For all the S60 lovers out there, this is a shocking news that S60.com is gone, gone forever. This is not as shocking as it sounds because it is an obvious aftermath of Nokia’s takeover of Symbian platform. Nokia has the largest installation base of Symbian S60 and it has eventually taken it over earliest this year.
First Mosh and now Widsets, merge and become Ovi store. Ovi store is Nokia’s application store that hosts applications, games, themes, content and more for Nokia S60 and S40 devices. Widsets has been an application that allows users to download and add widgets that eventually run inside widsets application. Widsets has no doubt been very popular at least as an rss reader and content delivery platform for mobile users. This move of merging Widsets into Ovi store will definitely give Ovi-store a head start and alot of users will migrate from widsets to Ovi-store. Following apple store’s success story, a big number of mobile app stores have sprung up including Ovi and Blackberry store. The transition from widsets to ovi-store will take a month or so to complete and from 1st June, widsets users will lose their current accounts and they will have to sign-up for ovi accounts.
Nokia Photo Browser is a fun photo viewer more commonly known to be associated with Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. It allows you to fly over a plethora of 3d arrangement of photos in your phone, that are mostly taken by you, yourself. Its a product of Nokia beta labs and they’re not sure what to do with it as yet but I’m sure it can easily replace the basic gallery of upcoming S60 nokias. You can view photos, fly over to browse thumbnails, open them up and the photo rotation is very quick when you rotate your phone (obviously utilizing accelerometer) and most interesting of all, it has face detection too. You can detect faces within a group photo and auto-jump face to face. Well, it works pretty well on my N82.
Limitations as discussed on Darla’s blog , it was initially targeted only for Nokia N97 and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic edition, but now its a good news for me. It is available for several other S60 phones. Obviously the touch-zoom functionality is not available with non-touchscreen phones. So simply go to Nokia beta labs site and download it on your Nokia. (Compatibility list is available on the same linke.)