Having seen Nokia's Series 90 interface get subsumed into S60, and with Series 80 seemingly well on the way, I've been busy over at 3-Lib and present my thoughts on what the Nokia Communicator of 2007 will look like. Comments welcome on whether I'm on the ball or way off the mark!
Read on in the full article.
I think the inside screen needs to be 640 x 480 (VGA), and that it should also run S60 on the outside, but with a lower screen resolution of course.
As far as I've understood, S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 also supports HVGA or 640 x 240 pixels. This would be the logical direction for S60 based communicators, as aspect ratio of the screen would still be "wide".
HVGA support was mentioned for example in the S60 MRKTNGman blog:
http://blogs.s60.com/mrktngman/2006/05/less_is_more.html
Note this especially:
"Now we have also decided to drop resolution support for 176x208 and double of that from 3rd Edition FP1 onward."
Tero
Oops, looks like I'd better tweak my design slightly. I'll take the news post down and put up again shortly 8-)
Steve
Back up again, with a new screen resolution. What do you think now? I'd buy one!
Steve
I don't have any more inside information than you, but just wondering what is the added value of touch screen in this type of device? I think the beauty and simplicity of Communicator is in its lack of touch screen!
Would this mean that we'd lose the unique features of S80 which S60 annoyingly didn't have (such as the Forward Scheduling of the sending of an SMS message)? These are the kind of reasons that I dabble with S60 but always find my way back!
Tim
Personally I miss the old Psion 5 touchscreen, and would love to se it on a Communicator, as long as it was stylus based input, and didn't result in a reduction of the quality of the Communicators screen (which is the best I've every used).
Switching the Communicator to S60 (inside and out) could be a very good move, since there would then be a single platform for developers to develop for, and all the S60 software (well S60 3rd ed) would run on the Communicator.
About the touch-screen: this was just a guess on my part, but with a protected inside-clamshell screen, there's no reason not to, really. And being able to tap with your fingernail to select something on such a large screen can be very helpful.
Steve
for the touch screen u will need uiq!:icon13:
Not true, S60 3rd Edition fully supports touch-screen input.
Steve
I like the idea of a touchscreen for two reasons, selecting weblink in a browser and the game minefield. Using a virtual cursor is just too much of a compromise.
I am more interested in the air interfaces. I would like to see 3G, BT, WiFi, and also the wired USB. All these are now std on the high end Nokia phones so should not be too much of a leap.
Personally I do not like the form factor or the QVGA resolution of the E61. Hence hope that a new clamshell communicator will come out.
I would like to see this based on Series 60, this is where Nokia is investing in R&D, otherwise the communicators will always be a year behind if they bother backporting at all.
Steve, you didn't mention anything about the keyboard (except for the app keys), but I guess it is difficult to say anything about the possibilities of a better keyboard at this point.
In any case, I would choose a better keyboard over touchscreen any day, as the keyboard interface just works so well! Although I am already very satisfied with the current keyboard, having used Psion Revo Plus, am up for improvements...😊
Is better be most like HTC Hytn...An 7710 with VGA Screen, S60 with slide qwerty Keyboard. That�s it!