One of the first and most comprehensive reviews of Nokia’s new touchscreen-based S60 5th edition has been published by Eldar over at Mobile-Review. Full with tons of screenshots and a few videos, the review states that S60 5th is very resemblant to the current S60 3rd, with a few tweaks here and there to make it more practical on touchscreen enabled handset.
Jump after the break for a summary of the major points.
One of these tweaks is the new Contacts bar, the new Multimedia menu as well as the better ability to manage Access Points. One big letdown is the browser that doesn’t offer a smooth experience and the lack of built-in Quick Office and Adobe Reader.
For those of you who are worried about 3rd-party applications backward compatibility from S60 3rd, almost 30% of these will work without any hiccup, the others either won’t instal either won’t start. Of course once the platform is released in the open, it’ll take a few months for major developers to port their apps.
As for Java apps, some of them will run through the Compatibility Mode, an option added by Nokia to ensure that applications who require a keypad work on S60 5th.
All in all, S60 5th is still in its infancy. It still has a lot of ground to cover, but we can expect S60 and Nokia, especially with the Symbian Foundation to bring a whole lot of improvements and new implementations as we move forward. Think of it as the software difference between today’s N85/N79 and the 30-months-old 3250/N80/N91: a huge difference in performance!
Via Mobile-Review