Q & A with Dennis Knothe (Nokia) on the Mobile Web, Nokia S60 Web Browser/Runtime and More (Part I)

Welcome to the MobileCamp Speakers Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome Dennis Knothe (Nokia) talking about the state of the mobile web, Nokia’s upcoming web runtime in the S60 series and more.

Disclaimer: Dennis Knothe is not a spokesperson for Nokia. All statements are personal opinions.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work at Nokia?

Dennis Knothe: I hold a computer engineering degree from the “Hochschule Ulm” in Germany. I have been working at Nokia since 1999. I first worked on the S40 platform and was involved in the integration of the first Java 2 Micro Edititon (J2ME) release in Nokia’s S40 phones. For the last few years I’ve been working with Symbian C++ and J2ME for Nokia’s S60 platform. Initially I did some Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)-related platform work. The last two years or so I worked in Nokias Multimedia business unit on music related applications. I am currently Software Architect there. Most recently I did some investigations for our business unit about the capabilities of the S60 web-runtime. That’s when I started looking closely at web technologies and web development.

Q: What’s the state of the mobile web? How does it differ from the “classic” web?

Dennis Knothe: Mobile web, as it was initially marketed and perceived, failed and is pretty much dead as far as I can tell. These were trials to build up a second web, parallel to the “real” internet. Personally, I think this was mostly driven by the cellular carriers and their “walled garden” like business models. But the last few years, the industry understood that there’s no such thing as a mobile web, there’s only one internet. I think what we all really want, is to access all data that is available in the internet also on our mobile devices. I think it does make a lot of sense to provide a mobile optimized access to a web application or web service – be that due to constraints in bandwidth, power consumption, memory or the user interface. Of course full web compliance on a mobile device is important, too, to still be able to access the services that were not optimized for mobile usage.
But apart from constraints, the mobile environments also offers big opportunities for completely new features. That’s mainly due to the fact that mobile device are very personal devices and provide a much better context for service deployment than PCs could ever do. Naturally you can access services on your mobile device wherever and whenever you want. You don’t need to wait until you get to a PC or laptop. It’d be exciting to see what services come out that really leverage this personality and contextuality of mobile devices.
Though, our western centric usage of the web is not necessarily the way it works all over the world. There are many people in developing countries who make their first steps on the web only on their mobiles, because they don’t have the infrastructure for PCs or broadband connections. And in future there will be more people accessing the web through mobile devices than on PCs. So I expect lots of innovation in that area in future.
I think Nokia is on the right track here to enable all these models. But still, key is that there’s no separate mobile web, and there shouldn’t be. It’s about optimizing web access for mobile devices and leveraging new opportunities that these devices offer.

Q: What does the Nokia S60 web browser and runtime offer (for developer)?

Dennis Knothe: S60 web runtime offers a fully “web compliant” browser engine that allows developers to deploy their services on (soon to be sold) 10s of millions S60 handsets. The browser engine is essentially the open source WebKit, which is the same engine that Safari and the iPhone use. WebKit is today somewhat a de-facto standard for mobile browser environments. It supports all the usual web technologies HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, etc.
The main benefit is that everyone that knows how to write a web page or web application for a PC or Mac/iPhone browser also knows how to write a web page or widget for the S60 web runtime environment. Even more so, many web pages and web applications run with no changes at all or with minor changes already in S60s web runtime.
There’s no new technology that needs to be learned by web developers or that needs to be deployed on the service side, like it was the case in the past with Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) (remember that?).

Q: Any tips, tricks and advice on getting started with mobile web development in general and with Nokia S60 series-powered web development in particular?

Dennis Knothe: Get Firefox and install the FireBug extension. Write a web page that contains an HTML frame of the size 320×200 pixels and load the webpage or widgets HTML page you’re going to develop into that frame. Then just write your usual HTML, CSS, JavaScript so that it shows up nicely on that “virtual screen”. That’ll get you already a long way to start with. I use FireBug a lot to debug my JavaScript code. Though you will have to test your web page on the S60 emulator regularly to catch any differences between FireFox and S60’s WebKit early in the development.

Go to the Nokia Web Technologies Forum and browse through the documentation there. Download the demo widget from that page and also download the S60 3rd edition feature pack 2 and install it on your PC. This is the latest version of the usual Symbian C++ emulator which can also be used to test web pages and S60 widgets on your PC. You don’t necessarily need a S60 device for testing.

Decide if you want to have your application running as a traditional web page that users access through the S60 browser (“full web browsing”) or if you want to write a web application (“web widget”) that users can install on their device and launch directly from the application menu. Then read through the appropriate sections in Forum Nokia to find out how to optimize your web code or how to package your widget.

S60 widgets are based on Apples Dashboard widgets. If you already have an Apple Dashboard widget, you can easily port that. There’s documentation on Forum Nokia how to do that, too.

Thanks Dennis Knothe. Check back tomorrow for the second part in the interview with Dennis discussing Apple’s iPhone, favorite Nokia phones/mobile devices (old or new) and the upcoming free Mobile(Web)CampVancouver talk.