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concept in mobile device hardware had been released, ushering in an
era of exponential progress in mobile computing.
On that rather special Monday, Nokia released a completely new type
of mobile phone. The Nokia 6600 was the most advanced mobile phone
anyone had seen, and it is still remembered today as a clear indication
of where the future was headed. It had a large, 16-bit color screen,
a four-way joystick for navigation and games, and a VGA, 640
480
camera for video recording and photography. The phone was a 2.5G,
Internet-enabled GPRS phone running Symbian OS v7.0 s with 6MB of
memory for storage, 3MB RAM and had Bluetooth wireless technology
connectivity. It was also easy to use and looked great at the time (it looks
like a bit of brick today, as you can see from Figure 1.1).
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Figure 1.1
Nokia 6600
This new device was clearly going to cause quite a stir, so the
Nokia marketing team came up with a special phrase just for the
launch - something that was prophetic and sounded really cool: Image is
Power.
Less important at the time but far more relevant to us today, the Nokia
6600 was the first mobile phone to come with the very latest in Java
technology - the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.0, which
had recently been finalized. Java ME was already dominating the mobile
software market; it was about to take a huge leap forward and the Nokia
6600 was the springboard. Even today, I keep my Nokia 6600 in a special
place and consider it with reverence.
In 2003, while the rest of the software industry was dragging itself out
of the Dot-com Bust, the constrained-device development sector was at
the start of a vertical rise. Hundreds of business applications had already
been written and shipped in expectation of an amazing shift in the way
people did business. The momentum for mobile hardware and software
