a half. Since I thoroughly enjoy using my Nokia E61 I accepted the offer and was loaned a fully charged E61i. The E61i improves on the E61 with a slightly modified keyboard and directional pad, a couple more hardware buttons, and a 2 megapixel camera. The camera is pretty basic compared to the high-end Nseries, but I did find that it took decent photos and was very snappy. I like the new keyboard design and the directional pad and am seriously thinking about selling my E61 to upgrade to the E61i. Part of the E61i loan was the opportunity to win one of the devices by answering a couple of questions and emailing in your responses. There were 28 valid responses, but my number was not drawn from the hat and the E61i went back at the press lunch the next day.

After the press cocktail hour, every attendee at the S60 Summit was bussed out of town on a 45 minute ride to a venue in the Spanish hillside. The venue had a small bullring on the site where we watched a horse show that demonstrated some very talented horses and riders. Dinner was then offered and consisted of some excellent steaks and other food cooked on grills with real wood pieces. Attendees were given the chance to visit the wine cellar and taste some wines from the area, get their photos taken with a Nokia N95 that were sent via Bluetooth to printers and then printed on postcards to send to family and friends, and listen to a live band in the main hall. I spent a few hours talking with Phil Schwarzmann from the Voice of S60 podcast, Rafe Blandford from All About Symbian, Stefan Constantinescu of RingNokia.com, and others before retiring for the evening to rest up for the next full day of activities.

The S60 Summit was officially kicked off by Matt Vanska, VP of Mobile Software Sales and Marketing at Nokia, 0900 on 25 April. The following was the seminar agenda that was divided into three main topics, Extended Service Benefits, Extended Markets, and Extended Revenues.

• S60 Extending the Internet, by Mr. Lee Williams, Senior VP of Software Platforms, Nokia
• Using Convergence Services on S60 to Increase Revenues in Mature Markets, by Mr. Jose Antonio Maoujadami, Head of Applications and Open OS Devices, Telefonica
• S60 Platform: Prospects, Opportunities & Challenges, by Kamran Kordi, Head of Next Generation Terminal Platforms, T-Mobile
• Expanding Internet Services to Mobile Phones, by Chengmin Liu, Executive VP, Tencent
• Future Opportunities in the Connected World, by Shaun Collins, Managing Director, CCS Insight
• S60 Reaching out for New Segments and Markets, by Mikko Rontynen, Head of Product Marketing, Mobile Software Sales & Marketing, Nokia
• Location-Based Service Mash Ups using Maps, by Michael Halbherr, Director, Experience Development, Nokia
• New Services Enabling New Revenues, by Doug Ortega, Chief Operating Officer, Handango
• S60 Device Concepts for Meeting Different Lifestyles, by Heikki Norta, Senior VP, Lifestyle Products, Nokia
• Closing of S60 Summit 07, by Matt Vanska

Stefan has made it easy for anyone interested to read each presentation in PDF format by visiting his S60 Summit 07 repository. I was particularly interested in hearing the talk from Telefonica, a Spanish wireless carrier, where Mr. Maoujadami stated that openness is the key to the new wireless ecosystem and that defensive strategies will not work in the long term. I hope that U.S. wireless carriers read his presentation and think about what is best for the future of all consumers. I am quite a mobile gadget freak and when Mr. Kordi posted a slide showing how complex the mobile market is (many models, many operating systems, many vendors, etc) compared to the PC market, it made much more sense why there is so much enthusiasm associated with mobile devices. A couple speakers talked about how most consumers are still uninformed and how education generally leads to more usage of wireless data and mobile devices. I missed the last two presentations since I was visiting many developers and Nokia employees at the Expo and found the event too short to cover everything.

S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 should be out in the second half of 2007 and there are many features that will make the platform even more user friendly. Some of the features that I look forward to are the integrated MMS/SMS messaging application, support for widgets, 3rd soft key depicting action button functionality, animations and effects when switching displays, and more.

I attended the press lunch where Ganesh Sivaraman, from the Nokia Boston office, discussed the upcoming Widgets and even demonstrated a couple of them for the attendees. Ganesh also showed how easy it was to change a widget and deploy it to a mobile device. I look forward to seeing devices running Feature Pack 2 with widgets that should be available later in 2007.

I also had the chance to check out some hardware that I haven't personally gotten any hands-on time with before, including the Nokia E90 Communicator (I am even more interested in purchasing the device now), Nokia N77, Nokia E65, LG JoY, and Samsung SGH-i520.

The following are the developers or subject areas presented by Nokia that appeared at the Expo.

• Carbide Tools & S60 SDKs
• Helix Multimedia Engine (Windows Media video on S60)
• Java Mobile Service Architecture JSR-248
• Message Composing New Look & Feel (Feature Pack 2 functionality)
• Nokia Download!
• Open C: Standard C Goes Mobile
• S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2
• S60 Mobile Office Suite
• S60 Support for Location Services
• S60 UI Evolution
• Web Browser for S60
• Web Run-Time & Widgets
• Adobe Flash Lite
• EMCC Software m-Sync and Lemonade
• Freescale Video Telephony
• Hampex Picture X and S60 Themes
• LG KS10 JoY
• Nokia Empower Email Experience
• Nokia 6110 Navigator
• Nokia Multimedia (TV & Video, Online Sharing, Radio & Podcasts, Search, Routing & Navigation)
• Samsung S60 Device Family
• STMicroelectronics Nomadick S60 Multimedia Platform
• Symbian
• SysOpen Digia Mobility Business Suite
• Teleca IMS on S60
• Telecom Italia, Extending VoIP
• Telefonica, Extend Your Phone 
• Texas Instruments, S60 on OMAP 3 Platform
• Wipro Technologies, Convergence of Digital Home & Mobile Devices
• Basware Mobile
• DataViz RoadSync
• Motech
• Oracle Corporation
• ThinPrint Content Beamer 3.0
• AIMS Migital
• HP/Bitfone, Fusion DM and mProveDM
• Handmark Pocket Express
• SNAPin
• Trend Micro Mobile Security 3.0
• Clicmobile MOSOMUSO
• GPShopper
• NewBay
• Gmode games
• I-Play games
• Juice Wireless, JuiceCaster
• Streamezzo
• Abbyy
• Audible
• ComVu PocketCaster
• fring, mobile VoIP
• OnRelay
• Player-X
• ROK Entertainment
• Zensis
• Various universities and Nokia Research Center demos 

A few of my personal favorite applications were RoadSync, fring, S60 Mobile Office Suite (QuickOffice), and ComVu PocketCaster. I learned a couple of things about the FM Radio built into the S60 3rd Edition (you can get a list of stations downloaded to your device when you travel) and the Nokia Search utility (the application searches your device and external storage card). I appreciate the opportunity to attend S60 Summit 07 and met some great people and companies that I plan to work with in the future while covering mobile devices. If you have any specific questions about the event, feel free to post them in the TalkBack section and I'll try to respond as best as I can or find an answer to your questions if I personally do not know the answer.