First of all I should mention that as I write this blog entry I’ve not yet had time to test the new Python for Series 60 release. So I apologize beforehand for all false comments I’m about to make.

It seems that they are giving a lot more focus on the ease of development in this new release. Which is a really good thing I must say. What pleases me the most is that they are planning on improving the Python runtime deployment so that the end-user or the guy that is installing Python applications should not have to worry too much about having or not having the Python runtime installed on his phone. Definitely a good thing. The new release includes a packaging tool that is not part of the S60 SDK and is basically ensymble with added GUI. Ensymble is an excellent tool and it is very nice to see it included in the official PyS60 release.

Like mentioned already, the new release includes the version 2.5 of the Python interpreter and most of it’s standard libraries. Ok, the word “most” does not sound good here. I’ll focus first on the good things. First, the new release has Expat XML parser in it. Definitely a good thing since XML is something that pretty much every application out there uses and so far people have had to make ugly regexp XML parsers or use 3rd party package of expat to be able to parse XML in their PyS60 applications. However, I would say that including JSON parser as the official Python 2.6 release did lately, would probably be a good idea too.

Also, inclusion of asyncore and more compliant socket module sounds nice. I can’t wait to try Twisted on PyS60 and see how it works. One could do some crazy things with that on a mobile phone.

Then to the things that are not included from the standard Python 2.5 libraries. Now, I don’t have too much information on this since, like said before, I haven’t tried the new release yet. However, to my disappointment I noticed that sqlite3 is not included. SQLite should probably be a platform component in S60 because it is kind of becoming a de facto standard in mobile platforms since both iPhone and Android platforms use it. I don’t know what is the equivalent in S60 or does such exist but having some kind of storage other than just plain text file for PyS60 applications would be extremely nice thing to have.

Ok, I have to try out the new PyS60 release soon. I’m hoping that I will be pleasantly surprised. I’ll definitely write more about it later.

This is the first, but rather small step towards having your mobile phone part of the Internet. Now all we need are flat fee data connections and I think lots of cool new stuff will appear. If you have a Series 60 phone, give Raccoon a try. You’ll be amazed by what you can do with it.

To make you phone truly a member of the Internet, you still need to register it to a server that gives it a URL and makes it possible to make TCP connections from outside to your phone. Sounds complicated and it is, but just blame the mobile operators. Test accounts are limited, but you can apply one and download the software from here.

Here is a default startup page of my mobsite, running on my Nokia 6630.

You can also do lots of cool stuff with the included concept demos. It is also possible to make your mobsite interactive using Python. How cool is that?

On the projects page, you can see the list of “open source” projects by Nokia. I wrote the open source in quotes since not all projects on the site are yet open source. Anyhow it’s really nice to see stuff like Python for Series 60 there so probably it will be soon open source as well.

Another interesting project is Series 60 OSS Browser. It’s still under development, but let’s hope we’ll get a decent browser for series 60 some day. Ok, ok…. Opera is quite good as well, but getting an open source browser for my phone would be too good to be true.