Slashdot Mirror

I'm getting a Nokia N91 when it comes out. Has a 2MP camera, 4GB HD, Wifi, Bluetooth. The interface looks good enough, especially since I'm already used to the Series 60 platform on my 3650. I have installed mp3 software for that phone too, though I've been using it with only a 512 MMC. Definitely good enough for me, and looks much better than this apple thing.

Unless you're with a CDMA provider or can't live without a stylus, hi-res screen, 802.11b/g (at least until the N91 is out) and qwerty keyboard, Symbian smartphones are great.

http://www.series60.com/products

Nokia is currently doing 2 WebKit (based on KHTML/KJS by the KDE project) related webbrowsers:

1) for 770/maemo
this will be shipped with an opera-browser, but WebKit was ported to GTK+ (the toolkit used by maemo) as part of the feasability study. This port can be found under the name gtk-webkit and is used for the atlantis browser.

2) for the Series60 (Symbian based)
For this series Nokia is porting WebKit to the Symbian OS and Symbian toolkit, and will thus create a new browser.

links:
http://khtml.info/
http://kde.org/
http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/
http://www.akcaagac.com/index_atlantis.html
http://www.series60.com/
http://www.symbian.com/
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/7 70
http://www.maemo.org/

g'luck...
Cies Breijs

Here is an email from Roland Geisler at Nokia that was posted on the Safari Web Kit mailing list (more info at http://webkit.opendarwin.org/contact.html)

From: roland geisler
Subject: [webkit-dev] Greetings from the Series 60 mobile browser team at Nokia
Date: June 13, 2005 2:52:33 PM PDT

RE: Recent press release: http://press.nokia.com/PR/200506/998214_5.html

Hi,

I'm heading marketing and strategy at Nokia for Series 60's new mobile browser that will be built upon WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS. I am writing you this email to thank you for having built the Konqueror and Safari browser with the two components WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS. I would like to introduce myself and some members from our core development team, and explain why we at Nokia have selected your code base for our future Series 60 mobile browser. I also hope that this will start a mutual dialogue among us that will support all of our projects in the future.

Not all of you might be familiar with Series 60. Series 60 is a smart phone software platform developed by Nokia, which enables feature rich applications on mobile devices. Series 60 is based on the Symbian OS and is written in C++. More information can be found from http://www.forum.nokia.com/
and http://www.series60.com/.

I copied some of our core development team members on this email so you have their names and contact information. Antti Koivisto, whom you might know already, is one of the co-authors of KHTML and has been working for Nokia Research Center for the past few years and recently joined our mobile browser development team in Boston. David Carson and Deepika Chauhan are two of the original developers of the Nokia mobile browser. Zalan Bujtas, Prabhakar Marnadi, Yongjun Zhang and Sachin Padma have been working with mobile browsers for some years at Nokia in Helsinki and Boston. Keith Hollis has several years experience working with mobile browsers and has recently joined our team in Boston, earlier he was the principal person leading the port of the Opera web browser to the Symbian OS at Opera Software. Guido Grassel, Kimmo Kinnunen and Andrei Popescu are working at our Nokia Research Center in Helsinki (http://www.nokia.com/research/) where we have built the GTK port of Apple's WebCore that we released last year - http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/.

The high performance, low memory consumption and small code footprint of KHTML and KJS make these components ideal for resource-constrained mobile devices. Clean architecture and good design create a good base for future development of mobile features. In addition, Web compliance was another important criteria for us. Congratulations to the KDE Konqueror developer team for building such a great browser.

Big thanks at this point also go to the Apple Safari team that has tremendously improved KHTML and KJS in many areas, in particular in Web compliance and performance. WebCore and JavaScriptCore also offer a cleaner separation to the underlying operating system. For these reasons we at Nokia chose WebCore and JavaScriptCore as the code base for our Series 60 mobile browser.

Our plan is that the new Series 60 mobile browser will be available as a standard Series 60 application during the first half of 2006.

We at Nokia are excited to use WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS for our future Series 60 mobile browser. I hope that we can start a dialogue with your community and the Apple Safari team on how to "mobilize" WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS to create the best Web browser based on open-source components for mobile devices.

Best regards,

Roland Geisler
Head of Marketing & Strategy, Series 60 Browser
Nok

Did you know Nokia license Series 60 to other manufacturers? Info is at http://www.series60.com/products

The Sendo is a lovely device - I have a small issue with it, otherwise I'd be using it right now - and the Panasonics look quite good too.

...IBM will keep an 18.9 percent stake in Levono. Lenovo will pay...

I was going to make a smart alec remark, but the first return on a Google search of Levono leads to a site for a Lenovo product.

Nokia has a way of hiding interesting future information in press releases under phone releases. Check out this press release from series60.com which is also available directly from Nokia and in some of the press coverage. It basically says that, Series 60 will have higher resolutions, pen and keyboard input and a lot more in the near future.

Also in the press coverage is a neat little snipped about testing the new 3220 Near Field Communications shells as contactless public transport tickets in Germany. That would be a great improvement over the current state of the art which is at least here in Finland is text message single trip tickets, which are handy, but hard to check quickly and probably crackable in the long run.