Nokia Smartphone Hacks

Foreword

You have in your hands Nokia Smartphone Hacks, from the gurus who deliver deep insight into anything cool. I am delighted to have been asked to write the foreword for this important book, which I believe will highlight details of some of the most open, extensible, and personalizable devices ever created.

Most people still think of phones as voice devices, which is natural, since they are so omnipresent. For me the phone ceased to be a phone when I started evangelizing in 1997 for a smartphone that could be operated with one free hand. In July of 2002, it came together with the launch of the Nokia 7650. I remember the November 23rd, 2002 cover for The Economist where the Nokia 7650 was set as the Monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which primates learned to use clubs to shape their world. This picture was perfect and the headline said it all: “Computing’s new shape.” Figure P-1 shows artist Donald Smith’s rendering of a similar image using the latest Nokia N91 smartphone.

Tip

The Nokia N91 smartphone featured in the figure combines an MP3 music player, a mpeg4 video player, a 4GB hard drive (3,000 songs or many hours of high quality video), as well as a 2-megapixel digital camera and camcorder. It also features a large color screen, sliding keypad, and built-in 3G/ WiFi/Bluetooth/USB data connectivity. It represents the future direction of smartphones.

Now, three years later, we are starting to see commercial success with the Nokia Series 60 platform built ...