During the recent SmartPhone Show 2008 in London we were showing off the S60 5th Edition software on new Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic.  I expected a lot of folks to be interested in the touch enabled User Interface and I was certainly not disappointed in the reaction from the crowd.  However, what did surprise me was the interest in some of the other things we talked about. 

It seems that a lot of folks tends to equate S60 with Nokia products and assume that the only option for getting content like music and videos for playback on the device is through a Nokia channel like OVI and the Nokia Music Store. 

That is certainly a great option, but when they saw how easy it is to use any of a number of commercial sites for acquiring music in addition to the Nokia Music Store, that’s when the eyes opened wider and the questions started to fly.  MP3 was an expected format, along with M4A and eAAC+, but not so many knew that WMA playback is now part of the S60 Music Player’s capability (originally announced in Cannes in Feb. of 2005). 

For example, the Rhapsody music store was dealing up Britney, Coldplay, Jason Mraz, M.I.A, Ne-Yo, Nickelback and Pink in .wma files that included Windows DRM, and they played like a dream on the S60 5th Edition product as well as the S60 3rd Edition FP2 devices we were displaying.   

Another thing that was interesting to showgoers was the use of Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) for quickly and easily moving music or video content using either Windows Media Player or the stand-alone clients provided by the content shops themselves.

Amazon’s Video on Demand service was the source for some TV episodes of The Office, Heroes, My Name is Earl, and Eureka and the combination of the easy transfer of video  and the beautiful playback experience on the 3.2″ nHD (640 x 360) 16mil color display of the Nokia 5800 really got some attention.  The .wmv files with Windows DRM were handled perfectly by the S60 Media Player.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts