Key highlights of S60 5th Edition:

• Based on Symbian OS 9.4, which brings a host of OS level improvements, which should increase performance and battery life. The OS is also the enabler for many of the technologies described below.
• Adds touch enablers and tactile feedback to S60. The UI is designed to be used with finger touch or a stylus. The UI and base applications have been optimised for touch usage. Tactile feedback gives a physical signal to the user (buzz/vibrate) when an on screen interaction takes place.
• Standard S60 applications have been extended and optimised to take advantage of touch interactions.
• In order to help enable touchscreen devices there is enhanced support for higher resolution displays and a new ‘widescreen’ mode.
• Adds a framework to enable the use of sensors in the UI and by third parties. Such sensors might include accelerometers, which enable functionality such as ‘flip to silence’ or ‘shake to unlock’. Third party access is enable by APIs which are available in the software development kit.
• Enhanced support for Internet technologies, including an updated Web browser (more recent version of WebKit) and Flash Lite 3. The browser has been optimised for touch usage, including the ability to scroll around the screen using a finger and finger touch-friendly toolbars and controls.
• Adds S60 Platform Services to the S60 Web Runtime (also known as WRT 2). This enables the creation of personalised and context-aware widgets. This gives widget developers access to many features of the S60 platform, including GPS, contacts, calendar, messaging, audio and video. These are accessed via custom javascript and actionscript API calls.
• Adds new image and video editors (i.e. now standard part of platform), making it simpler to edit media on the device. The image editor functions include red-eye reduction, cropping, image adjustments and the ability to add text and images. The video editor lets you cut, merge and add sound to videos stored on the device.
• Adds Open C++ (following on from Open C) to the platform. This brings the Standard Template Library (STL) and other popular platform-independent C++ libraries to S60.