If you haven’t spent any time yet on the Symbian Ideas site, ideas.symbian.org, I’d like to remind you what it’s for and encourage you to get involved. It takes only a few minutes to make a big difference – and it’s fun.
Ideas.symbian.org was set up to generate ideas about new mobile devices, new mobile applications and how to improve the Symbian Foundation. Anyone can post, comment and vote – we want your vision of the future.
With the current level of participation in the site, any idea that garners more than 30 votes will be reviewed by a domain expert with the aim of seeing it implemented. The threshold for an idea’s receiving a full review required will increase as more visitors use the site.
Pivotal to the effectiveness of Symbian Ideas is the process for making ideas into reality. Symbian doesn’t have development resources, so we’re devising means by which Symbian can help catalyse the implementation of popular ideas. In addition to the ideas whose implementation Symbian fosters, people or companies can choose to implement good ideas independently in order to make money from them.
Popular ideas for how to improve the Symbian Foundation will go directly to the relevant member(s) of staff. The rest of this blog covers the evolving process for getting application ideas implemented – and how you can get involved.
The Opportunities for You
Some applications (such as the calendar, alarm clock, games, and more) fall within the area of “mobile device software”, which are distributed as part of the Symbian platform. When we review a popular idea, we work out whether it should ship with Symbian.
For these applications, the company that implemented or sponsored the idea would have to be a Symbian member, and be happy to contribute the code to the platform in return for major kudos.
Applications that won’t be distributed as part of the Symbian platform are open for a third party to develop and retain the intellectual property rights. A good example of this is an app that lets you chart your family tree.
If you’re interested in making either kind of idea into reality, you have an opportunity to enhance your reputation in the Symbian community by developing or sponsoring them. Please be in touch if you’d like more details.
I wish the staff will atleast read all ideas instead of just basing from the 30 votes. The reason is because some good ideas are difficult to comprehend by normal voters or thinkers unless they see the real implementation.
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[...] and aspects) and vote on other people’s ideas. The Symbian blog popped this up again, to remind you that the Symbian Ideas site is going strong, and to give you an idea of how easy it is for you to [...]
Hi, BoyBawang
Thanks for the comment.
Will you please post the idea you had above (wish the staff would read all ideas) on Ideas.symbian.org? That way, other people will vote on your idea!
In the mean time, I will mention it to the folks who monitor Ideas.
Cheers,
Lauren
Hi BoyBawang,
At the moment, most of the experts are looking at pretty much all of the ideas (and they receive a notification every time an idea within their field is raised). However, we don’t want to commit to every idea being reviewed by the appropriate expert prior to 30 votes being received as such reviews can be a time-consuming exercise – especially as we’d like to make reviews into detailed and thorough analyses and feasibility studies, requiring a significant amount of an expert’s time.
The 30 vote threshold does entail that others must see a need for that which is suggested. However, we’re considering reducing the vote threshold for more ‘technical’ ideas as it may be that the average user isn’t sufficiently aware of the opportunities of such ideas.
– Freddie
[...] 17, 2009 4:30 PM Want to read the most popular blog on Symbian for a long long time? Here it is – maybe you can tell us why people went to this page over 10,000 times within a week? Is it [...]
Freddie, I do believe that a technical idea should resonate with consumers. If it doesn’t, then what is the point?
It might be better to support people framing and expressing their ideas in a more “layman” terms than reducing a threshold.
The Symbian platform has been criticised for being too “rich”, no need to entertain that myth.
Hi Julien,
I agree, in theory all ideas should be able to resonate with the average user (or consumer). However, when developers have specific ideas related to the code or app development it is hard to see how to usefully rephrase these in layman’s terms. See:
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=514
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=1162
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=1731
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=819
etc.
If you do see ready ways to rephrase these, please suggest them!
I definitely understand your point, but am sure we can find some ways.
It’s not so much about rephrasing everything, but more of adding couple lines for consumers.
I guess the question to ask is: “what’s in it for the consumer?”
If we can answer that question, then we’ll get the participation of the consumers. If not, whatever is the idea, it will remain technical jargon and consumers will move on.
Few ideas:
Host packages consisting of translated .rls files
Posted In Build a Symbian community
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=514
What’s in it for consumers:
- Devices supporting their languages
- New devices that would have not made it in their countries because of limited resources
- Opportunity to “adapt” the language to their particular culture
Provide WEB API for developers/website owners to discover device model/capabilities
Posted In Make Symbian development easier
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=1162
What’s in it for consumers:
- Web services tailored to their device, enabling better user experience
- Better understanding of the devices out there in order to bring new services to the “largest” customer base
Restrict DevCerts by UID
Posted In Make Symbian development easier
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=1731
Definitely don’t see the relevance of that idea myself, cause I don’t understand what it will help to solve.
Therefore I will not vote on it.
Resource cleanup at uninstall
Posted In Core platform
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=819
What’s in it for consumers:
- phone doesn’t get stuck after installing/de-installing many apps
- old installs don’t impact newer installs of the same software