Continuing our update on the Symbian Council meetings in Tokyo, January 14th, Ian Hutton on the Feature and Roadmap Council:

The Feature and Roadmap Council (“FRC” for short) had a very successful set of meetings in Tokyo.

We regularly talk to contributors about their plans, and in Tokyo were lucky enough to have a local company briefing us in person – Naoki Kanetani and Masao Sekine of Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho Ltd (“K3″ for short) presented their proposal for a revamp of the printing subsystem. This kicked off some interesting discussion which is continuing in the forums.

More generally the FRC tries regularly to  review the strategy across all parts of the platform, giving feedback and guidance to the Technology Managers who work with the community day-to-day to drive the platform forwards.

Another highlight of Tokyo for me were the topics that came up in these technology discussions: for example the need to find innovative ways to keep battery life long whilst allowing the user to make best use of their always-on data connection, plans to update the platform for LTE (“4G”) and other ultra high speed networks and driving scalability to ensure that the Symbian platform can continue to address the needs of both the most powerful smartphones and of lower cost mass market devices. Any of those could make a great blog post in themselves.

In the following video, shot at the Japan Forum, Ian introduced the FRC to the audience

We would like to thank NTT DOCOMO and Fujitsu who hosted council meetings at the prestigous Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills.