Software features of Nokia S40 6th Edition

What’s new in the 6th edition

The change log of the 6th edition is pretty lengthy, so in this preface we are going to cover the most vital of them and leave the rest for specific parts of this review. It’s important to emphasize that a number of features have been around since the fifth edition of the platform – for instance, certain views of the phonebook, transition effects and some other bits and pieces that are all attributes of S40 6th edition, in fact, are employed on some other phones too. However it’s only in the 6th edition that they have made it into the platform’s default feature pack.

* Transition effects were the cornerstone of S60 FP2 update and they did a great job adding new flavors to the user interface. So now feature phones can benefit from this feature, as they have added one effect that makes pop-up windows with notifications appear on the screen smoothly. While these special effects are eye-candy, occasionally they seem somewhat sluggish due to the CPU’s insufficient speed;
* Full-fledged support for Flash Lite 3 that allows running games and various animated swf files, including time- and date-conscious wallpapers;
* Support for WiFi that extends beyond VoIP – data connections are now available too
* Enhanced phonebook, revamped email client;
* New browser building upon WebKit open source project;
* Maps application integrated into the platform, although its an older version compared to the app found in S60-powered devices;
* Support for new Java APIs - JSR-179 Location API, JSR-205 – Wireless Messaging API;
* OMA Message 1.3;
* Horizontal scrolling of lists in the user interface;
* Themes now apply to radio application and multimedia player;
* New UI elements – pop-up windows;

Actually, it’d take us much longer than that to list all additions and tweaks introduced with the new edition of the platform, so we are going to stop right here. There are several reasons why the release of the sixth edition is very crucial to the entire world of S40 – first of all, it indicates that all successful ideas of S60 are going to get carried over to the “junior” platform. This way, the sixth edition comes preinstalled with transition effects, an open source browser, Flash Lite, and Maps. Although there is no way these two platforms will merge any time soon – they’ll just get a great deal closer, but that’s about it. In fact, all new features and ideas will be implemented in S60 first and then spread down to S40-based devices. As of today, in terms of features these two platforms are a year away from each other, which isn’t all that much in the context of the mobile phone market.

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