Introducing S60 v5 : Media

This is Part 2 of our 4 part on-going “Introducing S60 V5” Series

S60 V5 is Symbian’s new Touch UI. While many things remain the same as the previous S60 v3, the new updated OS and UI does bring about a couple new things here and there.

Today we’re going to talk about the Media in S60 v5. That covers everything from Images, Video, Music and Web Browsing. This was done on a Nokia 5800, so some things might be different on other S60 V5 devices like the upcoming N97 or Samsung Omnia HD.

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The Media Bar :

This particular feature might be exclusive to the 5800, but it shows what S60 V5 is capable of. A translucent layer containing a row of shortcuts glides in and off screen when you touch the media “button” on the 5800. This is the “Media Bar” in the 5800 :

The Media Bar contains shortcuts to Music, Images, Share Online(which we will cover later in the Series), Video and the Web Browser.

The Media Bar comes in pretty useful and provides quick access to these applications.

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Music :

The Music Application in S60 V5 is pretty much the same as S60 V3. You can sort your music by Genre, Artist, Album, Composer or you can make your own Playlist. You even have a dedicated Podcast Application where you can search, schedule, subscribe and download, and play Podcasts.

The Music Player is basically the same as before. You can rewind, fast-forward, play/pause, skip to the next track and all the basic functions you’d expect. There’s even support for Album Art. You can also skip ahead to a certain point in the song, by tapping on the play bar that’s on screen.

As expected, the Music Player can also be used in any orientation you choose, be it Landscape or Portrait.

You can also use the volume increase/decrease physical buttons (that are standard on most S60 phones) to adjust the volume. You can also tap on it, on screen to adjust it.

Music plays by default, through the phone’s loudspeakers unless you happen to have a headset plugged in or connected via Bluetooth.

There’s a lot more options though. You can change your Music Equalizer settings, change your bass or stereo widening settings, or make a song the ringtone for a contact, etc.

If your device supports it, S60 v5 has a Radio Application onboard. Strangely there is no Internet Radio Application preinstalled on the 5800, which was standard on most new S60 v3 devices lately.

That’s about it for Music !

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The Gallery :

The Gallery in S60 V5 handles Images, Video, Songs, Sound Clips (.wav files), and other Media (such as Flash files, etc).

Starting with Images and Video, they’re arranged in a Grid showing their Thumbnails.

Since they’re all bunched together, scrolling through all of that, can get a bit tedious. Hopefully they’ll find a better implementation of this in the upcoming Nokia N97 or Samsung Omnia HD.

When you tap on a Thumbnail (once to select it, double tap to open it), you’ll have the shortcuts to MMS/Email the Image, Edit it, or Delete it.

Of course, there are more options to it than just those. You can view images by date, title or size. You can assign that image to a contact, or set it as your wallpaper, etc.

Once you open up the image, you still have access to all these options, You can also zoom in and out (which is a LOT smoother on S60 v5), Edit and Add effects to the image :

You can also go from image to image by simply flicking your finger across the screen.

When it comes to video, the experience is a bit different. All videos play in Landscape only, and there is no on-board video editor (other than merging, changing sound or adding text to the video), which has been absent ever since the days of S60 v3 FP1. Of course this may or may not depend on the phone and model so you might see it appear on the upcoming Nokia N97 or Samsung Omnia HD.

A point to note though, is that S60 v5 does have a dedicated Video Center application which also handles video, and a lot better than the gallery.

Moving on, the Music tab in the Gallery Application takes you to the Music player app, which we already covered above.

The Sound clips tab though, lists all .wav files on your device.

For me, it was just a bunch of ringtones I had moved onto the 5800.

Last is “Other Media” which lists all your remaining media such as Flash files, etc.

That concludes the Gallery.

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Web Browing :

Web Browsing on S60 V5 is pretty sweet. S60 v5 has Flash support by default, so you can play any YouTube or Flash media in the browser.

When you first start up the Web Browser Application, it bring you to your bookmarks. You can change this to load a homepage instead, or stick with this if you prefer.

When you load a page, it is by default in standard view. You can change it to fullscreen though. It goes without saying, that this is possible in both landscape and portrait mode. You can return to normal view, by tapping on the icon on the lower right side.

And of course, there’s a lot more options to mess around with :

There is an easier way to do this though. If you tap the bars icon, you’ll get a whole bunch of options to play around with, including your web feeds, settings and a couple more.

Most of the icons and titles are self explanatory. Settings takes you into the more intricate settings of the browser.

With that, thats the end of the Web Browsing section.

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That’s it for part 2. Join us for Part 3 of our 4 part Introducing S60 V5 Series !