by Lee Williams
Well, it’s been a big year and I want to take some time to sum up a few major points. I believe it is becoming clear that Symbian, both the platform and the organisation, is headed in a very positive direction in the coming year. This is due to the hard work and the commitments of a great number of people from around the ecosystem, and I want to send a special thanks to all of you.
We have good news as the year comes to a close. First, though it has been a huge amount of work getting the Foundation going, judging from comments on the blog and around the Web, we’ve seen both positive and constructive suggestions about our progress. From where we sit in the foundation, it’s been quite a journey to define what a Foundation like this should do, and to execute our role in various aspects of the marketplace.
While I am reading some of the comments on the web and taking the feedback on board as best I can, it is clear that many recognise that the folks here and throughout the eco-system have worked incredibly hard to create a path breaking new initiative, and with little or no precedent to work off.
All involved should feel proud of their work toward this new frontier we have created. In looking at 2010 as a timeframe for even more progress, we are poised to continue to surpass expectations as to what we can accomplish in the marketplace with these initiatives and this is in large part due to the work completed and the foundation for progress established during this year, 2009.
Why does 2010 look so good? Well Nokia, a company that is clearly our largest initial contributor, could not have done more to support these concepts and to show their support for the Foundation and platform than the endorsement they gave us at their Capital Markets Day at the start of December. Let me elaborate upon what some of this means.
Symbian’s value in the future mobile market is its incredible flexibility, robustness and adaptability to future needs. We enjoy better multitasking capability, better power management, security, and scale of market than any mobile platform out there. It is clear that we have a unique offering, and an OS architected for mobile from day 1, and poised to continue to appeal to the marketplace at a tremendous scale.
Nokia’s endorsement of Symbian specifically marks out our future as a mobile computing and communications platform for the masses, globally marketed in smartphones costing $150 and under, and being an essential ingredient for helping others embrace the power of new types of communication.
Symbian will maintain it’s role as the smartphone for the masses which is where such a powerful, flexible platform belongs. An exciting aspect of this is that it also means that the offering will continue to have a huge impact on the lifestyles of people around the world.
There’ll be an estimated 4.6 billion subscriptions to mobile networks by the end of this year – just a few days away. To give you some sense of what this implies in terms of reach and significance, there are only 480 million newspapers circulated daily, around 1.1 billion personal computers, and 1.7 billion Internet users active globally.
From 2010 onwards Symbian powered smartphones will continue to bring the web to people who cannot afford a PC and who need to be on the move as a part of their lifestyle, perhaps because they might be farmers in a rural area of the India sub-continent, or small business owners in a remote area of China. We will be directly assisting them in linking them into a global economy, and we will be giving them computing power and access to essential applications and services in finance, payments, healthcare, transport, entertainment…and so on.
Through our apps community and future Symbian releases we’ll be bridging the gap between those 1.7 billion internet users and those among the 4.6 billion people who are mobile subscribers and who are not yet online. The future of the web, and all of it’s power to have a positive impact on people’s lives, is clearly mobile. This is a near term future, not one that is so far out there, and one that we can map and shape now. We see that what we do in our business and social lives here in the Symbian community will be dramatically more inclusive of the needs of hundreds of millions of people who so far have not had access to the benefits of computing and communications technology.
I’m looking forward to engaging you in a dialog about how that future should shape up, and what our collective role looks like. Thanks for being with us in 2009, and have a very Merry Christmas, and celebrated New Year.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by imcdnzl: Symbian Foundation Looking to 2010 http://bit.ly/69VVay (Lee Williams)…
I’m sorry, I guess Christmas is bringing out the Scrooge in me, but on what planet does Symbian “enjoy better multitasking capability [...] than any mobile platform out there”? The one with the rose-tinted vistas on which Symbian represents the pinnacle of single-handed “focus UI” evolution I suppose. On power management, security, and scale of market you could at least muster a bit of a wine-fueled post-turkey debate…
I don’t like to nitpick at this time of year, but it betrays a certain uninformed complacency on the technical side that isn’t particularly healthy. When Symbian sets its stall out against Android and Google these days, it’s exclusively about how open Symbian is and how nefarious Google’s intentions are (and hell, I don’t want to live in Google’s ad-laced dystopian future either). On the technical/feature side, though, we just get assertion-without-proof of leadership juxaposed with an “Ideas” site which is for the most part just a shopping list of features already present on other platforms. Frustrating. Let’s hear an engineering argument, just for once!
Hi PP – it’s going to be difficult given it is 24th December getting a quick reply on the technical aspects of your comment but here’s a question or two back while I see who I can track down.
The fact that you singled out multi-tasking for criticism does that mean you have no bone to pick with Symbian’s power management capabilities and other positives?
By the way I don’t think your comment is scrooge like or unkind – clearly we need to articulate Symbian’s benefits better. I think Lee points out one reason why that is a work in progress – it’s been a busy year setting up the Foundation.
I don’t believe we have characterised Google as nefarious though we have been trying to understand press coverage better – for example I read yesterday a post where someone asked whether the future of the smart phone lay with Google or Apple “who currently dominate the market”.
That kind of nonsense if difficult to counter but drawing attention to it is different from inferring anything about Google’s motives.
I don’t believe here we’ve referred to the openness issue in six months.
Here’s the second question (so another three) : how would you characterise his market right now? How do you see it shaping up? Have you any response to Chris’s list of predictions from around the web?
[...] Tweets about this great post on TwittLink.com [...]
Not through the official Symbian blog, but Lee’s certainly been making some calculatedly provocative statements about Google in interviews recently in an attempt to grab a few headlines. Perhaps I should take his outpourings with more of a pinch of salt, but it does set a certain tone.
As to the blog itself, I would suggest that if your team spends too much time republishing FUD (“The Phone That Sinks Android”) and attempting to debunk third party analysis that shows Symbian in a bad light (“Android Data – Something up?”, “Why more is not always better”, “Mobile data consumption”) then, even if you’re right, it can have a negative impact on people’s perceptions; if you’re always on the defensive, people will assume you have something to be defensive about. You’re better-served accentuating the positives wherever you can find them while being brutally honest at the same time, of which tone “Symbian vs. Android in Japan” is a good recent example.
I called out multitasking just because it’s so blatantly incorrect today. Versus iPhone? Sure. Versus Android, Maemo, or webOS? Hardly. You could point to Symbian/Nokia’s hugely-expensive investment in three-plane architectures under the hood, but (a) they’ve not shipped yet, and (b) they’ve never been proven to take Symbian beyond the performance and responsiveness achievable through more pragmatic means on top of Linux anyway.
Now of course if you *could* concretely demonstrate Symbian’s superiority over current-generation Linux-based mobile operating systems in this, or indeed in any area where Symbian traditionally held an advantage before the hordes descended to improve mobile Linux (e.g. power management, ROM/RAM footprint), then that would be a blog post that would get people’s attention. Symbian requires only a fraction of the NAND and dynamic RAM budget of Android? Shout it out. A S60 phone running on a 3430 lasts twice as long as a Maemo phone on similar hardware doing similar tasks? Put it up in lights. Conversely, if Symbian can’t demonstrate this stuff, it should probably stop making those bold claims of superiority in this area.
I’ll leave my answer to Question 2 until after the turkey’s gone down…
PP- great response, thanks for going to the trouble. Like I said earlier I think we’ve had a huge amount of effort to bed things in this year – and as well coming to terms with some of the coverage which at times has been irrational and at times unduly dismissive. I’ve written a couple of those posts you refer to and invited and processed posts like Android in Japan.
The context we’ve tried to set here is one where we haven’t shied away from shortcomings and at the same time we’ve had our say about the market – a couple of people have called it FUD but I think read closely it is an attempt to examine that coverage just as we have tried to give voice to a member to examine Android and Symbian in Japan. They are two parts of the same overall picture.
Here’s another part of the jigsaw – we don’t necessarily have all the answers all the time. The blog is really explicit about this.
We want members of the community to come forward with exactly the kinds of comments you are making and to provide guidance. We’re also pointing out that Symbian will continue to be Nokia’s mass market OS and the new price points in 2010 will widen that market considerably – the financial stake in that lies with the community rather than the Foundation so it’s really important we get more and more people vocalising their priorities.
For what it’s worth, my own view of the Foundation’s strengths is Lee hasn’t imposed a “Leadership account” of the Symbian experience or future but has held back while continually inviting the community to express viewpoints. This isn’t just about saying “we wanna hear your views” – it is saying the stakes are really high for you guys so what are your priorities?
We’d be really happy to run posts from you here – you and other members have authority. Meanwhile I am trying to get someone away from the Christmas table but I don’t have their phone numbers so bear with me. I think the points you make are not just valid but phrased in a way that we can take on to create the right data.
I like the ‘thought’ of this post. However … from an end-user’s perspective, having just bought a Nokia E72 (as a business user in the western world) … i feel like a farmer with cows in India now !
Nokia’s business-device strategy is totally unclear at this moment. Will Symbian fit in there ? Also in the future ?
The E72 is Nokia’s most plastic business device ever if you ask me … it’s rubbish .. but now i understand .. it should have cost 150 eur
But THEY didn’t know that.
Will there still be high end Symbian smartphones?
Good points Box – Nokia will have to respond to them of course rather than us. Personally I think Symbian’s business strategy should be about “being there” – in auto, healthcare, etc. People businesses, in these sectors are going to take their own initiatives – as in NG Connect – and the OS choices are going to be based on a whole lot of assumptions about what’s best so the more Symbian can be there telling its story the better.
I think the really high end at Nokia is going to be Maemo, Crim. What do you mean b high end though?
I am not sure where any one who knows how operating systems work, task, and memory manage gets the idea that there is a more capable or advanced system in mobile than Symbian. This is especially true when you look at a trifecta of hardware capability including a low level application processor, a configuration with mulitple RF frequency capabilities, a high end image encoding and decoding capability, and something that needs a day or two’s worth of battery life.
We can build on this core capability faster than others. Improvements to and a focus on usability by manufacturers, and broadening our hardware configuration support base will help us show any of the naysayers that this software platform has long legs. We are poised to obtain these gains through contributions, and a healthy ecosystem of partner companies and individuals.
2010, and 2011 will be very interesting in this way. Higher end, high volume products will not come out on any other platform.
Looking forward…
// Lee
I guess there are many ways to react to what Lee just set out in the comment above, but few are constructive so I’ll leave well alone. I do feel more relaxed about his output having read it.
Hi PP – you have some interesting things to say though so why give up now?
I think an interesting experiment would be to take Maemo 5 and stick it on an N97, or even a 5800. How do you think it would get on? Conversely, how would Symbian look on the N900’s 600Mhz A8 with graphics co-processor and 256 megs of RAM? Nokia often tread a fine line with the hardware configuration for their Symbian phones, just because they can. They can get away with less memory and a slower processor because of how advanced Symbian is. So by saying Symbian has ‘the best multitasking’ Lee means more than just ‘the ability to do it’. Think about it…
It’d be interesting to hear more about that Brendan – I’d say the readers, analysts and users who really know anything about the Operating System’s heart and soul are few and far between outside the Foundation – people would genuinely love to hear more about it. To those of us in that camp the references in the discussion are at best cryptic. I can imagine any number of analysts for example who daren’t ask questions about these things for fear of appearing stupid – and yes they write about us! Can you elaborate on your comment a little?
Back when ARM MMUs were brain damaged, XIP NOR flash memory was the primary storage medium for code, and mobile applications were simple and bounded in their use of resources, Symbian ruled the earth. Little-by-little though, it feels like the game’s been coming to Linux and its classical file system centric, paged virtual memory view of the world.
Cheap (non-XIP) NAND flash changed both the economics and the technical approach required when managing code on devices. Then, on top of that, full strength web page rendering engines ported from the desktop began to make demands on memory use that could barely be met in physical RAM without shutting every other app down. Suddenly Symbian needs to implement code and data paging to keep up, which is half way there today but still a work in progress I believe (at least in terms of system-wide use). Finally, Qt arrives as Symbian’s programmability and user experience saviour, resulting in precisely none of the applications running on the platform actually being written in terms of those native, defensive, parsimonious, designed-for-mobile techniques that were Symbian’s calling card. Bottom up and top down, Symbian is undergoing a bit of an identity crisis right now.
What’s my point? Well for one, that I’d encourage everyone to engage at an engineering level and look beyond the asinine^H^H^H^H^H^H^H executive cheer leading embodied by that “any one who knows how operating systems work” speech. What was once true may not still hold, or may not still hold to enough of a quantifiable degree to overcome other non-technical factors.
FWIW, I actually like and prefer the Symbian kernel to hack on. The point is more that I suspect it just isn’t as material as it once was, not once the fundamental memory architectures converge to something so similar. It’s the web engine… and the other big apps… and that next generation graphics architecture with the compositor and all those window buffers… and OpenGL ES underneath… that’s what’s going to be eating all your dynamic RAM and dictating system performance. At that level, future Symbian and future Maemo aren’t going to look a lot different. How long will a few 10s of MB of NAND budget savings and an incremental delta in available dynamic RAM continue to justify the maintenance of two OS platforms?
Hi Brendan, doesn’t the Samsung i8910 HD running S60 5th Edition boast hardware somewhat comparable to the N900? In that direction at least then, you don’t have to wonder.
And of course earlier (non-phone, but still WiFi-connected, still Linux based) generations of Maemo run perfectly well on the N810, which sports the same amount of dynamic RAM as the N97 and the 5800, and an ARM 11 clocked slightly slower than either. Homebrew ports of Android also run pretty respectably on the N800 and N810, taking their proof-of-concept status into account.
How Maemo performs on an N810 versus S60 on an N97 is a subjective judgment, but there are plenty of YouTube walkthroughs out there to help guide you. For me, Symbian’s implicitly-accepted overwhelming technical advantages as a designed-for-mobile software platform don’t shine through outwardly as strongly as one might hope. For that reason, I think they could bear a little more in the way of detailed explanation.
The first devices using Symbian Foundation open-source code for mobile devices will become available in 2010, Nokia has said.The first handsets bearing the new platform will appear in 2010, around the same time that the platform has been fully open-sourced. This timeline puts the foundation somewhat behind the Open Handset Alliance, which is the industry group that Google set up to develop Android.
PP I’m not the one to respond to the engineering analysis. I think what you’re saying though is an indication of how an open source community can evolve a critical view of the OS and help plot improvements. A couple of times while editing this blog I’ve been surprised by people’s emotions – I mean sometimes how great ideas get wrapped in a negative package. Clearly a LOT of people care about Symbian. If it had been the perfect product would Nokia and partners have open sourced it? Now it is moving into open source passionate and highly knowledgeable, perceptive viewpoints are what it needs. One of the things I’ve been most impressed with in other areas (ie non-mobile) is the way ideas sites can be used to capture some of this. I’m thinking Goldcorps and netflix both of which harnessed the ingenuity of a community to bring about substantial innovation and improvement. The Symbian ideas site could be used that way – it isn’t being and I think that’s because it is new but I;ve said elsewhere I think it needs a layer where it can bring people together for a far deeper analysis of Symbian technology. That would allow us to embrace deep knowledge whereas at present we are more geared towards top of mind features on ideas.
In response to PP, on both points, I’d like to say that I get where you’re coming from. You’re trying to say that Symbian’s formerly huge technical advantages over the competition are not so huge anymore. To this, I’d say one thing – from a users point of view ‘a few 10 of megabytes’ might not seem a lot. From a device manufacturers point of view, this can mean a saving on the bill of materials. Maybe only a few pence, but that by millions of devices and that adds up. You might also be glad to know that ‘writable data paging’ is way closer than you may think it is. It’s set for Symbian^3 which is supposed to be on phones from the middle of next year.
I also think it’s a bit cynical to say that because Qt is being introduced Symbian is suffering ‘an identity crisis’. Qt for Symbian is still implemented in terms of Symbian C++ (albeit at an indirect level via OpenC) and you can be sure that the parsimonious philosophy (you manage to make that word sound derogatory) of Symbian is there still. From what I’ve read on Qt, taking the Signal/Slot mechanism as an example – it’s quite light weight.
Going back to the, as you pointed out, highly subjective argument about how well Maemo would run on N97 hardware, I may have been exaggerating for effect – just like you did when you said that you can’t open a web page without shutting every other application
Also, I haven’t used the i8910 HD, but from what I hear it’s quite powerful, let down by bizarre design decisions by Samsung in customising the firmware. I think that as you suggested, it might be interesting to do some benchmarking between the different platforms, which anyone can do nowadays considering that both platforms are available for anyone to use (or will be soon). How about a test of Symbian^3 and Maemo 6 on the Zoom2 (or even the N900!) someday?
One thing I missed from your original post was the jibe that the ideas site is just a collection of features from other OS’es. I can see where you might get the idea, there’s a number of ideas that take the form ‘I saw this in X and thought it would be good’. There are a large number of original ideas though, and I think that those ‘I saw this in X’ ideas are still valid – we’re hardly going to copy the competition wholesale, so we need to take a look at what is good on those platforms and decide whether we want it too.
“Higher end, high volume products will not come out on any other platform.”
Bold satement. I guess the combination of high end + high volume may make it true.
Another, even bolder statement:
“I’d say the readers, analysts and users who really know anything about the Operating System’s heart and soul are few and far between outside the Foundation.”
I continue to be amazed such language is allowed to be published on an official blog of an essentially commercial blog (free source or not). You really are shooting yourself in the foot by basically bad mouthing the competition and pretty much anybody who is not in the Foundation. It does NOT matter whether your statement is correct/accurate or not.
How do you interpret that as bad mouthing the compeition?
I was referring to your earlier posts, and now you add that very few people outside of the Foundation know anything about mobile OSes. It sounds incredibly arrogant and belittleling, and, frankly, not flattering to Symbian Foundation. So, I would suggest you and others (including Lee) need to start moderating your language a bit more so as not to do harm to your employer and owners.
For the statement you quoted not to be offensive you have to map “Operating System” to “Symbian OS” and “outside the Foundation” to “outside the Symbian Foundation’s member companies”. I wasn’t 100% sure about the second of these mappings myself, but since any other reading would absurdly disregard the majority of ex-Symbian staff still working for Nokia, I chose to go with it.
Well it shows how easy it is to be misundrestood on the page I refered to the Symbian OS not OSes. And I imagine there are many potential developers out there, app developers, maybe some of them in college dorms, who don’t know thte OS and do try to patch together an understanding from what they see here and there. SO best we are more explicit when we can be and dont assume too much knowledge on the part of readers and best we welcome in as broad an audience as we can.
PP – you were going to respond to these:
Here’s the second question (so another three) : how would you characterise this market right now? How do you see it shaping up? Have you any response to Chris’s list of predictions from around the web?
I’m no pundit Haydn, but I did say I would so I’ll try.
Before I do, I should just clarify one thing: despite appearances, I’m not a Symbian OS basher. In fact, I have skin in this game and it’s beneficial to me if the Symbian ecosystem thrives. That’s why it frustrates me when I come across Foundation leadership team tub-thumping that smacks of inaccuracy or complacency. It’s embarrassing, it’s transparent, and it’s not what Symbian needs.
Best case, it’s just calculated spin and propaganda designed for analyst and media consumption; it’s unhelpful and nobody buys it (“Samsung remains an active supporter of Symbian technology”, yeah right), but maybe something’s getting done behind the facade.
Worst case, the tub-thumpers actually believe what they’re saying. In which case they desperately need to take a step back from their Twittering and evangelism, get a grip, and set out a clear, differentiated _technical_ and ecosystem proposition for Symbian OS that makes sense in the context of the hugely competitive market where the medium to long term trend indicators all point towards Linux inside right now (it’s proven “good enough” for mobile in the hands of Nokia, Google, Palm, and many others; it has a thriving and long-established open source ecosystem across many industry sectors that can be leveraged, versus a wannabe open source movement and the remains of the Symbian partner ecosystem; and so on and so on).
Answer me this. I’m an OEM or ODM, perhaps even a startup, making a fundamental decision about which OS I use on the device I’m creating (could be a left-field phone like the original INQ was, or a network-connected ebook reader like the Nook, or a web tablet, or a social networking client appliance like the TwitterPeek, or just about anything really). Where on http://www.symbian.org do I go to get some headline facts and figures about what technical benefits there might be in choosing Symbian OS rather than an embedded Linux based solution like Android?
I’m not naive enough to suggest that decisions are made on this basis alone, but where’s that top level hook to get me to stump up the fee and investigate further? Through failure to set its fundamental engineering stall out, the Foundation seems to have allowed this kind of decision to default to Linux and/or Android almost unchallenged, even where it doesn’t really make sense, and just at a time when there’s a real wealth of opportunities out there.
[...] in the USA? The director of the Symbian Foundation, Lee Williams, seems to think so. In a blog post of his, he speaks of: Symbian’s value in the future mobile market is its incredible flexibility, [...]
Am not bashing symbian here, but if the debate is going to be public then i think it needs to be honest even if it may seem harsh. Also note that these are my personal opinions and i speak purely for myself.
I’ve written windows desktop and mobile using ms c++ and hated it. I’ve written symbian stuff in the past , i took the exam , did reasonably well and yep i do know about the cool stuff and theory. But i’ve shifted my tinkerings to android and to web scripting. Why? Iteration speed. If i’m writing something for epoc/symbian then i sit down and design my url structures, then i generate my classes and test code, then i create my build scripts, then i wait for the compiler, and then the (non arm)emulator and then i find a panic due to a typo and have to wait again. Eventually after a month i might have something that does what i want. My first android app i had working in 2 days from scratch, and by the end of a week of re-factoring and optimizing I was finished and pleased. If i want to knock up a web service i can do it even faster online with my scripting language of choice ( python/js/css ) – I can test and tinker with each generation of a project very quickly, i can drag and drop code and ui elements and if i get stuck, then usually a quick online search will throw up ideas and solutions.
Its always a balance between “making it good enough quickly” and “taking the time to get perfect optimizations”. For me “doing the right thing” at this point in time is iterate, iterate, iterate. And do it quickly.
Best wishes for a great 2010 to all. Regardless of platform, the competition is good for the consumer.
@PP – I think your remarks are spot on.
Hi PP,
You know what would be amazingly useful? Links to where Android and Maemo provide the same information you requested. Otherwise ODM’s are just making the same ‘mistake’ that you’re saying that Symbian is making by ‘assuming’ characteristics of the platform. Somehow I don’t think that these decisions are made off of public websites (although it would be really enlightening for people like you and me).
My impression through my work with quite a few companies is that key decisions are made in ways that can be justified in an open court like a shareholder meeting or an analyst meeting. And Android has a lot of natural open court kudos – Linux transformed its market and got adoption from the ultimate corporate adviser IBM (who spent $2 billion a year on Linux development). It has a long history of winning over doubters. It has those global communities. And it looks like mobile device manufacturers can get some service revenue by signing up. That last one is a really fascinating development.
Against that there are open court environments where you can point to the market leader and that’s good enough.
We’ve been aiming to engage people on the blog whose “skin is in this” so I’m delighted you’re going to come back with more PP. Your paragraph beginning “Answer me this….” PP – I would look to you to provide an answer from your standpoint. Why are you in it and where are the benefits that you want to see accentuated?
DS thanks for contributing to the debate. Your skin is in it too. Where do you see the strengths of Symbian in an open source environment and what would be your priorities for action?
Brendan, Symbian just isn’t in the same position as the other two operating systems you mention:
1. In terms of device manufacturer adoption, Symbian is in free-fall right now. Many tried, then failed to execute to their own satisfaction, then bailed. Android is the new default choice, and not just for smartphones. Burden of proof: with Symbian.
2. In terms of hardware adaptation investment, Symbian is an island in a sea of Linux solutions. Building skills and reusable assets in Linux is a more portable investment. Burden of proof: with Symbian.
3. In terms of market proposition, Maemo and Android target the high end where what you see on the screen is the bottom line. Symbian’s positioning (courtesy of Nokia) is now subtler than that, it’s “we can compete with that for less”, which cannot be demonstrated with feature lists and screen shots. Burden of proof: Symbian.
4. In terms of availability and readiness for experimentation, Symbian today is neither fully open source, nor buildable on open source host platforms with open source tools, nor completely patched up to work around third party IP; you need to sign legal agreements, pay (a token amount of) money, and scrabble around for all the bits you need to build and run on your hardware. It’s just so much easier to open the box and get working system builds with Android. Burden of proof: Symbian.
And on and on.
Basically, if Symbian wants to expand its base then it needs to work harder than the others and fight for it. It needs to understand that it’s the challenger now, not the incumbent, when it comes to industry adoption (not volume for now, thanks to Nokia, just adoption).
1.) & 2.) So you’re basically saying that Android and Maemo are proven platforms and don’t have to do anything to show that they’re worth using on devices? The fact that ODM’s tried and failed with Symbian does say something, but about what? Motorola have been floundering for years – finally casting aside Symbian and placing their faith first in LiMo, then Android. The Droid may ressurect them, which is obviously everything to do with the wonder that is Android and nothing to do with a $100 million marketing push… of course.
3.) This is true, quite true. If you want to market a platform based on non-functional aspects, then that’s not much good if you can’t clearly demonstrate superiority in these areas is it? Let’s see what 2010 brings in terms of Symbian’s new UI. Maybe there will be something that can be demonstrated with a screenshot there.
4.) Well yes, but please don’t be one of these people who says that the efforts being made to make these things happen aren’t good enough. This may be closer than you think. You’re also slightly *wrong* about the second point. SBSv2 is mostly Python based and there are instructions on our dev wiki on how to build it for Linux. You can then use that to build Symbian bits.
to be fair i havnt written any symbian code in over a year. So its possible some of the following have already happened. But without thinking to hard ( after all i’m not getting paid for this consultation + its still christmas feasting )
a) allow developers to monetize their apps – while each device manufacturer may want to have their own market place the interface to those markets as seen by each and every device should be the same. Allow developers to have subscription micro payments, allow them to have shared libraries that automatically download if needed without neediting to be embedded in a giant size file. Allow for multiple versions of the same lib to be loaded in memory for different proceses ( yes i know thats non trivial ) – but it would mean app writer ‘A’ could say that his app would run against versionsof some third party lib >3.0 8.0 . Allow automated upgrades that check the market and optionally install unprompted. Allow library developers to charge for their libraries to be used.
b) Allow users to get the apps they want – thats mostly the same as ‘a’ but again the key is that regardless of the actual market, the apis on the device used to connect to and interact with a particular library should be consistent – in effect treat markets like rpm repositories
c) release a WARM variant – ie windows ARM emulator – wins made sence back in the days of winc, but not any more.
d) create a WARM hosted gui designer that allowed third party Cone derived controls to be loaded and manipulated.
e) release a generic ui build for a N810 – if you want to make statements about the performanct of symbian of against meamo or android then it should be possible to compre on the same hardware
f) partner with somebody and create the fastest mobile web browser and compliant java script on any platform. be the best and demonstrate you are the best , times have moved beyond people believing unconditionally what they read in blogs.
h) host real developer contacts for both individuals and multi nationals – make it worth it for people to spend the time to try and be inovative.
g) write a hyperviser and call it epoc64.
@DS – thanks. What’s the difference between contribution and consultation? Don’t feel you need to answer that! It’s great to get you contributing your thoughts.
“1.) & 2.) So you’re basically saying that Android and Maemo are proven platforms and don’t have to do anything to show that they’re worth using on devices?”
When, where and how did he say that?
Well, by saying that Symbian needs to prove itself AND that Android/Maemo aren’t in this position what other conclusion do you reach?
Brendan,
Android: You may feel it’s not fair, you may feel it owes much to the hype, the brand, and to Google’s commercial antics behind the scenes. But like it or not, whether you feel they earned it or not, they’re winning the open mobile OS adoption race across the board right now. You may feel they have more to prove to justify that love, but right now the industry is disagreeing with you. In this context, you really think Google needs to be working even harder to promote the benefits of their platform? And by the way, see point #3.
As to Motorola, the actual market success of Droid is almost irrelevant; the impressive part is that this previously shambling company managed to ship two well-received and quite different handsets in the CLIQ and Droid in quick succession, *and* on two different network standards, all with Android. Remind me where Symbian stands on CDMA and EVDO support these days?
Maemo: Are Nokia even actively courting Maemo adoption by other companies right now? It’d be a bonus for sure but, crucially, unlike with their Symbian effort, they’re already leveraging open source in a big way via all the Linux-based componentry they’re reusing. Maemo doesn’t need to sell itself so hard because, as part of the Linux family, it’s nowhere near as isolated.
FWIW, as an engineer I actually quite like the feel of the Maemo community. The Qt community too. They’re not as slick perhaps, but they feel more like proper grassroots developer communities, built by hackers, that get engineering things done. By contrast, the Symbian Foundation feels more like a community designed by product managers and evangelists in the hope of attracting engineers, which gives it a very different vibe.
This discussion is getting fairly circular – so I think I’ll just wrap up by saying that, FWIW, I’m an engineer too so I hope to see you around our developer website sometime soon, or maybe I already have?
I think I agree with you Brendan. It’s not clear you guys bought much of it, but just for the record these are the three take-aways I’ve tried to convey:
1. From the kernel through to the middleware layers in particular, Symbian OS has become a technologically-isolated underdog swimming against a fast-rising tide of Linux-based mobile offerings that go beyond smartphones and reinforce each other’s ecosystems. The Foundation needs to acknowledge this and fight tooth-and-nail, more so than it has done to date, to make sure that the fundamental (often non-functional) advantages of Symbian OS versus Linux are well-publicised, quantified, and proven.
2. A personal note of caution with respect to point #1 is that I feel that Symbian OS fitted out with all its latest kernel-to-middleware developments, and topped off with Qt, may no longer hold the same degree of advantage over Linux as it once did. If the Qt/Symbian versus Qt/Maemo advantage becomes too close to call on non-functional aspects, it’s hard to see a rational future for Symbian OS in Nokia’s eyes. Right or wrong, if I were leading the Foundation, I’d want to find this out: by asking Nokia what their numbers say; by asking the Japanese licensees for their feedback; and/or by doing my own experiments.
3. Symbian spokespeople, particularly executive spokespeople, should be less glib, less cavalier with the truth, less obsessed with debunking Apple and Android’s success, and become much more focused on Symbian reality and Symbian fact. Less spin, more engineering please.
Say I’m wrong about #2, Symbian’s in great shape on battery/BOM today versus Maemo and Android, and Nokia’s strategy to use Symbian as the smartphone platform for the masses is really borne out by the numbers. Wouldn’t this would be great ammunition for the Foundation to go to town on while it’s forcibly treading water on the “jam tomorrow” of Qt, Orbit, and all that other stuff bottled-up in the pipeline? Happy New Year!
Great discussion – thank you both.
Regarding some of the comments, and inferences that myself or others in the foundation are intent on bashing the competition, or arrogant, etc. let me reassure you that this is not the intent. We have made a mistake if we have crossed that line.
We remain humbled, and open to criticism and opinions about anything and everything we do, especially the technology and design merits, or lack thereof, in the platform. In the spirit of the concept that the truth can set you free…I would hope that open and revealing comments about other platform efforts are welcome.
Please do not mistake conviction, and passion for the capabilities of this mature technology, and a willingness to share some knowledge about the mobile industry and it’s offerings as ‘arrogance’.
// Lee
Hi PP – am trying to make contact with you via email or am happy to discuss here. We’re not shying away from criticism – I’d be happy to talk with you about how we might incorporate some of your ideas. DO you have my email address?
Hi PP,
Going all the way back to a snippet from your original comment:
“we just get assertion-without-proof of leadership juxaposed with an “Ideas” site which is for the most part just a shopping list of features already present on other platforms”
I think you’re right in that it is a challenge to foster genuine innovation within the Symbian community, rather than gap-spotting/catch-up features.
I’ve three remarks related to this.
- inevitably, the initial set of ideas will reflect problems encountered and features available elsewhere. There will be a lot of “shopping list” mixed in with the genuine innovation. I see this as indicative of the maturity of Symbian Ideas: it’s new, and it is inevitable that an initial tranche of the ‘obvious’ missing features must be addressed before users focus on more innovative and unusual ideas.
- at present, Symbian Ideas presents users with free-for-all in terms of posting ideas, and this can result in gap-spotting rather than innovation. In the course of 2010 I’m looking to introduce means for broad problems to be outlined and solutions suggested, with the intended result of encouraging engineers (amongst others) to propose innovative solutions. I believe focus is necessary to encourage innovation.
- the intention is that Symbian Ideas is, in itself, an innovative venture. Whether generating innovative or gap-filling ideas, Symbian Ideas will become a transparent product roadmap with visitors able to follow product features through the entirety of their development (from idea, to development, to testing, to release). Rather than Symbian Ideas being one of several funnels into an internal product roadmap (as most organisations tend to use such idea websites), the aim is that Symbian Ideas becomes the means for the community to influence, decide and design its product. Those using and creating the platform can be involved at every stage. But, there’s going to be a lot of work before this aim is realised…
That ended up being somewhat lengthier a comment than intended. For those that you stayed with it to the end, I’m very much interested in your thoughts.
Freddie
Brendan,
You are absolutely brilliant. Its rare to see such a GOOD response to a babbler ( PP ) in the blogsphere. You made my day.
Happy New Year.
ps
PP, you probably wont let facts get in the way of a good argument. Consider this, the Symbian 5th edition based Nokia 5800 has been out for a year but it has outsold all of the Android devices put together. Recent report also suggests that Europeans are not buying Android. This Open mobile OS race is not a sprint, its a marathon.
@Tochi: but it is also rare to see such a well thought-out babbler as PP in a blog thread – to me this was one of the most insightful discussions on Symbian in the last couple of months.
And I say this as someone who has been doing Symbian development for the last 7 years or so, and who still has “skin in the game”.
My personal take on this (and I know I wrote this in a previous comment already) is that the discussion about the superiority of Symbian on lower-end hardware reminds me a bit of the GEOS discussions around the Nokia 9000/9110, before it was replaced by EPOC:
GEOS was indeed able to do amazing things on low-end hardware (x86 CPUs in Real Mode with 1MB of RAM or so), and came to the table with a number of unique ideas and very solid engineering.
At the time I was part of several product teams that werre trying to build inexpensive hardware around those strengths – all of which ultimately failed because the ability to run on yesterday’s hardware mattered less and less: the small BOM savings from using an embedded CPU were more than offset by the problems with running tasks that were cutting-edge at the time, such as JavaScript, stylesheet-based web layouts and MP3 decoding.
PP’s comments about web browsing, composition engine and OpenGL ultimately driving the BOM, and any benefits from mature, well-engineered code underneath just stopping to matter simply have a ring of truth to me from that experience alone.
Being able to perform amazing feats on behind-the-curve hardware is always a skill that is dating very quickly – and I increasingly see Symbian at a point where it might miss that moment of opportunity when its “doing more with less” could outshine the appeal of “doing even more with more”.
ciao marcus
[...] just caught a very interesting and revealing post over on the Symbian Foundation’s Blog … The key quote for me was the following: Nokia’s endorsement of Symbian specifically marks [...]
Marcus,
Point taken.
Doing more with more ? Not if battery life has anything to do with it!. I know a lot of iPhone users who carry along a s40 Nokia or similar phone for backup. Anyone serious about really doing more for a decent amount of time will be better off with a Nokia e71 anyday. I recently bought a Nokia N900 but I wont leave home without my trusty Nokia 5800XM. Yes the UI is not slick (I refuse to be seduced by UI gimmicks) but it lets me do more (yes, anything the Unix based ones can do – & with better sound quality than all of them) for much longer. The beauty of the Symbian OS is that it scales from the low end to the high end – Nokia 5530 to Samsung i8910 or Sony Ericsson Satio.
I have been using the Nokia N900 for a while and while its a really good device, I find that its fabled multitasking is no better than that of Symbian e.g. Music player stutters sometimes when running other apps. I have never experienced this problem on my 5800XM symbian device; impressive given the resource constraint is has to deal with ARM-11, 128MB. The much hyped iPhone does away with full app Multitasking completely (oh yeah LESS is probably more) so I wont even go there.
When it comes to mobility features (battery life, reliability, seamless multitasking, phone ability ) I am yet to be impressed by any Linux / Unix based smartphone – Not Android or iPhone (not much of a phone in my view).
Lee is absolutely right and he is clearly vindicated by the horde of users from Tokyo to Timbuktu who have relied on Symbian for ages and despite the loquaciousness of the competition (and its blog based hirelings), continues to do so.
Like soul brother Chuck D once told us, Dont believe the HYPE.
http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/12/24/china.iphone.carrier.still.prefers.others/
I’ve come to the conclusion I am old fashioned – the one facet of this great debate that’s disappointed me is the use of personal attacks, however mild. I like to see the passion go into the weight of argument and I think we are seeing that from all sides. PP, Tochi, Marcus – the offer to work with me on a policy document relevant to these themes is open if any of you wish to take it up.
[...] we wspomnianym artykule (można go przeczytać tutaj) brakuje solidnej dawki konkretów. Ze stosu zapowiedzi marketingowych można jednak wyłowić [...]
From the receiving end, I recall with irrational affection and great amusement the msmobiles.com guy who used to stalk Symbian back in the day. Sadly, I’m just not in his league.
If I had to water this stuff down with business diplomacy, as I would feel obliged to do in a professional capacity, then it’d never get said. But every now and again something *really* needs saying, and where that thing intersects with the style or content of a public statement someone’s made, it’s hard to de-personalise it completely. But credit where it’s due in the positive handling of the rough with the smooth in this discussion, notably Comment #42.
Dismissing me as a babbler is equally valid under the circumstances, though, so I bear no grudges on that score! Although if you can’t find any degree of truth (with associated risks and opportunities for Symbian) in what I’m saying then I’m clearly failing to get my point across.
Hi PP – don’t quite know what to make of that. I’d like to involve you in the process. That’s not asking you to water anything down. What you’ve said has tremendous value and Symbian is not turning its head away from any of it. I am working in a paper and would gladly involve you – at the very least your views would shape it.
Hi Haydn, I wasn’t referring to your offer, just to the nature of public commentary generally; the perceived constraints don’t really stem from the Foundation side of the equation in any case. If there is a kernel of an idea in anything I’ve written that you feel you can utilise or build around in some way then feel free, but getting any deeper probably isn’t realistic.
Deeper isn’t the issue – it’s more a question of mindset. The sharp critical mind is a welcome part of our dialogue – if what you are saying is you are too busy then ok I won’t press but there is a point to what I am trying to do here. I’ve found over the years when I’ve been in the position of critic that it’s been easy to make telling points bt difficult to make the transition to a more creative role. Difficult but ultimately better – I’d like to work with you as a valued member of our community on outlining a position paper and being creative about how that should be positioned and what it needs to contain. But I wont press it any further.