Symbian Blog: Articles by David Wood

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Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity

Oct 6th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

The inherent complexity of present-day smartphones risks all kinds of bad outcomes:

  • Smartphone device creation projects may become time-consuming and delay-prone, and the smartphones themselves may compromise on quality in order to try to hit a fast-receding market window;
  • Smartphone application development may become difficult, as developers need to juggle different programming interfaces and optimisation methods;
  • Smartphone users may fail to find the functionality they believe is contained (somewhere!) within their handset, and having found that functionality, they may struggle to learn how to use it.

In short, smartphone system complexity risks impacting manufacturability, developability, and usability.  The number one issue for the mobile industry, arguably, is to constantly find better ways to tame this complexity.  Hence the title of this post: simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

But I’m not calling for the rich functionality of modern handsets to be eliminated.  Instead, I’m calling for improved packaging and selection of that rich functionality.  The concept of “simplicity” itself turns out to be far from simple. Read more »

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The next big thing?

Oct 3rd by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

One market where Symbian software has been put to striking use in recent years is the “Raku Raku” market in Japan. Both Fujitsu and Mitsubishi brought a range of devices onto the NTT DOCOMO network that were designed specifically to be “easy for the senior citizen to use”. These phones tend to have larger keys, clearer screen instructions, and less functionality. They can be seen as an example of the “less is more” principle: for some markets, you create a better product by removing features, rather than by adding more. The resulting simplicity of operation can have its own attraction.  Initially launched in September 2004, these devices have been a runaway success.

As Tokyo-based Ray Tsuchiyama of Nuance explained recently on the MoMo London mailing list:

For some years in Japan there have been cell phone models specifically targeted for seniors: called the “Raku-Raku” phone (meaning “It’s Easy, Easy” as opposed to “A Million Apps and Buttons that you will become frustrated over endlessly”).  This niche market seems to be adopting the phone — the phone models still continue to be marketed. Read more »

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Enabling communities

Sep 18th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

Thanks go to guest blogger David Durant from Nokia, for stimulating an important discussion on how best to build and engage the Symbian developer community.  I’d like to ask a related question.

At a broad level, there are four different (although overlapping and interconnected) communities around Symbian:

  • The community of platform contributors – people who provide enhancements and extensions to the Symbian platform itself;
  • The community of device creators – people who assist in the creation of Symbian-powered devices;
  • The community of application creators – people who develop applications and services for these devices;
  • The community of consumers – people who are interested to buy and use Symbian-powered devices and applications. Read more »

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Affordable smartphones

Sep 14th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

One recent comment to this blog suggested that:

…phone purchasing decision comes down to 3 Bs: Brand, Budget, Battery

It’s a suggestion with a lot of sense.  Take the topic of “budget”.  Other things being equal, a smartphone with a lower price point will sell better than one with a higher price point.  How does Symbian score on this criteria? Pretty good!

One data point is a good place to start the discussion: the price point of just 149 EUR for the Nokia 5230 (which runs Symbian^1).  Note that this proposed price is before any taxes and subsidies or mail-in rebates.  Let’s call this the “underlying cost” of the phone.  I’m not aware of any commercially significant device with comparable functionality that has such a low underlying cost. Read more »

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China’s booming mobile market

Sep 9th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

Here’s my story of the context of this morning’s announcement, “China Mobile and Symbian Foundation Collaborate to Improve Mobile Ecosystem and Stimulate Development for TD-SCDMA in China“.

In July 2006, I spent 14 days on a family holiday travelling around China.  Everywhere we went, we saw evidence of vast scale.  There was also plenty of evidence of rapid transition.  Our tourguide in the city of Wuhan brought this home to me with the following pithy remark:

Six years ago, mobile phones were pretty rare in these parts.  Nowadays even the cleaning ladies have mobile phones!

These same impressions – scale, and rapid transition – strike me every time I return to China.  The region already hosts three of the world’s top ten phone manufacturers: ZTE, Huawei, and HTC.  These companies abound with ambition to make even larger impacts on the worldwide market.  The network operator China Mobile (“CMCC”) comfortably heads Wikipedia’s list of the world’s largest network operators, with half a billion subscribers. Read more »

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Smart mobile services for the next four billion

Sep 5th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

A profound theme underlay many of the developments announced this week at Nokia World.  I summarise it as follows: smart mobile services for the next four billion consumers.  It’s not just the world’s well-heeled digital elite that will enjoy the rich facilities provided by modern mobile devices.  There’s huge latent demand for these services from people in the economic underclasses worldwide: a demand that should, and can, be met by increasingly low-priced handsets.

“Nokia Money” exemplifies this theme.  As Martin Perez explains in Information Week,

Nokia introduced a mobile payment service Wednesday that aims to make using your phone for financial services as easy as making a call or sending a sending a text message.

…it is likely emerging markets will be the targeted first because they are “underbanked” or “unbanked.”  The potential market for mobile payment services is huge, as there are an estimated 4 billion mobile phone users, but only about 1.6 billion bank accounts. Read more »

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Anticipating the femto transformation

Aug 28th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

Smart mobile devices monitor their environment and adjust aspects of both their appearance and their behaviour depending on what they sense. For example, depending on the level of ambient light, a device might adjust the brightness of its screen display and keypad display.

Before too long, mobile phones will be sensing the presence of “femtocells” in their neighbourhood. A femtocell is like a miniature wireless network mast, for use in a home or office. It plugs into the local broadband (e.g. cable network or DSL) and provides strong shortrange wireless coverage.

Ordinary mobile phones, without any modification, can detect and use the femtocell signal.  This is welcome news if normal wireless reception in your house is patchy or intermittent.  You now get a great signal all the time, courtesy of your home broadband connection. You can use this great signal for either voice calls or data.

In a way, connecting to a femtocell is like your phone switching from cellular to WiFi coverage.  Both WiFi and femtocells can provide lower-cost strong wireless coverage, suitable for mobile browsing and more.  But the femtocell avoids the need to have WiFi hardware in your phone.  That can bring down the cost and size of the phone.  It also avoids the need for complex software and user interface to oversee the switch between two different kinds of wireless network.  That’s because the femtocell generates the same kind of signal to which the phone is already well accustomed.

Recent coverage in IT Business Edge states:

The remaining months of 2009 and 2010 will see the carefully planned and extraordinarily important rollout of femtocells go into high gear.

But that’s just the start of what the anticipated “femto transformation” could achieve.  There’s great potential in applications that can detect when a mobile device has reached your home femtocell. Some experimental initial applications are covered in Michelle Donegan’s review in Unstrung, Femtocells Kick Apps:

In partnership with Mobica, Ubiquisys demo’d an app that automatically downloads a user’s latest podcast to his mobile phone as soon as he gets home. The femtocell’s detection of when a user arrives home triggers the download to start automatically…

ip.access showed off its Facebook virtual fridge notes app, which essentially uses the presence information available on the femto to deliver messages. Here’s how it works: Say you have pet fish, and while you’re out of town, you want to remind your roommate to feed them when he gets home. You can compose the reminder message on Facebook, which will be delivered to your roommate’s phone as soon as he is within range of the femtocell at home. The femto recognizes that the roommate has arrived home and sends the message: “Feed the fish”…

Here’s a video of the Facebook virtual fridge notes app.

What’s your view on this kind of femto-aware application?  Could you do better, taking full advantage of the rich capabilities of a Symbian-powered handset?  As part of Symbian’s passion to explore and debate the future of mobile, we’d love to hear your suggestions.

// David Wood, Catalyst & Futurist, Symbian Foundation Leadership Team

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Building the online Symbian Research Community

Aug 21st by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

The Symbian Foundation’s open collaboration approach frees us to engage with universities quite differently from when Symbian was a commercial company. As already discussed, we are able not only to share our technology with university researchers, but also to positively support the principle of universities contributing to the code base and freely sharing ideas for technological innovation. For me, this openness is a real relief – I have always found it irksome to have to keep good ideas secret and to limit who is involved in discussing them.

The Symbian Foundation sees the university research community as an important part of this open programme. Universities have always been instrumental in establishing the platforms and technology standards of the future. We look for innovation that comes from the research community, and we see universities as essential in our own goal of becoming the standard open-source mobile software platform of the 21st century.

We are now launching a web-based focal point to build the community of Symbian researchers and others across the academic world. We invite researchers interested in the Symbian platform to visit research.symbian.org and to become part of the community on this site. For more information, drop a line to Lawrence Simpson.
Professor

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Symbian game-changers

Aug 10th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

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?

Read more »

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Reasons to choose

Aug 3rd by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

In this posting, I’d like to review some approaches for choosing the answer to the following question:

  • Which mobile software platform will have the leading position worldwide in 2012?

In more detail, the question asks: Which mobile software platform will power the devices and applications that will generate, around 2012:

  • The most profits
  • The most network traffic
  • The most innovation
  • The biggest buzz
  • The largest popular acclaim…?

Read more »

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