Nokia's "MediaScreen" Proof-Of-Concept Uses MozillaMonday September 13th, 1999Frank Hecker writes in with some interesting news that was passed over by the mainstream press. "If MozillaZine readers were looking closely they may have seen an EE Times story (referenced in "Linux Weekly News") about Nokia demonstrating "MediaScreen", a prototype portable/mobile wireless device using the Linux operating system, and offering cellular phone message services, digital TV reception, and Internet access with services such as e-mail and web browsing using the cellular phone or the digital TV broadcast as transmission media. What your readers may not know (because it wasn't mentioned in the EE Times story or others) is that the MediaScreen device also incorporates Mozilla as the web browser. Note that MediaScreen is not a real product; it is simply a "proof of concept" that Nokia has created to demonstrate their technologies, and there is no guarantee whatsoever that Nokia will be using Mozilla in their future products. However it's a nice example of a potential application of Mozilla in information appliances. You can find more information on MediaScreen in Nokia's press release for the IFA conference and press material for the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC99) in Amsterdam; in particular they have a picture of the MediaScreen showing Nokia's new user interface called Navibars (but unfortunately not showing Mozilla) and a question and answer area where they answered various questions about their "multimedia terminal" product line, including a question confirming their use of Mozilla in the MediaScreen. There are also additional press stories about the MediaScreen in Wired, New Scientist, and Berlin Online (in German). Thanks go to Patrik Schnell of Nokia for providing information about the use of Mozilla in MediaScreen." Nokia's cool :) and if they didn't use Linux, then something would be wrong. If they weren't looking at Linux, they could look at Mac OS X... this may well scale down as well as/better than Linux.. Why is that some people in the industry find it so hard to acknowledge the efforts of others? NeoPlanet takes Adam Lock's Mozilla ActiveX but it takes an uproar for them to acknowledge it. And the changes (if any) that they promised to contribute back to Mozilla are still awaited. Next, *if* we were to believe ongoing rumors, Gecko may crawled in Microsoft's land. Now, Nokia boasts about their browsing capabilities. A browser is a very complex application, not just a couple of utilities from the cgi-resources index. But they don't bother to acknowledge others' efforts. It doesn't take much to imagine that if they could hide that they use Linux (or other components), they will do it. Just to clarify this: It was Patrik Schnell of Nokia that alerted the rest of us to the use of Mozilla in the MediaScreen device. Nokia people also mentioned Mozilla in their press conferences, however the stories in the press didn't apparently pick up on this. Overall I think Nokia has been quite willing to acknowledge their debt to the Mozilla project. (Mozilla wasn't in their press release, but I'm not going to flame them for that omission.) Frank Hecker hecker@netscape.com Good, clarification taken. it's also mentioned at www.theregister.co.uk . a snippit: "Its base OS is Linux, it uses Mozilla as its browser, and in current form it comes in a tablet-type format." Since Nokia is part of the Symbian (http://www.symbian.com) consortium, it's interesting to see that they're using Linux instead of EPOC. Personally, I think if Linux can scale small enough, that's good. It's great to see them using Mozilla though. Netscape shoud work with them to issue a joint press release stating such. Mike Crist |
