Symbian Blog: Archives for November 2009

Gartner on Symbian

Nov 30th by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

Nick Jones over on Gartner late last week weighed in with some thoughts on Symbian. Our thanks to Nick for bringing this up

I’ve just completed three Gartner symposium conferences and so have spent a lot of time talking to clients in Europe, APAC and the USA about mobile platforms. And one thing I noticed was how seldom people talked about Symbian. Remember Symbian? It’s the dominant smartphone platform by far, well over 40% of smartphones shipped in Q3 used Symbian.

You can follow Twitter trackbacks here.

Nick’s point was:

I’ve had more questions about the potential of Android as a corporate smartphone platform than Symbian even though the latter is far more consistent, secure and mature.

He also points out that Android basks in Google glory while Apple gets a ton of marketing $$ spent on maintaining the hype around iPhone. Those are strong words in favour of Symbian.

Jones points out though that no-one is evangelising Symbian.

The follow up debate in the comments is also very interesting, Paul B weighing in with a view that Symbian needs a great handset launch to help the brand.

Of course resources are an issue for the Symbian brand and Paul is right that new product launches based on a future platform will help.

I still feel we are making very little of two aspects of change that are important to every business and hence to every enterprise platform purchaser.

The first is that all businesses are now concerned with open management – open innovation for starters and then more open, transparent business practices.

The second is that Symbian as a brand is not just open as in”going open source” but is also working with more open and transparent management processes.

Business is changing in fundamental ways – in many fundamental ways – and Symbian as an organisation is well aligned with those changes and in some sense pioneers change.   We can make more of a virtue of the platform being aligned with those changes too.

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Open Innovation

Nov 29th by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

Being a regular user of LinkedIn has, for me, the benefit of catching conferences I might not otherwise hear about – because my connections are attending them.

So I came across the inaugural Open Innovation Conference, due to take place this week in Orlando, Florida. What’s interesting about the conference is how quickly Open Innovation has translated into new job titles. Presumably beneath the title are new corporate initiatives. Lets take a look at a few:

Russ Conser, Head Game Changer, Shell.

Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer, Mozilla Corporation.

John Tao, Vice President of Open Innovation, WEYERHAEUSER.

Helene F. Rutledge, Director Of Open Innovations, GSK CONSUMER HEALTHCARE

One of the key elements of the conference is how to become a partner of chocie for the innovation community. In other words open innovation is becoming so widespread, companies now need strategies to attract the right innovators and ideas.

You can follow some of the action at the event through a number of bloggers:

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Event: Symbian Japan

Nov 27th by Ryo Inowa Retweet Share on Facebook

Hello, I’m Ryo Inowa, a community manager in Symbian Japan.

I am very happy to inform members of the upcoming “Symbian Japan Forum”. This will be held on 15/01/2010 at the Accenture office in Tokyo – thanks Accenture!!

This member event will provide various updates from Symbian, keynote lectures by board members and demonstrations of the latest technology. Join us if you can.

The purpose of the event is to activate interaction between members including Symbian staff. And also this is the first chance for most of Japanese members to meet each other and Symbian staff.

Any material will be available after this event on our web site. Detailed information will be on our event site and mail shot will be sent as well shortly, and I will blog again!!

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Blog Awards

Nov 27th by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

Computer Weekly on Tuesday last hosted it annual IT blog awards. Symbian was runner up in the small corporate section. It is of course very good news. Congratulations to the winners in each category.

Thanks to whoever nominated Symbian. I will try to find out more as the day wears on.

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Catching up With Symbian Tools

Nov 25th by paulbsymbian Retweet Share on Facebook

A couple of weeks back twenty-nine Symbian eco-system tools creators spent the day sharing plans, strategies and goals here in the Bay Area.  We had representatives from handset manufacturers, package owners, chip vendors, startups, tools vendors, and service providers. This is after all an open community.

Let me share that with you and see if you’ve any ideas for improving our process or thinking. For those not in the tools business but with an interest in Symbian – why is this important? Going forward we need to create ways that people not steeped in the Symbian tradition can participate, easily, effectively and collaboratively in the contribution process – i.e. taking the OS and tools forward.

Tools Challenges. The three top themes were:
  • Platform Creation – Use tools to support, ease, and encourage platform creation and collaboration
  • Getting Started – It should be easy and fast to create a Symbian hello world program
  • Understand the Tools Portfolio – There are a few hundred different tools in the Symbian eco-system. There needs to be a good way to understand them and find what you need
For those not in the know, we talked a lot about what we called an Open Source Paradox….

Open Source Paradox = Tools contributions are slow because the contributors are waiting to see interest from the community in contributing. The community isn’t contributing because they’re waiting to see the packages that they would need to contribute to. How do we solve this?
  • Tools Package Owners – need encouraging to make the “leap of faith” and contribute even if there are no known collaborators
  • Symbian Foundation Tools team and community – need to encourage collaborators to express interest in contribution

Some of the tools and issues we are talking about?


Qt Tools Qt is an application framework (not just a User Interface framework). Qt Creator is focused on being a great C++ development environment.
Target Shell Tools Consulting giant Accenture has a rich set of command line tools that run on Symbian targets. They agreed to explore contributing them to the Symbian Foundation.

Open Source Best Practices. Qt and CodeSourcery shared best practices from being successful open source eco-system tools providers. Some examples of best practice:
  • Meet the community on its own turf – through mailing lists, IRC, forums
  • Making sure contributors see value in their contribution
  • Consider using more existing well known open source tools instead of open sourcing comparable historically closed source tools

There are more SIG meeting details and presentations on the Symbian wiki. Meantime we agreed to create a Working Group to create a better organization of the tools for documentation, installation and usage.  See the Symbian tools forum for more details.

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Thought Leaders and Business as Movement

Nov 25th by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

The press , trade and national, picked up on this week’s new Thought Leadership Index from TLG (the Thought Leadership Group). Apple and Google appeared as number 1 and 2. What the trade press didn’t point out is that The Co-operative Bank ranked 6, just behind joint third place companies Microsoft, Amazon and GSK (the pharma folks) and ahead of Facebook and Twitter.

So a couple of background details.

TLG is a London-based PR agency that specialises in projecting brands as thought leaders. It is “thought leadership as marketing”.

Second the Index is created from UK “key opinion formers”. The idea is if you are a brand that markets via thought leadership then you need to be influencing the people that matter (if you believe in that concept).

Leave aside your skepticism for a moment. The inclusion of the Co-op among these tech giants is important. The Co-op is not known for a raft of innovations but for a tradition of shared ownership. It is the bank that likes to trace its history back to the 1844 Cooperative pioneers. Who would have thought it could be snapping at Microsoft’s heels in 2009 and leaving Facebook and Twitter in its shadow?

A second observation. TLG have tried to make thought leadership a concrete element of marketing. I don’t think they have succeeded with this Index but the fact that they are trying is a good indication that thought leadership is a vital part of marketing impact. This may be historically new (comments please).

I think it has important implications for Symbian and its members. It says the broader cultural values that we stand for have an important place even in the perspectives of people who automatically think Apple, Google, Microsoft when asked about thought leadership.

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Spotify on Symbian

Nov 24th by Joe Neale Retweet Share on Facebook

As I’m sure a lot of you are aware the popular and truly excellent music service Spotify is now available on Symbian.

For all of those not in the know, Spotify grants you instant access to a vast array of music that you can store on your device and listen to whenever you want even if you haven’t got decent reception, i.e. in offline mode. The service is currently only available in Europe and does require a monthly fee to use which no doubt helps keep the music flowing, but considering that you won’t ever need to buy another MP3 it seems like a pretty good deal to us!

The beautifully designed UI was constructed by the much hyped The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) who have truly exceeded expectations with this effort.

Have you got any thoughts on the app or found any weird and random songs that might be of interest to other readers?

Thanks a lot and enjoy the music with the Spotify App!

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The Art of Community by Jono Bacon

Nov 24th by ashleeg Retweet Share on Facebook

Hi, I’m Sebastian Brannstrom, Release Manager here at Symbian. Some time back I stumbled across a book called “The Art of Community” by Jono Bacon. It turns out that this book and I have a bit of common history.

A few years ago I discovered podcasting, this fantastic medium where everyone can make their own radio show and broadcast it to the world. It turned out to have a lasting effect on me. Firstly, because I still today listen to hours of podcasts every week. Secondly, because I found myself having to write my own open source podcasting application for Symbian. This led to a long chain of events that would eventually find me living here in London, working for the now open source Symbian Foundation.

As a Linux user, one of my favourite podcasts was “LugRadio”. It was produced by a group of Linux geeks in the UK, among them Jono Bacon. LugRadio was largely improvised, but it was fun, enthusiastic and very well produced. It gained a large following and eventually spawned a “conference” called LugRadio Live, equally well produced. In 2006 I attended LugRadio Live, and I had a great time. Read more »

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An Introduction to the Symbian Virtual Platform

Nov 20th by Tyson Key Retweet Share on Facebook

Hi, I’m Tyson Key, a college student currently residing somewhere in the north of England.

When I’m not studying, I happen to advocate and contribute to open source, and open platforms and enjoy spending time testing and documenting software, and exploring various aspects of low-level operating system and computer networking technology – all whilst trying to be a generally reasonable and agreeable person…

Of course, I also happen to be a heavy user, and advocate of the Symbian platform, and have been involved with the Symbian Foundation to varying extents, since its announcement.

Introduction aside, I’ve been invited to introduce the Symbian Virtual Platform. This is a project that I’ve been involved in beta testing, prior to the release of the Symbian Kernel Taster Kit.

What’s the Symbian Virtual Platform?

The Symbian Virtual Platform consists of a customised version of QEMU (an Open Source CPU instruction set and hardware emulator), containing several additional features, along with a corresponding baseport referred to as Syborg.

This combination potentially represents the future of inexpensive, accurate, user-level application testing, and low-level debugging and experimentation on the Symbian Platform, without the need for additional hardware.

As a bonus, some of the hallmark causes of frustration with the older Windows-based emulator (commonly referred to as WINS or WINSCW dependant upon toolchain used) are removed, such as:

  • Low performance
  • Simulation inaccuracy (e.g. differing memory models with various limitations, behavioural differences from real hardware, and disabled/restricted software functionality)
  • Platform dependence – QEMU is well-supported under Windows, most Linux distributions and Mac OS X, and also runs under many other operating systems Read more »

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Please donate to the Symbian Movember team

Nov 20th by Craig Box Retweet Share on Facebook

Would you buy a used car from this man?

Hi, I’m Craig Box, and I’m the IT architect in the operations team.  (That photo is of my colleague Shaun Phillips, our Service Delivery Manager.  My moustache does not photograph nearly as well.)

Movember is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues, specifically prostate cancer. (Translated, it’s an excuse for the modern man to grow the ’70s moustache he’s always wanted to wear – it’s for charity!)

From one foundation to another, some of the guys on the Symbian team have been growing moustaches since the first of the month. While we may not be in the same league as these guys, every dollar we collect goes to raising awareness of men’s health issues. Last year Movember raised £14 million and we want you to help top that number this year.

You should donate to the Symbian “MoDuck” team here.

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