Announcing S40 5th Edition

There is no 4th Edition since the number 4 sounds similar to the word "death" in some Asian countries.

The press release did a fine job of explaining the technical bits of the new OS, but Forum Nokia member Kevin Sharp knocked one out of the park with his awesome list of links:

Nokia just announced Series 40 5th Edition, a big step forward for the platform with by far the biggest market opportunity for Java developers. The press release mentions support for MIDP 2.1, and I was curious and what that would mean for developers. Here’s the change log for JSR 118 Maintenance Release 2.1, listing all items proposed for the release, the packages they impact, and whether the items were included in the MIDP 2.1 release or not.

The MIDP 2.1 release reinforces the defragmentation efforts of JSR-248, another feature of Series 40 5th Edition. JSR 248
is designed to reduce Java fragmentation by defining a consistent set
of Java technologies for high-volume mobile devices. If you dig into
the JSR-248 spec, you’ll see that it includes more than a collection of
required JSRs, which is pretty much the approach taken when JSR-185
started the defragmentation push back in 2002. Nokia. Vodaphone, and
all the members of the JSR-248 expert group spent a lot of time and
care in specifying not only which JSRs are bundled into JSR-248, but
which options in the underlying JSRs would be required in a JSR-248
implementation.
So that brings me back to the
question about MIDP 2.1. Check the spec and you’ll see the item list
are dominated by such statements as:

• Make LCD UI layout directives (MIDP 2.0 specification pages 292-294) mandatory
     
• A
  StringItem that has item commands and the appearance mode Item.PLAIN
  MUST always be presented as a StringItem with added command(s) and
  appearance mode Item.HYPERLINK.
     

More mandatories and musts, fewer maybes and sometimes. This is a good thing.

Other new Java APIs supported by Series 40 5th Edition include:

• Javaâ„¢ APIs for Bluetooth v1.1 maintenance release (JSR 82), with the addition of support for the Object Exchange (OBEX) protocol.
     
• Mobile Media API (JSR 135),
  which now provides support for device media keys, allowing media to be
  controlled from these dedicated keys (where available).
     
• J2MEâ„¢ Web Services Specification (JSR 172),
  which now implements the Remote Procedural Call (RPC) package allowing
  applications to use the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to access
  public and private Web services.
     
• Security and Trust Services API for J2MEâ„¢ (JSR 177), which now includes the SATSA-CRYPTO optional package, allowing applications to offer cryptographic features.
     
• Advanced Multimedia Supplements (JSR 234),
  providing 3D audio and music support that allows applications to
  provide a rich sound experience for games and multimedia applications.

Something he didn’t mention was JSR 179 and I am very disappointed to see that Nokia did not make this a part of the next version of S40. JSR 179 is a location based API that interacts with a GPS, A-GPS, any unit that will give you coordinates and exposes this information to Java applications.

Nokia would like to become the leader of location based services in 2007, but I find it rather difficult to imagine how that will happen when they are not willing to let third party developers build on top of the sophisticated hardware that surely will be in future S40 devices.

A quick glance thru the S40 FAQ PDF and I was able to find this:

Nokia expects to include the Location API for J2MEâ„¢ (JSR-179) in CDMA devices with embedded global positioning system (GPS) receivers.

CDMA? Why CDMA?

Little FYI: JSR 179 has been in S60 since 3rd Edition.

Update: Biskero reminds me that S40 5th Edition will support Flash Lite 2.1 content.