NewLC At the 3GSM Congress in Barcelona 07

NewLC was present at 3GS Congress at Barcelona, in the French Pavillon booth, with a lot of meetings - we had to do some business as well ! - we did not have much time to visit all what we wanted. Here is however a few highlights of what we have seen there...

Motorizr Z8

The major announcement was the official come-back of Motorola with a new Symbian based device: the Motorizr Z8:

The Z8 is the first - and currently only - mobile powered by UIQ 3.1 platform. It comes with a 240x320 screen, but not a touchscreen :o(, HSDPA support and a original form Factor, a banana slider, which follow the face curve. Not much technical details have leaked so far and no price has been announced. However, we found out that it was powered by an OMAP 2420 application processor and that it has been optimized for video usage (no DVB support however). Expect no fancy feature from this phone, but a clean and sexy look as usual with Motorola phones.

The device is compatible with the UIQ 3.1 SDK published on http://developer.uiq.com and you can expect some custom addons on http://motodev.com soon.

Nokia E90: The S60 based communicator

A second big annoucement was the Nokia E90 Communicator. And if you still had a doubt about the death of Series 80 platform, you now have the confirmation. So the E90 is the successor of the Nokia 9300i and 9500 devices but powered by Symbian OS 9.2 / S60 FP1 platform:

The device is still a little big IMHO (132 x 57 x 20 mm, 210g) but comes with a very good keyboard and a bunch of features:
  quadband GSM, GPRS/EDGE/HSCSD/3G/HSDPA and Wlan (802.11b/g) "support
  a big 800 x 352 screen with 24 bits colors.
  a main 3.2 megapixels camera with autofocus and flash as well as a 320x240 secondary one.
  integrated GPS
  stereo speakers
  mini USB connectivity
  hot swapable micro SD card
  128MB internal storage.
  JPEG 2000 codec

Rafe had the chance to have a device in its hand and you can read his impression here

Other new S60 devices

The Nokia N95, already shown at the Smartphone Show was still there and MarCo fell in love with the N95 and its integrated GPS, 240x320 screen, Wifi, HSDPA, 5 megapixel camera with Carl-Zeiss optic and autofocus, in a neat sliding form factor (99 x 53 x 21 mm, 120 g). It's the first Symbian 9.2 phone with an integrated GPS and thus using the new symbian LBS API.

A second Nokia GPS-enabled phone was introduced in Barcelona: the 6110. This is a simpler phone with a similar form-factor, no wifi and a 2 megapixel camera (and still based on Symbian OS 9.2 / S60 3rd Edition FP1).

The Nokia E65 is another addition to the E-Series. Built on top of Symbian OS 9.1 / S60 3rd Edition, the phone focuses on simplicity and usability for the business user. A good and clean phone with WLAN support and 11 day battery autonomy:

The Nokia N76 was also presented at Barcelona. I am personally not very fond of clamshell phones but they tend to become thiner and relatively interesting phones.

Last but not least, the N77 was also announced. Not the sexiest device out there but a basic DVB-H phone with some interesting features, like 2 stereo HP and a 30s video buffer for DVB-h replay (sorry, no pic for this one!)

Mobile Linux

There was quite a few interesting annoucement around Mobile Linux as well. Nothing really new on Trolltech booth as the base of Qt powered phone is still slowly increasing. It is just a shame that the only phone with a native SDK was the Trolltech Greenphone...

Might be time to look at the competition then. Nokia has the Maemo powered N800 - not exactly a new device as it already shipped before the 3GSM - but this is a good linux based device.

The most exciting news in the area was clearly the forthcoming availability of the Access Linux Platform SDK. This SDK is currently only available to selected partner members of the Access Developer Network (you can register freely to the early-access program) but is expected to be publicly available in June. The Access Linux Platform seems relatively close to Nokia's Maemo as both are based on GTK and share several common libraries.

The ALP, based on a Linux 2.16 kernel, provides four different environements to application developers:
  The ALP native environment called MAX,
  A GTK+ environement to ease port of legacy applications (other well known components include GStreamer, BlueZ and SQLite).
  A Palm OS Emulation layer so that the platform can benefit of the huge Palm OS Garnet applications,
  A J2ME Virtual Machine