Nokia today announced two new Feature Packs to enhance its Series 60 platform for smartphones. Series 60, which runs on top of the Symbian operating system, the most commonly found smartphone OS, is used to create smartphones with large color screens, a user interface for single-handed navigation, and a suite of mobile friendly applications. Within the Symbian market segment, smartphones that use Nokia's Series 60 platform are by far the most widely deployed.

The mobile phone giant has taken a page out of Microsoft’s playbook by calling the new version of Series 60 with the Feature Packs Series 60 Second Edition. Microsoft named its most recent mobile operating system Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition. With advances coming with Microsoft's mobile OS and from the Palm platform with Palm OS Cobalt, Nokia appears to be taking the threat to its smartphone platform seriously.

The feature set of Series 60 will now include multiradio support with GSM/GPRS/EDGE, WCDMA and CDMA, phone displays with higher resolutions and enhanced enterprise support.

Nokia claims Series 60 Second Edition is the first smartphone platform to include both CDMA configurations as well as dual-mode WCDMA-GSM. Dual-mode WCDMA -GSM allows smartphone vendors to offer full support for operators' 3G services. The goal is to the pave the way for video telephony and advanced streaming & browsing capabilities.

In terms of the display resolutions supported, Series 60 devices will now be able to go to 208x208, 240x320 QVGA and 352x416 in both portrait and landscape orientations. The UI framework will also include support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that will enable third party developers to design layout aware applications that intuitively adjust to the different resolutions.

Series 60 Second Edition will also add IMAP-IDLE support for push email, improved data synchronization and corporate intranet browsing with HTML and JavaScript support. Secure connectivity will be enabled via IPSec and VPN. QWERTY keyboard support has also been added.

Series 60 Smartphones

Five (Lenovo, Siemens, Samsung, Panasonic, Sendo and Nokia) licensees have announced devices with the Series 60 interface. In addition, more than 100 operators are now selling handsets based on the Series 60 Platform, including all the major GSM operators in the US & Canada. The addition of CDMA should help Symbian device vendors in the United States, where that wireless standard still dominates. As it is, the Palm platform is much more popular in the United States because of products from palmOne with the Treo 600, Kyocera and Samsung.

According to Gartner, in 2003, more than 6.67 million smartphones based on Symbian OS were shipped worldwide. While this is a drop in the bucket compared to the over 520 million mobile phones sold worldwide last year, the overall sales of smartphones are expected to grow exponentially over the next few years. ABI Research predicts Symbian will ship on almost a quarter of all handsets by 2009. That's in a market that should top 600 million units.

Not all Symbian applications run on all Symbian smartphones. For example, those written for another Symbian interface called UIQ won't run on Series 60 phones. There has been, however, more than 1,400 Series 60 based applications written. That is out of approximately 2,100 total Symbian-based applications.