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?
To set some context, here are a few examples of game-changers in the general computing space (with thanks to Tony Hardie-Bick for raising the topic):
- Personal computing devices with unexpected low cost (such as the Sinclair ZX80, breaking the £100 price tag in the UK);
- A device (like the Amstrad PCW8256) which made it feasible for people to do word processing at home, replacing the typewriter;
- The invention of the spreadsheet application (VisiCalc), that enormously speeded up business planning;
- The availability of home desktop publishing (Aldus Pagemaker);
- A mobile device containing an agenda application that out-performs pencil-and-paper schedulers (Psion’s aspiration with the Series 3a PDA onwards);
- Mobile phones that included cameras good enough so that people could stop carrying separate cameras with them;
- Mobile phones that have web browsers that can “browse the real Internet, not a mobilised cut-down version of it”;
- Mobile phones with reliable position-tracking capabilities (such as GPS) coupled with dynamic map-display, enabling real-time visual feedback on your whereabouts;
- Mobile devices with multi-touch UIs;
- Game controllers (like the Nintendo Wii) that respond to motion.
It’s not just devices that can change the game. Software platforms can be game-changers too:
- Multiple manufacturers of desktop devices based on a shared computing platform (Wintel), that drove down the cost of devices to end-users;
- An open source platform (Linux) that was widely adopted inside universities and corporations alike, on account of its easy access.
Symbian software has enabled a whole series of game changers in the past. But what about the future?
Five technologies well worth watching
1.) The possibilities of Augmented Reality (“AR”) on mobile devices are only just becoming apparent. SequencePoint Software has a promising demo app, “ARound”, for the Nokia N97.
The display combines a feed from the camera with information about aspects of the view.
2.) Another attractive “technology to watch” is real-time video broadcasting from mobile devices. As the website for Qik explains,
Share live video from your phone!
Qik enables you to share your moments live with your friends, family and the world—right from your mobile phone!
For more details of the Qik application that is pre-loaded onto the Nokia N97, see this blog posting – and view the embedded video.
3.) Keynetik is a leading example of a company that can interpret a surprising amount of information from how users move their devices. “Intelligent motion sensors” can become the basis for new interaction mechanisms with mobile devices – and can allow users to operate their device in a way that feels more comfortable and natural.
Applications “Hi-N-Bye” and “Rock-N-Scroll” show examples of what may quickly become routine in next generation mobile user experience.
Devices with more than one embedded motion detector can, if managed by suitable software, generate all kinds of interesting information. For example, they can even detect if the user is walking with a limp, and they can tell the difference between an arm swinging from the shoulder and an arm swinging from the elbow.
4.) Controlling a mobile device by waving it or shaking it is one important dimension of improved usability. Another important dimension is an enhanced search interface. Just as Google significantly improved the user experience of the Internet by providing a UI primarily consisting of a single search box, various companies are racing to significantly improve the user interface of mobile phones by providing a smart search box.
Done right, the UI will take advantage of both explicit and implicit knowledge of the kinds of data, services, applications, and websites a particular user is likely to be searching for.
An example of companies developing this kind of solution is Nuance, with its T9 Nav solution. To quote from their website,
Just type it and find it!
Find anything on your mobile device instantly.
Music, websites, calendar entries, phone functions, contacts, whatever.
Just type in the first few letters and there it is. Unlock the power and potential of your mobile device with T9 Nav™.
5.) A different kind of sensor is that used to monitor aspects of personal medical health. As these sensors become smaller and less expensive, there is likely to be a huge growth in wearable wireless sensor systems – often with a smart mobile device (such as a mobile phone) as the local core of the system.
The news aggregator FierceHealthcare recently commented on a press release from ABI Research:
Wearable Wireless Sensor Market To Grow By 400 Million Devices
Around the world multiple social factors are putting strain on existing healthcare operations, but a new wave of interest and investment in wireless body sensors will help healthcare providers to improve treatment as well as increase efficiency and cut costs. Key to these benefits is the development of wireless sensors to measure important body parameters and communicate the data to remote systems. These developments are examined in a new study from ABI Research.
Over the next five years the market for wearable wireless sensors is set to grow to more than 400 million devices by 2014. Demand will come from the professional healthcare, home healthcare and sports and fitness markets, but these markets will develop at different speeds and will support different applications. The sports and fitness market represents more than 90% of the market today.
“These are very early days for wearable wireless sensors in the healthcare market, but a number of factors are coming together to support strong growth over the next five years,” says principle analyst Jonathan Collins. “Technology and product development, wireless protocol standardization, and the potential already seen in sports and fitness monitoring will help drive investment in the healthcare market.”
Lots more technologies worth watching
There are three points that are worth emphasising about the five potential game-changers that I’ve listed above:
- Each of the five examples are important, but they’re not necessarily the most important; there are many more that could equally well be listed (please let me know if there are others you think are especially interesting);
- For a great opportunity to find out more about many potential game-changing mobile technologies, attend the forthcoming Symbian Exchange and Exposition;
- None of these examples are tied particularly closely to the Symbian platform; they could also be implemented on alternative mobile software platforms.
The last point leads me to a confession. None of the technologies I’ve listed so far is the game-changer for Symbian itself. That’s something different…
The real game-changer
The factor that has the biggest potential to drive faster and wider take-up of the Symbian platform is … choice. Here’s my aspiration for how things will work:
- If users don’t particularly like an application that is bundled with a Symbian device, they have the freedom to choose a different application to install in its place. They can do this by visiting any of a range of different application stores;
- If a network operator doesn’t particularly like the UI model that is built into a Symbian device, they have the freedom to choose a different UI model. They can do this by engaging the services of any of a number of professional services companies;
- If a device manufacturer no longer likes the performance from the chipset of a formerly favoured silicon vendor, they can choose to switch over to a different silicon vendor, whilst keeping the vast majority of their Symbian-based software system intact;
- If users don’t find an application that meets their newly emerging requirements, they can choose to raise their requests on an ideas exchange system such as the Symbian Ideas Exchange marketplace. In reply, developers can either point out that a suitable application already exists, or they can choose to design and implement a new solution;
- If developers don’t like aspects of the Symbian development environment, they have the freedom to choose to modify parts of it.
In other words, the vision for Symbian is to enable numerous people throughout the value chain to have the freedom to realise their own visions for the future of mobile.
The Symbian community is in the middle of converting processes and tools so that this talk of “freedom of choice” will be matched by the reality of what’s available. Converting the software platform to open source is a major part of this transformation. Adopting and continue to apply principles of open management and independent governance is equally important. Last but not least, the underlying software system needs to manifest sufficient flexibility.
If we get this right, the game-changer at the platform level (namely, freedom of choice) will convert into a large series of game-changers in the hands of end-users of Symbian devices.
Worked example: choosing an alternative UI
To make this discussion more concrete, let’s end by looking at options for developers who find themselves unsure about the planned future direction of the UI of the Symbian platform.
As announced at the end of April (and see a recent AllAboutSymbian article for a good review), Symbian^4 will contain
- Qt optimised for the Symbian platform;
- A new “Orbit” extension library for Qt, which contains more than 50 UI elements tailored for mobile user experience, and which will provide a replacement for the existing “Avkon” set of UI elements;
- A new “Direct UI” interaction and navigation logic, combined with finger-optimised layouts offering excellent touch and hybrid-device user experience;
- The application suite re-factored and re-written to take advantage of Qt APIs, Orbit extension library, and Direct UI.
Comments in response to that blogpost announcement made it clear that a number of application developers were unhappy with elements of this proposal. The particular area of unease is the proposal that applications written for previous versions of the platform (S^1, S^2, and S^3) and which use the Avkon UI, will be incompatible with the new platform, and will need to be re-written.
Over the last week or so, this unease has continued to find expression in online discussions. People ask,
- Why can’t the new UI system (Orbit) remain compatible with the old one (Avkon)?
The answers that have been given are that, if the new system is constrained to remain compatible with the old one, it could significantly increase the complexity of the new UI system, add to the run-time overhead (in terms of memory used and speed of execution), and slow down its introduction. However, questions keep on coming:
- Is there really no way for a compatibility layer to be added, or for devices to contain both UI systems in parallel?
- Aren’t there advantages to a gradual transition between the UI systems?
In truth, this remains an open question. It is something for the entire Symbian developer community to review and debate. This discussion is just beginning to start in earnest. Anyone who wishes to become involved in discussions about this topic should visit the Symbian Developer website, and take part in the forums there. Note that people who are prepared to make contributions of design and/or code will in general have more influence over discussions than people who merely request changes in plans.
This kind of choice isn’t cheap. It’s hard work. But Symbian is open to enable that kind of hard work – out of a conviction that, in this way, the best solutions will be uncovered. And who knows: maybe the group discussion will identify surprising new ways to combine the best of both worlds:
- A quick new start with Orbit;
- A smooth transition from Avkon.
That’s the type of game-changer that would be well worth obtaining!
Small typo – the first link is “change-changing innovation”, should be “game-changing innovation”.
AR seems to have endless possibilities to change the way we use our mobiles. Mixing AR with a good map search engine would give the final stroke to never getting lost again!
The amount of times that I followed google maps to the X, while still I am unsure of which door I am support to go into!
Also, I can see lots of potential for AR as virtual guides to large exhibitions like Mobile World Congress, where it is difficult to find out what pavilion contains what exhibitors and so on.. Great to see progress in the Symbian Platform for this!
Most of the game changers you mentioned already taking shape in your competitor platforms Android and iPhone.
Nokia’s Linux phone passed FCC and captured.
http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2009/08/08/nokia-rx-51-tablet-captured-in-the-wild/
Symbian has to justify its existence now.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for pointing out the typo – I’ve fixed it now.
Hi Victor,
Yes, I’m eagerly looking forward to more AR (Augmented Reality) on mobile devices. Rod Burns pointed out another interesting AR link this morning – by Metaio.
Hi Crux,
There’s no change: Symbian has always had to justify its existence.
I don’t deny that similar technologies are also being developed for other mobile software platforms. (I said as much, in my posting.) However, for the reasons I stated at the end of the posting (and also for the reasons in “Reasons to choose“) I believe that this kind of functionality breakthrough will increasingly tend to happen more often on Symbian.
// David W.
What would be really interesting is to explore about how real world users would react to these technologies and do a hard assessment of what problem they are solving. In the game changers you mention, VisiCalc and PageMaker gave huge gains in productivity, built-in cameras gave people the means to capture and save pictures anytime. They had real benefits in the real world.
Augmented Reality is a nice demo, but what’s is the compelling mass market application? The same for advanced haptic sensors. Does it work in when you’re in a crowd, or in a lift? Would you only use a motion sensor when no-one is looking?
What are the legal, financial or social issues of these features? Many thought videophones would be successful, but costs, network issues and people’s vanity and social discomfort got the better of the technology.
I think a better approach would be to start with the aspect of people’s life you want to improve and then build the solution from available technology. Where are the pain points in mobile phones?
Paul
Very good this post. I think that in some years the Smartphones will be what the Notebooks are today. People will use Smartphone to make your jobs, your calendar, you photos, movies etc, because is more easy make all this with um gadget that behove in your hands than a computer thar behove in your backpack. This is a evolution….
At fear of sounding like a broken record, I’d love to hear what your take is on why the Symbian proposition is materially better than the Android proposition as an engine for innovation and breakthrough.
The main planks of your thinking here seem to rest squarely on choice, openness, and hackability (for want of a better term), all of which Android shares. In some ways Android is more open to more people (due to their less restrictive license). And it is currently demonstrating its hackability e.g. through HTC’s recent extensive UI customisation.
You often refer to Symbian’s open governance, which I sometimes take to be a gentle swipe at the way Google goes about things. But is that secret weapon enough to take on Google’s lead in open source maturity and UI? Any technical advantages to highlight? Native code deployment capability and (partly as a result) a choice of runtimes (albeit of mixed quality) comes to mind.
Symbian has emerged from a keyboard-centric phone world which will remain relevant, not just for the forseeable future, but forever. The phone is more like a musical instrument than many people realise: muscle memory makes it much easier to operate a keyboard-based device without looking at it, or at least with very reduced eye-to-object processing. Hence, expression without thinking: Pure expression. This does not occur if you have to look at a device to operate any of its functions.
I think getting the touch UI right is absolutely essential for the next stage of Symbian. However, tactility is something that no touch screen can fully provide, because touchscreens derive their value from their reconfigurability. Throwing away what is already an advantage in pursuit of the dust of competitors, might be to miss a trick.
I can’t believe that Symbian missed touch UI badly despite having futurists in its executive team.
Is it Nokia to blame for? I don’t know who is letting down whom?
David Wood always avoided answering questions that involved Nokia which can be understood.
Nokia is in the middle of the big mess. It’s an unwanted position to be into.
@Tony haptic technology is overrated. Try to use an iPhone for a little while and you will see what I mean. Happily posted from my iPhone without any haptic technology at all.
My contacts still do not sync reliably. My calendar does not interoperate correctly and it still can’t pick out interesting dates from my emails and sms automatically. AR seems so faddy when foundation use cases are still so flawed.
As a developer the Qt announcements here are really difficult to interpret. I want to release for the symbian platform but right now the choice of technologies is more difficult that it has ever been.
1. I invest in avkon knowing that my app will work with the majority of existing phones and those released in the last five years (particularly important for countries who rely on older reconditioned phones). However if I make the investment now, how long will this last in the future.
2. Wait for the Qt based APIs….how long should I wait and can I target older phones via a SIS installable runtime (officially supported by Symbian).
3. Adopt one of the other runtimes such as wrt or python etc. Lets face it the story for commercial release is pretty weak at the moment. Great demos, but it’s really hard for us 3rd parties to sign and deploy solutions or like wrt, it’s just not grown up yet.
It would be really good to have some advice on how to manage the development of native apps and how to maintain avkon/Qt versions.
Mr.Wood, where is that promised Symbian^2? Will we see it this year?
You know, when I came over here thanks to Bill Perry, I was really hoping this was going to be concrete.
My fundamental issue, David, is that choice requires alternatives. Currently, Symbian is stuck in a glasnost-style choice structure. Sure, there are (hypothetically) choices for app stores, for silicon, for solutions, but in reality your alternatives are seriously limited. Want an app for Twitter? You can have any app – so long as it’s Tweets60, Gravity or Twittix. Want an app for Skype? Yours if you want Fring. Etc. Want a touch screen? We have resistive screens available – only. Etc.
So yeah, sure, the game changer might be that you have choice – but choice with actual alternatives is a meaningless concept, and that’s where Symbian is right now. Until recently, if I wanted a Symbian device, I could choose Nokia. Or nothing. Sony and Samsung have stepped up, but they’re also hedging against Symbian with Android, Windows Mobile and in-house systems.
What we need, David, is actual alternatives. We don’t have enough yet on Symbian, much to the detriment of the platform. When the alternatives become available (for apps, for chipsets, for screen technologies, for core software components), then I look forward to Symbian being game-changing. Until then, there’s nothing game-changing – it’s just words!
But seriously, good luck. You see how far Symbian has come in the two years since power users have had a choice of mobile OS. Make choice real on Symbian.
Hi Varun,
Agreed.
SonyEricsson and Samsung have each been shipping Symbian phones for many years. The Symbian-powered Samsung 8910iHD has many fans. (And, to counter one of your points, has a capacative screen.) Video reviews of the Symbian-powered Sony Ericsson Satio reveal some of the huge potential of that device.
Even if there were only Nokia phones running Symbian, there’s still a large choice of different kinds of devices – sports focused, enterprise focused, multimedia focused, etc.
What’s more, you can get a choice of network operator for your Symbian-powered Symbian phone. When my friend recently bought a Nokia N86, a large part of the discussion was whether to contract with operator A or with operator B. That’s real choice too.
But, not to be complacent, I look forward to the range of choice increasing. There are plenty of measures in place to support this expansion of choice.
// David W.
David,
When we can see blog posts from your device partners Nokia, Samsung and others.
I want to hear their perspective with some true confessions on Symbian. I don’t want PR stuff that’s about blowing trumpet all the time.
Hi Stringer,
I suspect that these cases are already known to the development teams, but it may still be worth raising specific defects on Symbian Bugzilla.
As you know, one goal in sharing the Symbian platform source code more widely is that people will not only raise bugs, but study the source code and make suggestions for how to fix these bugs.
Advice on this topic is in the process of being prepared. In the meantime, you will hopefully get a friendly response to questions you raise in Symbian developer forum discussions threads such as this one.
// David W.
Hi chips,
This comment is somewhat unfair, because Symbian has supported touch UI since the very first release, Symbian OS v1.0 (1997). Handheld communicators such as the Psion Series 5 could be driven either via the keyboard or using a pen/finger. Later, both UIQ and Series 90 supported touch UI.
On the other hand, I confess to being surprised by the speed of success of adoption of new touch UIs in mobile devices in the last 12-18 months. If I look back (say) 3 years to the trends that I considered at that time to be the most significant for the near future, I did not include touch UI on that list. (The list focused on items lower down the software stack.) It’s a sobering lesson that the future holds plenty of surprises, even for people who spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Good suggestion! We had one guest blog posting from Samsung a while back, but we should have more like that. And maybe we should round up a list of links to blog posts by device partners (and others) about their Symbian experiences, and post that here too, for convenience.
I’m very sorry if anything written in this blog appears like “blowing trumpet all the time”. As you can imagine, we’re constantly thinking about what kind of material we should be including here. Feedback from the community will be our guide.
// David W.
Hi Paul,
One reason I continue to be interested in Augmented Reality is because I believe such applications will be a big help to me personally.
The “pain point” it addresses, isn’t a pain point in operating a mobile phone, but is a pain point in making sense out of the world around me.
I’m often looking at things and wondering, “now, what is that / who is that / can I find out more about this…?”
This isn’t whimsical. I’m frustrated by lack of instant info about the things I’m seeing. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
When I look at some of the AR apps and demos that already exist – there’s a interesting roundup here – I can’t help but to savour the potential.
These are all good questions. Personally, I don’t know the answers. But I’m hopeful that the community, collectively, will find good solutions. There could be big returns for the people who succeed.
// David W.
I also have an interest in AR, having previous worked in Virtual Reality, and I do understand that there is a definite value in presenting additional information over video images. However, I am also aware of the social issues having tried some applications (nru on the iPhone app store is good example).
You have to stand in the street and hold your expensive phone up for all to see and you are then looking at the screen and not what is going on around you. You feel very self conscious and quite vulnerable in a big city like London. Nice in a demo, but no more useful than a map in reality.
The best uses for AR I saw were for medical and emergency services, but neither are mass market, although knowing how to get out of building could be a useful application for staff.
I guess where I end up is that to me Symbian are too focused on technology and engineering and not enough on user experience. Having all the right parts doesn’t mean that you have a good product.
Paul
my favourite touch UI phone ever is still the P800 from SonyEriccson, but that is just me… I admit it, I am a bit of a geek
Hello David,
at the moment it is quite troublesome for me because I as an leader of a development team decided to choose symbian foundation + qt as the development platform for a mobile-health-application which will hopefully start shipping at the end of 2010.
The main point for this decision is simply the market penetration in that timeframe. We don’t care about feature bling-bling. Java Micro Edition didn’t gave us the few features we needed for our application so we where searching for alternatives.
Today my CTO came in and said ‘Hey Financial Times Germany wrote that Nokia isn’t supporting Symbian anymore’. I had a hard hour. Two weeks ago I said to my CTO Nokia is intending to shift S40 more in the Low-End-Market and S60 will be the next Feature-Phone-/Volume-Platform (compared to S40 which was the feature phone platform for the last couple of years).
Are there any infos? If necessary I am willing to sign a NDA.
In my oppinion the only and the biggest driver for programming on the symbian platform is the raw number of sold devices out there. There are so many proprietary mobile phones out there which are simply not reachable – I don’t count JME as an alternative.
++ I am not interested in Smartphone numbers ++
++ I am interested in overall mobile phones sales numbers ++
I have numbers for the german market Q1 2009:
o Nokia 34%
o Sony Ericsson 26%
o Samsung 24%
o LG 7%
o Motorola 4%
The last 5% is going to HTC + Apple + Blackberry TOGETHER!!
HTC is responsible for the biggest chunk in Windows Mobile and Android.
Help is really appreciated.
If there are some more ‘not so good news’ I fear that this decision has to be reverted (not knowing an alternative platform).
Best regards,
Thomas
I would say a game-changer is something that uses a genuine innovative twist to achieve a highly visible, extremely simple, advantage.
Going back to one of the examples: The Sinclair ZX80 achieved its low cost by using the Z80 CPU to generate the video signal. This trick made it possible to then say “Computer costs £99″, and launched Sinclair into the world of computing.
A game-changer is a narrative. It may seem cheesy, but Shakespeare was not shy of a good plot. All the best technology, words or otherwise, needs a twist to wrap it all up. It’s like a well-told joke: you cannot predict the ending, and everybody gets it.
That’s what I mean by game-changer.
Hi Thomas,
I don’t speak German, and the Google automated translation of the article leaves a lot to be desired.
However, I do notice that Nokia gave no official comment to the article. Also, from my own eyes, I continue to see huge amounts of ongoing commitment by Nokia to Symbian projects.
The first four comments in response to the TechCrunch version of this story seem more balanced than the FT Germany article. (I only mention 4 since there are only 4 at the time that I write this.)
// David W.
Victor, my favourite phone ever was the P800 from SonyEriccson, and I’m not a geek!
Hi ZAR,
There’s already a PDK for Symbian^2 available for download from the Symbian developer website. (Click on “Tools & Kits” and then “Download the Kits”.)
All members of the Symbian Foundation can download this and use it.
In the future, the PDK will be available even to non-members, but for the time being, there’s a delay, on account of some licensing issues that need to be fixed first. (These issues are straightforward, but simply take a bit of time to work through.)
Symbian^2 is expected to be confirmed as meeting the Functionality Complete milestone at the next meeting of the Release Council, towards the end of August. The milestone review processes are still a bit new, and we’re all getting used to them!
// David W.
Victor / Anatolie,
As a touch phone, I preferred the Sony Ericsson P910 to its predecessors. Such a great device!
In the days before I discovered push email and Twitter, I whiled away many a late-night train journey playing the Solitaire card game (HomeRun), seeking to beat the built-in KIS high-score…
// David W.
David,
Ironically the FTD article has a quote from you. Here is the translated version.
“At the Symbian Foundation in London can be seen, however, is not in danger. Even if Nokia smartphones increasingly disconnected with Maemo should be the number of Symbian phones worldwide, said manager David Wood of FTD. Nokia will continue to be the great majority of its phones with Symbian to deliver. In addition, he constructed so that other Symbian users like Sony Ericsson already in 2012 “more than half” of the development effort for the software would take, so Wood. Currently Nokia schultert more than 90 percent of development services.”
At this point I would think twice before releasing Symbian^3. I think it would be wiser to skip that (i.e. move release of new things introduced in Symbian^3 to Symbian^4 and skip hardening phase of Symbian^3 and never ship it) and put all efforts to Symbian^4.
It’s hard to justify the need of Symbian^3 when it’s going to be phased out quickly and new things are not that ground breaking or that must have features* to support “releasing” it. It would be wiser to put all efforts to get Symbian^4 out faster.
*Screenplay is wasted because of Avkon, in my opinion.
Hi Tupe,
You make an interesting suggestion – to avoid the effort to harden/productise Symbian^3, in order to reach Symbian^4 more quickly.
I see both pros and cons in this suggestion.
Pros: Yes, we might reach Symbian^4 more quickly. That would be a big win.
Cons: It’s often easier to take two small steps than to attempt one large one. The principle of incremental development says that we should avoid trying to take one giant leap all the way to S^4. In other words, skipping S^3 might result (counterintuitively) in delaying the integration and release of S^4.
That’s not entirely clear, either. Just as the 3rd edition of S60 looks like it could have a long life ahead of it, even after the 5th edition has been released, it could be the same for S^3.
The discussion is worth exploring further. After all, Symbian Ltd took similar decisions, in the past, to avoid productising versions of Symbian OS. For example, project “Yankee” (delivering Symbian OS v9.0) was never productised – licensee projects moved straight onto project “Mike” (Symbian OS v9.1). Likewise for project “Oghma” (the first candidate for Symbian OS v9.5).
// David W.
Hi Paul,
A big part of the thinking behind the creation of Symbian’s UI Council (alongside eg the Architecture Council and the Release Council) was to counteract exactly this risk.
That’s a fair point, and until a solution emerges, it diminishes the attractiveness of many of the use cases for AR (Augmented Reality). It may mean that initial use cases for AR have to apply in “safer” environments.
// David W.
To take a more directly relevant example: What was the “game-changer” in the iPhone. It was palm-rejection. This requires multitouch. The “purpose” of multitouch is described as “being able to zoom in and zoom out”. But this is a necessary story. The secret is palm-rejection, which is an issue in any touch tech that is light enough to be very usable, and where the screen covers most of the phone. Apple’s confidence to pursue their gamble was based on this knowledge.
Can Symbian beat Apple at this game?
Hi Tony,
That’s an interesting suggestion, but I’m not sure everyone will agree. I think the iPhone success is due to the convergence of a number of factors:
1.) Larger screen size – which fitted into a device that is nevertheless portable;
2.) Well-implemented single-touch UI (that, as it happens, also does multitouch);
3.) A good implementation of the Safari web-browser;
4.) Lots of attention to detail in the UI and the functionality.
5.) Being bundled with a flat “all-you-can-eat” data-plan;
5.) Leveraging the pre-existing iTunes music distribution system;
7.) Leveraging developers who knew about (or who could learn) Cocoa.
That’s a tough act to match, but Apple isn’t the only great company around, and nor is it (or any other company) infallible.
But isn’t the point to change the game?
// David W.
> You have to stand in the street and hold your expensive phone up for all to see and you are then looking at the screen and not what is going on around you. You feel very self conscious and quite vulnerable in a big city like London.
Well, in that case I assume you don’t use your phone for taking pictures either?
[...] August 10th the Symbian Foundation Blog ran an article titled Symbian Game-Changers that goes really in depth and also talks about the future of the platform. Comments from the [...]
> Well, in that case I assume you don’t use your phone for taking pictures either?
Not in certain parts of a busy city like London or Paris, nor if I’m obviously lost and using an AR tool to find something. I wouldn’t wear expensive jewelry either, it’s just common sense.
> A big part of the thinking behind the creation of Symbian’s UI Council (alongside eg the Architecture Council and the Release Council) was to counteract exactly this risk.
But that talks about evolution and differentiation, what about radical rethinks to embrace a more internet-focused future for handsets? I think all a council with this remit would do is re-hash what’s there all ready, not change the game.
Hi Paul,
The discussion topics in and around Council meetings that I’ve attended have included a mix of incremental and potentially revolutionary changes.
// David W.
Hello David,
you are cited in the FTD-Article with the following words (free translation):
“Nokias contributions are almost 90% of the work inside symbian foundation. In 2012 this picture will change, Sony Ericssons contribution will be almost 50% and perhaps a bit more to SF.”
Qestion 1) Did they cite you correct?
I know the history of Symbian UIQ, I saw the things Nokia where doing to Sony Ericsson (especially UIQ) as an outside observer. I thought – ouch that hurts – Nokia cannot simply kill UIQ without any consequencys. I saw the reaction to this – the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 – which is a sensational (highest end) device.
Question 2) Qt on a Symbian^4 Sony Ericsson-Phone is as well integrated as Qt on a Symbian^4 Nokia-Phone? No show-stoppers?
Question 3) It seems to me, that the real contender will be Android.
Samsung already has an android-phone on the shelfes
Sony Ericsson is developing a phone (rachel?)
Motorola is building a completely new User-Interface for Android
I know guys, they know guys, and they heard rumors saying that one big carrier in germany is currently throwing an eye on android (uff that was close). Where do you see Symbian Foundation and Android in 2012 in terms of overall mobile phone(not only smartphone) market share?
Best regards,
Thomas
Hi Thomas,
To quickly address one point re the mention of Sony Ericsson. What I tried to say, when talking to the FTD journalist, was that the Symbian Foundation looks forward to a time in the not-too-distant future – perhaps in 3 or 4 years time – when there are as many contributions to the Symbian platform codebase from outside Nokia as from inside Nokia. Sony Ericsson was just mentioned as one example of a company who is a potential code contributor.
I’ve been forwarded this translation of the relevant part of the FTD article:
(my emphasis added). That translation sounds more like what I said. So the collaboration will be shared out among many companies.
Re your comment,
Major network operators generally look very closely at several different mobile platforms. For example, most of the major network operators are strongly engaged with Symbian Councils – but they also have people looking at Android / LiMo / … That makes good commercial business sense.
In general, the point I would make is: just because a manufacturer (eg Nokia) or a network operator commences new projects with a different mobile operating system, it doesn’t mean they will be doing fewer projects with Symbian. It’s not a zero-sum game.
// David W.
Thank you very much for your answers.
Today I registrated for the Qt-Developer-Days in Munich.
Is it planned that some Symbian-Foundation-people are there?
I hope that I do not disturb to much but this question is really vital for me:
>Qt on a Symbian^4 Sony Ericsson-Phone is as well
>integrated as Qt on a Symbian^4 Nokia-Phone?
>No show-stoppers?
According to this at the moment (prerelease) Qt and Open-C/P.I.P.S. has to be signed differently for the Samsung-phones and the Nokia-phones. Light at the end of the tunnel?
Best regards,
Thomas
But ultimately it is a zero-sum game and I would consider it naive and unwise (at best) to think otherwise. Unless entering an entirely new (non-phone) category, there is only so much space in operator ranges and in their stores to sell through. Something somewhere’s getting squeezed, even if that something turns out to be lower down the food chain in the form of featurephone operating systems.
Perhaps not Nokia today, but there certainly are tier 1 manufacturers structured such that they redeploy their (stable set of) product creation teams between OS’s according to the market opportunities they see. Within manufacturers like that, make no mistake that it is very much zero-sum.
Hi Thomas,
We’re planning to have at least one person there.
That’s definitely the intention. There should be no different signing requirements on the phones from different manufacturers for the same Qt/Orbit app.
// David W.
Hi David,
Could one say that laptop computing started because of a voltage multiplier?
> But isn’t the point to change the game?
Symbian is in a very lucky position – a lot of people would now like to see the SF do something radical and new. Preferably, an integrated, brilliant, unpredictable, exciting set of simple solutions, so that the phone industry has something to talk about, outside of the phone industry.
Thanks again David, you made my day.
Just for the protocol:
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090812-702406.html
>Nokia:Remain Strongly Committed To Symbian
>Operating System
>
>Nokia Corp. (NOK), the world’s biggest maker of cellphones
>by volume, said Wednesday it remains “strongly committed”
>to the Symbian mobile operating system……
>
Hi Anatolie,
You are not a geek?!?! oh well
David,
What’s the status of your end-user branding? Is your device partners comfartable with the idea of allocating real estate to Symbian Logo on their devices?
David, Victor – the P910 was indeed even better but considering the P800 was the first of its kind, it’s more revolutionary, it makes for a better favourite. And the light blue frame was very pretty.
Incredible post! Definately worthy of having the record number of comments and perfectly highlights the vision and direction that Symbian is taking. This is bolstered by Nokia’s vehement statement press release that Symbian is their OS of choice for mobile phones.
I’m hoping that Symbian^2 will significantly improve Samsung i8910HD, N97, 5800.
Recent article that I thought shows a significant direction that Google is taking relating to HTML5
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-bets-big-on-html-5.html
Can you speak to HTML5 capabilities now and in the future with Symbian?
RE: HTML5
Current Symbian devices don’t have any HTML5 support out of the box, but Nokia is providing a new browser based on Webkit 525 (which has some HTML5 support) in the latest firmware updates to S60 5th Edition and selected 3rd Edition FP2 models. You can expect this, or a newer browser version to ship in Symbian devices prior to Symbian^4.
In Symbian^4 there will be a Qt WebKit based browser, from which point, the browser in Symbian devices should stay much closer to the WebKit trunk and have the latest HTML5 support available. Of course, with Qt WebKit you aren’t bound by standards support, since you can create rich hybrid apps, integrating a web interface with the native code you might need to access any platform feature.
[...] a comment » I was reading @dw2’s blog entry “Game Changers” early this week, when I found myself pondering about some of the rather agressive comments [...]
Hi Chips,
It’s too early to say anything concrete about this, sorry.
As you can imagine, there are lots of options here, including displaying a Symbian logo during the software startup sequence, and putting a Symbian logo on the box of the device.
Device manufacturers will include such a logo (or other reference to Symbian) provided they see value to themselves in doing so. One analogy is with the way in which some device manufacturers explicitly market the fact that their devices include a Carl Zeiss lens.
// David W.
Hi PP,
Your comment deserves a longer reply than can easily fit here. I have in mind a new top-level blog posting “Beyond zero sum”.
In the meantime:
Briefly, you are of course right that device manufacturers and operators often make a straight choice between two operating systems, for a particular project. One day a team may be lined up to work on a Symbian Platform project, but next day they are told the project will switch to use a different operating system. Or vice versa.
Whenever this happens (or could be about to happen), there are opportunities to answer the question: what are the key criteria that determine in practice (as opposed to theory) the choice of mobile operating system? And internal improvement projects get hatched as a result. That’s a good consequence of competition. There have been very many such internal improvement projects at Symbian over the years.
However, the total number of device projects is not fixed. And nor is it fixed what is the share of these projects that use an open operating system (as opposed to an in-house system).
A common metaphor here is “a rising tide lifts all boats“.
The discipline of “game theory” can also provide insights here. My colleague Victor Palau, from Symbian’s Release Management team, has already started to touch on this topic, in one of his blog postings.
// David W.
RE: HTML5
Your poing out that Symbian is working toward HTML5 is great. Seems to me that it should be a significant focus of Symbian (and members/partners) efforts (title of this Thread indicates Game-Changers and I think HTML5 is going to be one of the biggest game changers). With respect to that, I come back to the point of upgrading slightly older phones to be able to take advantage of newer technologies. Can a phone such as the E71 have a browser added (i.e. Opera or Native) to handle HTML5, and if so, will that happen?
I think you are going to see frustration by customers when they plunk down $340 – $400 dollars (or more) for a phone, and then 1 year later (i.e. the length of time the E71 has now been out) the owners start seeing a number of technologies (HTML5) that they aren’t able to upgrade to because they haven’t purchased the latest phone(i.e. my phone is only a year old). The big question here is, can that technology be supported on the E71 and if so, why don’t we make doing so a priority?
Example, If I can buy a $300 netbook (nice and small) and use a cheap phone to tether it to the internet; should I in the future, NOT purchase the equivalent of the E71 and just go with a cheap phone and netbook so that I DON’T lose the ability to add technology for a significant period of time.
I would not have a problem paying for a feature add such as an upgrade that would give my E71 features like HTML5 (or other game changers).
The most impressive brand placement I’ve ever seen is by Solid State Logic (http://www.solid-state-logic.com). On a mixing desk the size of a living room, they put “Solid State Logic, Begbroke, Oxford”, in <1cm high text. That has never left me.
If you have to advertise a technology which nobody understands (Intel inside, for example) as opposed to a simple idea, it usually means you're under pressure from a strong competitor (AMD, in this example).
If Symbian became notable for being Symbiotic with the wild animals of fast-emerging formats (including OGG et al), and playing well as an interface between corporate and developer cultures, then in time, that could be an interesting way of gaining both developer and user trust.
But a game-changer is something entirely different. It is something other than, and in addition to, excellence.
Fast-moving, unpredictable, simple and fun.