Nokia Smartphone Hacks

Foreword

You have in your hands Nokia Smartphone Hacks, from the gurus who deliver deep insight into anything cool. I am delighted to have been asked to write the foreword for this important book, which I believe will highlight details of some of the most open, extensible, and personalizable devices ever created.

Most people still think of phones as voice devices, which is natural, since they are so omnipresent. For me the phone ceased to be a phone when I started evangelizing in 1997 for a smartphone that could be operated with one free hand. In July of 2002, it came together with the launch of the Nokia 7650. I remember the November 23rd, 2002 cover for The Economist where the Nokia 7650 was set as the Monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which primates learned to use clubs to shape their world. This picture was perfect and the headline said it all: “Computing’s new shape.” Figure P-1 shows artist Donald Smith’s rendering of a similar image using the latest Nokia N91 smartphone.

Tip

The Nokia N91 smartphone featured in the figure combines an MP3 music player, a mpeg4 video player, a 4GB hard drive (3,000 songs or many hours of high quality video), as well as a 2-megapixel digital camera and camcorder. It also features a large color screen, sliding keypad, and built-in 3G/ WiFi/Bluetooth/USB data connectivity. It represents the future direction of smartphones.

Now, three years later, we are starting to see commercial success with the Nokia Series 60 platform built on top of the Symbian OS. There are more than 10 million Nokia Series 60 devices in the market, and the number is growing very rapidly. The platform is now being used for imaging, gaming, music, and video. I guess it would be fair to say that we’ve only just gotten started.

Figure **LABEL TBD**-1. The Dawn of Smartphone, by Donald L. Smith

An open platform such as the Nokia Series 60 brings the power to the individual: with a few simple actions, you can personalize the device exactly how you want it. In this book, you will find lots of great tricks and hacks that make a smartphone the first intimate computer.

An open platform brings power to developers; in this book you will find lots of insight into mobile devices essential for anyone entering the mobile application or service business.

Through faith I ended up being a developer on the Series 60 platform with the development of Nokia Lifeblog (http://www.nokia.com/lifeblog/). I am frequently amazed at what you can do when you have a fully programmable platform. I wish I would have had this book as a reference, since we had to dig out the details ourselves.

I am really pleased that Michael, Brian, and the team have undertaken this task of digging out the details of the world of Nokia smartphones. This should be standard reading for anyone shaping the future of computing.

—Christian Lindholm

"Father of the Nokia Series 60 user interface"