Rafe reports further from last week's S60 Summit, with a look at all the hardware-related announcements and demonstrations. Be amazed at an S60 device that can boot up from cold in 5 seconds...!
Read on in the full article.
S60 Summit - the hardware demos...
"A central softkey label will be used to display the action for pressing the navikey"
Thank goodness for that! This feature has been on Series 40 dumb phones for over three years now, finally S60 is catching up.
"an 'Active applications' item will be added to the Options menu to make the multitasking option provided by a long press on the S60 key more obvious"
A step in the right direction, much better than the blue twirly things. However, an on-screen taskbar (as seen on the N800) would still be the most intuitive way of showing which apps are running, and allow easy switching or killing of apps.
On-screen task manager sounds like a good idea, though I would like the option of both methods as I actually quite like the current way since it is similar to ALT+TAB. A dedicated task manager would be great though to kill frozen apps without having to take the battery out though. I am pleased to hear that start-up times should start to get faster as opposed to the recent trend of slow-boot mobiles.
"On-screen task manager sounds like a good idea, though I would like the option of both methods as I actually quite like the current way since it is similar to ALT+TAB."
The N800 has quite a good solution to this, there's a dedicated button on the side of the device that removes and restores the taskbar.
If for example you want to watch a video full screen you can just press the button and you get the whole screen dedicated to the vid, then when it's finished you press the button again and the taskbar reappears.
Something like that on S60 might be quite good.