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Preview of Nokia S60 Feature Pack 2

Editorial by Michael Oryl on Wednesday February 14, 2007.

Vertical Active Standby

Today we had the chance to view Nokia's upcoming S60 Feature Pack 2 user interface in action on a 6290 handset. S60 FP2, which was announced last week, includes a number of new user experience enhancements both practical and pretty. To start with, you will notice that there is now a label for the d-pad/joystick's center select button. The functionality has been there for a while without the on-screen label, but now the display will tell the user exactly what will happen if they press the button. In the case of the photos above, it will select the currently highlighted item.

Some other obvious changes have been added to Nokia's Active Standby screen mode, also shown above. Now a number of Active Standby themes can be used, including a new vertical one, though the original horizontal format is still available. There is now also the ability to see news ticker type scrolling data on the screen as well by linking to an RSS feed. The feed can be updated manually, on a timed basis, or when the carrier pushes out an update request to the handset. Of course S60 still offers the ability to disable Active Standby completely.

One of the more entertaining additions to S60 is its new screen transitions system. While this is a bit hard to show in still photographs, you can see a snowy wind blow across the screen in one of the photo below. The wind blows away the old screen's contents while bringing in the new. A number of possible effects can be used for the transitions. Another enhancement that people will likely welcome is the use of nearly full screen images, animations, and video for caller ID functions. In the example below you can see Nokia's Mikko R�ntynen, the man that did the demo for us, calling from another handset. In this case the phone had a shot of La Fira, Barcelona's fairgrounds and site of 3GSM 2007, assigned to Mikko's contact.

New transitions

Full screen picture caller ID

Other changes to S60, apart from an overall improvement in speed, include automatic switching between SMS and MMS message types, based on content, and easier access to the task manager. With Feature Pack 2, users simply click on the "new message" option and start creating a message. If the user enters only items that can be sent via SMS, the message will send as an SMS, but if they add something like a video, the message type will automatically change over to MMS. When this happens, the user will be notified with a small pop-up box near the top of the screen (shown below). If the video is later deleted, a new pop-up will tell the user that once again they are in SMS mode. The new Task Manager access comes in the form of the "Show open applications" item that is now at the top of nearly every left softkey Options menu in the system. This will be far more obvious to most users than long-pressing the S60 menu key, the current method for accessing the task manager.

That wraps up our brief tour of S60 Feature Pack 2. The improvements in both speed and overall enjoyment level when using the system were good to see. We look forward to seeing the system in action on production handsets soon.