For some time now, Nokia has used the Symbian S60 OS for it’s smartphones / high end mobile phones. The guys over that S60.com are quite happy with recent sales figures and see their OS becoming more and more popular. Today, however, I got a call from a friend of mine telling me that he’s reconsidering his current plan to wait for the Nokia N80 and instead go for the Nokia 6280 which uses, according to the Nokia website, the S40 OS (see a Nokia video of the phone). Tough times ahead for S60?
The 6280 seems to be a nice, slick UMTS phone with a crisp QVGA screen (320×240 pixel), 2 Megapixel camera, active standby screen and very compact dimensions (99,9 x 46 x 21 mm, 91 cm³). It’s only 21 mm thick, quite impressive for a UMTS phone. Even more impressive after seeing the video was the fact that Nokia says on it’s web page that this is a S40 phone!? O.k., I said to my friend, but it doesn’t have a number of things which make it worthwhile to wait for the N80:
- Built in WLAN
- 3 Megapixel camera
- Direct File system support over USB without drivers
- All the cool S60 applications I use like Liveblog, Opera, Office programs, Custom MP-3 player, RSS Reader, etc.
True he said, but if the 6280 is on the market before the N80, he’ll go for it anyway, it’s just powerful enough for him… I guess that proves that S60 will have a hard time extending beyond the smartphone market down to lower ranks. S40 and others seem to be too strong already and already knock on the smartphone door. Together with new Java JSRs, such operating systems might even try to get a share of the smartphone market for themselves. Well, competition is good 🙂
P.S.: Looks like the movie above was made in the U.S. -> the phone however is only GSM/WCDMA 2100 so it will only work in Europen UMTS networks…