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According to sources cited by Reuters, Nokia will unveil its first touchscreen phone at an event in London on October 2. Earlier this year, Nokia confirmed that it would offer a touch-based phone by the end of 2008. Reuters did not confirm any details about the phone. [Via This article]

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October 2nd: mark it down ’cause Reuters says that’s the date that Nokia will launch its Nokia Tube — aka, 5800 XpressMusic. According to a pair of industry sources, Nokia will launch the much anticipated, long overdue, S60 touchscreen device at a media and analyst event in London — exactly as Pocket-lint’s source told us earlier. All that’s left now is for the invites to be distributed.

[Via This article]

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Neither mobile banking apps nor mobile payment technologies are anything new, but the depth of Visa’s newfound commitment to anything and everything mobile here is pretty unique. The company has announced a slew of initiatives to make it as frighteningly easy as possible for cardholders to do cool things with their accounts right from their phones starting with the launch of the Nokia 6212 Classic next month, which will serve up NFC-based contactless payments, cardholder-to-cardholder transfers, and realtime account alerts (subject to issuing bank availability). Meanwhile, they’ve wasted no time jumping on the Android bandwagon, revealing that they’ve hooked up with Chase to offer an Android app that delivers notifications, merchant “offers,” and a location-based search of nearby retailers that accept Visa cards (which is pretty much all of them in our experience). If the Chase trial pans out, Visa plans to shop the Android app around to other issuing banks. Finally, there’s also a new web-based mobile money transfer pilot going down that’s scheduled to kick off around the end of the year involving several banks and “as many as” 6,000 cardholders; what are the odds that those 6,000 are going to be transferring much money among each other, though?

[Via CNET]

Read - Nokia partnership
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Read - Mobile money transfer

[Via This article]

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Today Visa announced that it plans to offer alerts, special offers, and ATM and merchant location services in a software application for phones powered by the Android platform. The application will work with Google maps and location technology to help users find nearby cash machines and stores. To start, the application will be available only for Android phone users who also have Visa cards issued by JPMorgan Chase. Visa will also provide a similar application for the Nokia 6212, which is equipped with a near-field communications radio for contactless payments. The software will be available by the end of the year. [Via This article]

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If the leaked press pictures of Nokia’s 5800 XpressMedia have got you itching to own the phone, you’ll be happy to hear that the rumors are pointing that Nokia will be announcing said phone on October the 2nd next month, along with the introduction of the Nokia Tube Touch UI (user interface). The announcement will supposedly be held in London, with the phone available on the market by the end of the year.

[Via This article]

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The internet is really a breeding ground for leaked information and pictures. This time, what looks like official press pictures of Nokia’s 5800 Xpress Music phone have appeared on the Internet. In case you’ve forgotten the specs of the 5800, here’s a quick recap:

• Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900)
• UMTS 2100, GSM/EDGE, HSDPA
• Symbian S60
• 3.2-inch 640×360 pixel touchscreen display
• A-GPS
• Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 2.0
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• microSD card expansion

[Via This article]

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[Via This article]

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[Via This article]

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One day after Google goes touchscreen, along comes what looks to be an official press shot of Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic — aka, the Tube. No new details here, though Nokia appears to have cleaned up the industrial design around the buttons of some of those earlier prototypes we’ve seen. October 2nd looks like the date that we’ll finally get our fill of the first S60 Touch handset. Though given the number of leaks and rabid competition Nokia faces in the touchscreen OS space — our appetite for this device might be quickly satiated.

[Via unwired view]

[Via This article]

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At the Maemo Summit in Berlin this past weekend, Nokia shared its plans for Maemo 5, the next major version of the company’s Linux-based Internet Tablet platform. In addition to extensive architectural enhancements, Nokia’s roadmap for Maemo 5 also includes a strategy for boosting the platform’s usability and aesthetic appeal.

Nokia’s vision for Maemo 5 is heavily influenced by the iPhone and some emerging trends in mobile design. The developers aim to reduce dependence on the stylus and make the user interface conducive to finger interaction from top to bottom. Nokia will also leverage hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and the power of OMAP 3 processors to experiment with sophisticated visual effects.

Harri Kiljander, Nokia’s user experience director for Maemo, provided some insight into the philosophy behind the planned design changes. The primary goal, he told Maemo Summit attendees, is to make the powerful underlying functionality of the tablet device more accessible to end users and deliver an experience that provokes lasting appreciation. He argued that an emphasis on content rather than user interface elements must drive the design.

He cautioned developers against excessive use of visual effects. A flashy interface can amuse the user for the first 15 seconds or 15 minutes, he said, but the “wow” factor can quickly turn to annoyance. He aims to achieve what he described as the “long wow”—elegant presentation and interaction that are continuously pleasing and don’t detract from the user experience when the initial novelty wears off.

Kiljander also shared some details about Nokia’s internal design process for the platform. Maemo user interface design and software development are tightly coupled within the company, and the designers work closely with the developers so that they can achieve excellent stability, performance, consistency, ease of use, and an aesthetically pleasing experience. These will continue to be high priorities as Maemo 5 takes shape.

The specific technical goals that Kiljander cited for the next version are finger-friendliness and better support for one-handed interaction. He also revealed that Nokia is experimenting with multitouch technologies, but he declined to say whether the feature would appear in future Nokia devices.

Toolkit overhaul and beautiful Clutter

During a presentation at the Maemo Summit, Nokia developer Rodrigo Novo revealed that the GTK-based Hildon framework is being overhauled as part of the effort to make application user interfaces more accessible to fingers. Spacing and padding will be improved throughout the toolkit so that widgets, like buttons and menu items, are easier to target. Hildon will also gain some new widgets that are designed specifically to improve finger usability.

In the latest stable version of the Internet Tablet OS, several applications have extremely wide scrollbars that are designed for thumbs. Aside from being a terrible eyesore, these scrollbars are also an awful waste of space. The wide scrollbars are going to be dropped in Maemo 5, and the toolkit will include a new panning scroll container that is designed specifically with fingers in mind. Nokia is also working on better tap-and-hold solutions for those of us who want to eschew the stylus.

Novo said that Nokia is attempting to integrate these changes upstream into GTK+ so that they can be used as seamlessly as possible. He also explained that Nokia intends to minimize the need for changes in individual programs, so conventional GTK+ applications and legacy applications will still work without requiring much porting effort. Nokia is experimenting internally with some additional widget concepts that haven’t been announced yet, and we can likely expect to see more emerge as development continues.

One of the most significant additions in Maemo 5 is the Clutter library, which facilitates rapid development of rich graphical user interfaces. Support for Clutter on top of OpenGL ES 2.0 will enable developers to completely redefine the Maemo user experience. Clutter provides a scene-graph system and frame-based animation engine for displaying and manipulating graphical elements. It can be used to implement rich visual effects and sophisticated interactive user interfaces that stretch beyond the boundaries of conventional widget toolkits.

A demo of Clutter

Nokia has sponsored development efforts to bring native offscreen rendering to GTK+ so that Clutter content and regular GTK+ widgets can be seamlessly interspersed.

The early alpha releases of Maemo 5 will include the Clutter library by default, so it can be used out-of-the-box by third-party application developers. Novo said that for future releases, potentially the betas, Clutter could be leveraged directly in the UI framework to handle rich graphical transitions and some visual effects.

The Clutter libraries are increasingly being used by applications in the GNOME ecosystem and various GTK-based mobile software platforms. OpenedHand, the company behind Clutter, was recently acquired by Intel and is currently working on integrating Clutter into Intel’s Moblin platform.

Clutter is somewhat low-level, in the sense that it is essentially a canvas library and doesn’t aim to provide any toolkit abstractions. The extreme versatility of Clutter makes it highly conducive to innovative user interface design, but also creates some challenges. There are no constraints to ensure basic consistency between Clutter-based user interfaces. Nokia will have to provide some clearly-defined guidelines so that third-party developers will be able to make Clutter user interfaces that don’t detract from the visual cohesion of the platform.

Conclusion

Nokia is boldly reinventing the Maemo user experience so that the next-generation Internet Tablet will provide a level of aesthetic polish and usability that could allow it to compete with the iPhone. Nokia has an opportunity to prove that outstanding fit and finish can be delivered with open source software and community-driven development. The path that Nokia takes to leverage the power of Clutter in Hildon could also provide some valuable insights for the architects who will shape the future of GTK+ and GNOME on the desktop.

[Via This article]

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