Symbian Blog: Archives for August 2009

What are The Information Dynamics for Handsets?

Aug 31st by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

Two recent UK newspaper reports, two opposing factual stories. The Sunday Times ran a story this weekend on Google’s failure to make an impact with Android.

To quote: “It is almost two years since Google launched Android but so far it has disappointed. After the initial hype, Harry Wang, analyst at Parks Associates, said he was surprised by how slow the rise of the software had been.”

This appeared on the same day in the Observer: Apple iPhone faces Android threat. “The battle to dent the dominance of Apple’s iPhone will intensify next month. Orange and T-Mobile are expected to unveil exclusive deals to stock the latest touchscreen phones that use Google’s Android software to British gadget fans.”

In recent weeks Michael Arrington of Techcrunch fame gave his iPhone back after what sounded like a sorry two years of owning it.

Here’s the point of mentioning this and my question…. These sources share contrary views of a major product/initiative.  Would it be everyone’s experience that there has been ambivalence around the iPhone or that the jury is out on Android? My impression is that ambivalence has not been a feature of any reporting I’ve read until now so I wonder are we turning a significant corner in the way we appraise this market?

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Meet up at Nokia World

Aug 31st by Julien Fourgeaud Retweet Share on Facebook

My name is Julien Fourgeaud. After 6 years experiencing the Finnish High Tech and Research sector, I decided to move to London and join the Symbian Foundation. I always get excited about new gadgets, innovation and technology, and enjoy sports, social activities and nature.

I’ll be reporting from Nokia World (#NW09) this week in Stuttgart.  Symbian Foundation is attending the event with a small team. The crew is getting ready, looking forward to meeting passionate and enthusiastic people. Read more »

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Anticipating the femto transformation

Aug 28th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

Smart mobile devices monitor their environment and adjust aspects of both their appearance and their behaviour depending on what they sense. For example, depending on the level of ambient light, a device might adjust the brightness of its screen display and keypad display.

Before too long, mobile phones will be sensing the presence of “femtocells” in their neighbourhood. A femtocell is like a miniature wireless network mast, for use in a home or office. It plugs into the local broadband (e.g. cable network or DSL) and provides strong shortrange wireless coverage.

Ordinary mobile phones, without any modification, can detect and use the femtocell signal.  This is welcome news if normal wireless reception in your house is patchy or intermittent.  You now get a great signal all the time, courtesy of your home broadband connection. You can use this great signal for either voice calls or data.

In a way, connecting to a femtocell is like your phone switching from cellular to WiFi coverage.  Both WiFi and femtocells can provide lower-cost strong wireless coverage, suitable for mobile browsing and more.  But the femtocell avoids the need to have WiFi hardware in your phone.  That can bring down the cost and size of the phone.  It also avoids the need for complex software and user interface to oversee the switch between two different kinds of wireless network.  That’s because the femtocell generates the same kind of signal to which the phone is already well accustomed.

Recent coverage in IT Business Edge states:

The remaining months of 2009 and 2010 will see the carefully planned and extraordinarily important rollout of femtocells go into high gear.

But that’s just the start of what the anticipated “femto transformation” could achieve.  There’s great potential in applications that can detect when a mobile device has reached your home femtocell. Some experimental initial applications are covered in Michelle Donegan’s review in Unstrung, Femtocells Kick Apps:

In partnership with Mobica, Ubiquisys demo’d an app that automatically downloads a user’s latest podcast to his mobile phone as soon as he gets home. The femtocell’s detection of when a user arrives home triggers the download to start automatically…

ip.access showed off its Facebook virtual fridge notes app, which essentially uses the presence information available on the femto to deliver messages. Here’s how it works: Say you have pet fish, and while you’re out of town, you want to remind your roommate to feed them when he gets home. You can compose the reminder message on Facebook, which will be delivered to your roommate’s phone as soon as he is within range of the femtocell at home. The femto recognizes that the roommate has arrived home and sends the message: “Feed the fish”…

Here’s a video of the Facebook virtual fridge notes app.

What’s your view on this kind of femto-aware application?  Could you do better, taking full advantage of the rich capabilities of a Symbian-powered handset?  As part of Symbian’s passion to explore and debate the future of mobile, we’d love to hear your suggestions.

// David Wood, Catalyst & Futurist, Symbian Foundation Leadership Team

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A Few Introductions to Symbian

Aug 28th by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

Following up David’s suggestion that we make a round of introductions, we’ll start doing that today and over the next couple of weeks. Next week you should hear from Julien Fourgeaud, a member of the Symbian technology team who will be posting about new directions for mobile apps; Joe Neale, one of our community team who will post on consumer experience, and Roelof Kotze, who works in the member community area.

I’ll ask each of them to do a short introduction when they post. Please use the comments to ask questions and get to know them a bit better.

I’m Haydn Shaughnessy.

Here is my  personal blog over at five ideas.  My background is in journalism and technology management. I used to work with the EU back in the days when 3G was in the planning phase. Older readers might remember RACE – Research and Development in Advanced Communications for Europe, the department that funded a lot of early broadband and telematics applications research. And 3G.  That’s where I started in technology. I now do a lot of work around Web 2.0. The rest of my interests should be clear from the blog.

We’re having a lot of discussion internally about where to take this blog and the current thinking is that we need to bridge over to end user experiences so you will see people appearing who write more about customer experience. We’ll be mixing in posts with different themes and we really welcome your comments.

The new direction might not serve everyone’s needs perfectly or in some cases at all but we hope you’ll support us as we look for ways of engaging end-users – it’s a long term plan and we believe it makes sense for everyone in the Symbian community.

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On Qt

Aug 27th by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

Highlighting ways to improve the mobile consumer experience is one of the priorities for the Symbian blog, so some good news from Qt.

Qt is a cross-platform application and UI  framework that enables you to create a super  user experience.  Qt is the main application framework for one  of the most popular Linux desktops, KDE, and it is also supported on  distributions using the rival GNOME desktop

Microsoft’s Windows platforms  (desktop and mobile/embedded) and Mac OS are also well supported

Qt  is the basis for  successful applications such as Google Earth, Skype and Adobe Photoshop  Elements. Cross-platform means that you  can deploy code on the desktop and other mobile and embedded operating  systems without rewriting it all.  It has an intuitive C++ class library and  includes integrated development tools with a cross-platform IDE.

Starting in  October, Qt Development Frameworks will be running their 6th annual  Qt Developer Day events.

This year, there is a full program for mobile/embedded developers including an  introduction to developing with Qt on  the Symbian platform

Whether you’re new to Qt, or have been coding  with Qt for years, Qt Developer Days will give you a the head start  you need, by informing, engaging (and in some cases even entertaining)  you.

Register before September  15th to catch the early bird promotion and save 200 Euros. More information is at qt.nokia.com/qtdevdays2009.

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Mobile Brands and Customers

Aug 26th by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

Is a brand now being judged by how well it relates to customers? For a decade and a half, maybe more, the brand has been judged primarily by financial performance, and it still is and of course customers are very important to that. My question though is – is there a subtle change? Is brand value more and more reflecting the abilities of companies in the human relationships’ side of business?

That question really struck me when I looked at  Brand Finance’s June ranking of the top 500 global brands. The top 500 have lost over $700 billion of value in a year. Telcos though have withstood the fall better than most to become the top branded sector, ie the top ten Telcos are top of all sector Top Tens.

Of course it is speculation to say that Telcos have withstood the steep decline in brand values simply because they have large installed subscription-customer bases.

Walmart is the top global brand and it too is a strong customer facing company (doesn’t always get it right of course!). And amazingly retail was the least affected of all brand sectors. Nokia, by the way, is a more valuable brand than Walt Disney, Nike or BMW.

Another trend that went unnoticed in the press commentary that I read is that Asian brands are becoming more visible. China Mobile is number 4 in Telcos (Vodafone is number 1). Five European brands have slipped out of the Top 500 while 13 Asian brands have entered it. But back to the main point. The strongest sectors are those that provide something tangible to a retail customer base.

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Building the online Symbian Research Community

Aug 21st by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

The Symbian Foundation’s open collaboration approach frees us to engage with universities quite differently from when Symbian was a commercial company. As already discussed, we are able not only to share our technology with university researchers, but also to positively support the principle of universities contributing to the code base and freely sharing ideas for technological innovation. For me, this openness is a real relief – I have always found it irksome to have to keep good ideas secret and to limit who is involved in discussing them.

The Symbian Foundation sees the university research community as an important part of this open programme. Universities have always been instrumental in establishing the platforms and technology standards of the future. We look for innovation that comes from the research community, and we see universities as essential in our own goal of becoming the standard open-source mobile software platform of the 21st century.

We are now launching a web-based focal point to build the community of Symbian researchers and others across the academic world. We invite researchers interested in the Symbian platform to visit research.symbian.org and to become part of the community on this site. For more information, drop a line to Lawrence Simpson.
Professor

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What does the Nokia-Microsoft deal say about Symbian

Aug 14th by puckrin Retweet Share on Facebook

This week’s deal between Microsoft and Nokia has been widely reported; you can see some of the analysis at Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.  Core to the announcement is the development of enterprise apps on the Symbian based E-Series handsets. It is easy to speculate that the vision is for these products to become the ultimate in business devices.  Combine that with the ability for these companies to market and sell to enterprise customers and there is good reason to believe that this goal is very achievable. Read more »

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Symbian game-changers

Aug 10th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

The following thoughts might run through someone’s mind, when coming across a game-changing innovation.

I didn’t realise something like this was possible.  Now I can see lots of new ideas.  It’s made me interested in buying and using something I’d previously never considered and scarcely could imagine.  The game has changed.  It’s not just a new game; it’s a game with new rules and with big new opportunities.  I can’t imagine going back to the old game.

What game-changers does the Symbian platform bring to the party?

Read more »

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Because we can – part I – the really mobile web

Aug 7th by Mark Wilcox Retweet Share on Facebook

This is the first in a series of posts all about the amazing things you can do with Symbian devices. Among the major mobile device platforms, Symbian has a strong claim to being the most accessible in terms of functionality. It has also been the platform that device manufacturers have used to deliver some of the most feature-packed hardware. In turn, that has led to lots of curious and enthusiastic people pushing the boundaries of what mobiles can do. In many such cases, commercial or practical considerations are not at the top of a developer’s agenda, we’re just doing it because it’s cool, and because we can!

It seems almost everyone is talking about the “mobile web” these days, whether they’re optimising existing web content for mobile devices, or building cutting edge web applications (or widgets as we tend to call them). However, for almost 2 years now, some smart folks at Nokia have pushed the frontiers of the mobile web a step further by providing a mobile web server. The project, called PAMP (Personal Apache MySQL and PHP), is also open source in case you want to play with the code. At its core this project is a port of the LAMP stack, which powers about 40% of the world’s websites, to the Symbian platform and there is a great interview with the project lead describing the challenges involved and potential uses. It’s not anywhere near as difficult as you might think, since there has been ever increasing support for a Linux-like programming environment on Symbian in recent years. Read more »

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