Old Hardware Emulating - Nokia S60 SDK Using Symbian

 

The Nokia S60 Software Platform With J2ME

The early 2000's was a very different time than what we're a accustomed to now. Technology that we take for granted was either non-existent or in a very different state than what we're use to now. The smartphone that is ubiquitous today was nothing short of science fiction in the early 2000's. While smartphones did exist, they were in a very different form factor than the devices of today. Also, they were very expensive, along with their service and data plans. The common phones of the day were of the small flip phone variation that we're very basic. Even then, their proliferation wasn't as widespread depending on where you lived.

South Texas does not follow national trends. It usually takes 1-2 years longer for tech trends to filter down here. When I was a high-school senior in late 2003/early 2004, cellphones were not everywhere like they are today. I would occasionally run across them. However they were not something that was a part of the everyday high-school scene. When one did encounter a phone, it was typically the basic flip-phone. Smartphones were non-existent. The proliferation of the dumb flip phones occurred around late 2004/early 2005.  However, the smartphones were about to set the world on fire.

Nokia released the S60 software platform that ran on top of the Symbian operating system. Nokia has already been a leader in their field (they invented the cellphone after all), and as such, the S60 was a natural follow-up of that success. The S60 software platform ran on top of the Symbian operating system and was making its way onto the Nokia 7650 (introduced late 2001) and 3650 smartphones (introduced late 2002). Nokia licensed the OS to other OEM's as well. The S60 platform running Symbian found its way onto Samsung, Sendo, and Siemens phones as well.

Symbian had been covered in previous articles when examining the history of Psion. The Symbian operating system became a part of a Nokia when Psion went into dire straits. Symbian had been used on handhelds like the Psion Revo and Series 5-7 tablets. Nokia reworked Symbian as the smartphone operating system for their smartphones. Nokia modified the user interface to accommodate the small display of these mobile handhelds.

I have the S60's SDK's (software development kits) running under VMware Player with Windows XP Service Pack 3 installed as the guest operating system. The VM has 1GB of RAM allocated along with a single core. This was done primarily for compatibility as Windows XP and the Nokia SDK's were released before multi-core setups became common. There was no issue installing the S60 SDK's within virtual XP.

Anyone familiar with the previous SDK's should feel like at home. The Nokia SDK's build on top of those previous releases, except geared towards mobile development now. The device emulator conforms to the form factor of the phones running the S60 platform. The emulator interface imitates the buttons, number pad, and small screen of the S60. The file structure used by the S60 SDK is similar to previous Symbian releases. However the emulator is quite limited if one wants to get a general idea of what these earlier smartphones were like.

The S60 contained a Java interpreter that allows applets to run. The Java interpreter for the S60 was referred to as J2ME, or the Micro Edition of the Java platform. Eventually this Java interpreter would find it's way on hundreds of millions of phones, like the Motorola Razr. Thousands upon thousands of applications were built around J2ME, including countless games. However, few of these original archives survived. While archives of Java applets have been preserved, they were compiled for later releases of the S60 (or emulator). As a result, I wasn't able to find any Java applets that would run on the early releases of the S60 SDK. The basic phone applets are there though. The emulator supports images in the jpg format which can be loaded when copied in the appropriate directory. I hadn't had any luck with video or audio though. On the whole, the early releases of the SDK's provided a basic feel of the S60's features.

However, the SDK's provided by Nokia would serve a very valuable role in the platform's development. Jar applets would flood the Internet. The S60 developed a very healthy software ecosystem that was populated by various games, media programs, and useful utilities like currency converters and calculators. When it came to the size of software libraries, Symbian came in second only to Palm. The S60 platform would find great success in the mobile realm. 

Articles of Interest
Wikipedia : Symbian - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian
Wikipedia : S60 (Software Platform) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S60_(software_platform)
Wikipedia : Nokia 7650 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7650
Wikipedia : Nokia 3650 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650
Wikipedia : Java Platform, Micro Edition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Platform,_Micro_Edition
Wikipedia : Motorola Razr - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Razr

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