What is a S60

The S60 (formerly Series 60 Platform) is a platform for mobile phones that uses Symbian OS. S60 is currently amongst the leading smartphone platforms in the world. It is developed primarily by Nokia and licensed by them to other manufacturers including Lenovo, LG Electronics and Samsung.

S60 consists of a suite of libraries and standard applications, such as telephony, PIM tools, and Helix-enabled multimedia players. It is intended to power fully-featured modern phones with large colour screens, which are commonly known as smartphones.

The S60 software is a multivendor standard for smartphones that supports application development in Java MIDP, C++, and Python. An important feature of S60 phones is that they allow new applications to be installed after purchase.

These are a few common features in S60:

• Devices' display resolution is originally 176x208. Since 2nd Edition Feature Pack 3, S60 supports multiple resolutions, i.e. Basic (176x208), QVGA (240x320) and Double (352x416). Nokia N90 is the first S60 device that supports higher resolution (352x416). Some devices, however, have non-standard resolutions, like the Siemens SX1, with 176x220. Nokia 5500 has a 208x208 screen resolution.
  
• It supports Java (J2ME/MIDP 1.0) + applications and Symbian C++ applications.
  
• It is designed to be easy and fast to use.
  
• It provides versatile and powerful application framework.
  

It is noteworthy that software written for S60 1st edition (S60v1) or 2nd edition (S60v2) is not binary compatible with S60 3rd edition (S60v3), because it uses a new, hardened version of the Symbian OS (v9.1).