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Symbian Blog: Dialogue Category

Covering all the issues that we want to discuss or argue over.

Initiating collaborative testing in Symbian

Aug 18th by Fred

It is as I start my second month of work at Symbian that I finally get round to writing and publishing a blog posting about my new position. Why so long? Simply because the task at hand is proportional to its importance! I have indeed joined Symbian to take over as Technology Manager – Collaborative Test, and I’m relishing the new challenge.

My new role will mostly consist of making sure that the community at large can and will contribute to testing and validating the Symbian platform. In this post I will not describe in great detail my activities (you will be able to follow them as they happen when I post on Twitter or via future posts) but here is a brief summary…

It all started with a simple question: “If I download a kit, PDK or other, build it, and run it on a platform (Syborg or Zoom II), what use cases will actually work?”

Since I couldn’t find a simple enough answer to that question, my first action will be to provide a system test plan and make some test execution results available to the community, which will be used as one of the criteria for reaching the Symbian^3 stable milestone. I have started to gather ideas and put things in motion, and you can follow my progress through the Test Working Group, of which I have also taken the lead. Read more »

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End-to-end open source speeds up telecommunications deployment in the developing world

Aug 13th by daviddurant

Thirty years ago if you wanted a phone connection in Africa or India you had to pay a large amount of money and join a long waiting list for a landline. The mobile revolution went a long way to helping with that. Mobile base stations can be introduced much quicker and relatively low cost mobile devices allowed many more people to join the communications revolution.

However, up till now it still took a lot of money to create a company offering mobile infrastructure. There were two reasons for this – hardware and software. GSM base station hardware is sold by a small number of companies and is extremely expensive. Likewise GSM software, which is very complex, was offered at a price that removed most entrepreneurs from that market.

However, things are in the process of changing. Firstly the introduction of software radio technology, for example GNU Radio, means that much simpler hardware can be purchased that will handle mobile calls. The last part to fall into place is the introduction of an open source GSM stack. The OpenBTS project are working on turning this into reality. Currently their test setup has a range of 10 miles and backhauls through a standard broadband connection. As long as there is a working internet connection local people can very quickly get connected using standard cheap mobile handsets. Read more »

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A chance to play with the Nokia N8

Aug 9th by shaunph

My name is Shaun Phillips and I’m the Service Delivery Manager in the IT department at Symbian – we support the users and infrastructure of our websites. Previously, I was at Symbian Software Ltd for the entire 10 year life of the company, before the Symbian Foundation was born. Although in the IT department we don’t get involved so much in the platform development and support side of things, we are all still very enthusiatic about seeing the latest platform release in new devices. Some of us are even having a go at writing some apps in Qt, some for fun and others to be used to compliment our IT services.

So, when my colleague Craig sent round an email about the Mobile Monday N8 launch event, where they promised to let us play with shiny new Nokia N8 handsets – albeit only prototypes – the decision on where some of us were was going to spend last Monday morning was made easy, and getting the opportunity to say a few words about it in this blog post is great.

By the time it was underway it was a full house, and there were about 120+ people there, with some standing (although I think they may have been mostly the Nokia employees letting the rest of us have a seat). They started off with a couple of presentations on how the development of applications has been simplified, Forum Nokia‘s been updated, 50+ major brand names are building apps for the Ovi store and a preview of the new Nokia TV advert which is coming soon.

At the break there was a dash for the coffee and the Nokia staff with the prototype N8s (yay, this is what we’d come for!), and everyone was desperate to have a look and a play before the break ended. Read more »

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Composing new features with symfony

Jul 12th by mikehsymbian

For some time now, we’ve been using a custom framework for the trusty Symbian developer community website. And it’s been working, albeit with the standard problems that come along when you choose to write an in-house framework. The web developers reading this will probably be quite familiar with, amongst other things, the “only the guru of the framework knows how X works” syndrome.

And while the guru of the framework could probably spend a little more time training up newbies, it might put dampeners on a few goals we have for the developer site:

  1. To allow new developers to be productive as soon as possible when they join Symbian. We want to get new features on the website as soon as possible for you guys to use!
  2. To allow people outside Symbian to contribute modules as easily as possible. This is really exciting because as well as being open with the development of the Symbian code, we can start to allow website developers to contribute to the website itself! More on this will appear in the coming months. The first contribution, which will allow people to track multimedia testing, is underway already.
  3. To contribute code back to the open source community wherever possible. With Symbian’s committment to open source, we want to enrich the community wherever possible.

So we started to look around at pre-rolled open source frameworks that fit our needs. Read more »

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Symbian World in July – desktop wallpaper calendar

Jul 7th by magdav

You can have Symbian World on your desktop all year round. July wallpaper is out and available for download from our goodies section, Symbian Flickr site and now also from the Smashing Magazine collection!

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Symbian supports the Open Cloud Manifesto

Jul 1st by imcdnzl

With the popularity of cloud computing quickly rising there is a real need to ensure that the cloud is open and not a proprietary lock-in. The Open Cloud Manifesto has been launched to try and ensure that this is the case and Symbian has become an official supporter.

Symbian is an organisation that is passionate about being open – the planning for our releases, the decision making processes (including the councils) and all our code are out in the open. As such we totally support the Open Cloud Manifesto which is working to ensure that different cloud offerings can work together and that there are open standards.

Inside Symbian we use the cloud thanks to a wide range of providers – over twenty in fact – and we don’t even run our own file or email servers! Symbian Ideas, Symbian Horizon and this blog run on cloud infrastructure, and we have plans to shift nearly all our sites onto the cloud in the next few months.

If you want to learn more about the Open Cloud Manifesto, go over and have a look at their website at www.opencloudmanifesto.org, and we encourage you to support it too.

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Reward and Recognition at Symbian

May 27th by laurachuck

Here at Symbian we believe strongly in motivating and ensuring the fulfilment of our employees.

Motivation and fulfillment can be found in many different ways for different people and here at the foundation we have a very diverse range of global employees from very different cultures and backgrounds. This means different employees are motivated by different things, some could be tangible and some are intangible. It’s probably the same in your organisation.

Symbian E CardToday, Symbian is launching its Yellow Duck Awards for all Symbian employees, which we are running with our global external partner Corporate Rewards. There are a wide variety of prizes for anybody who is successfully nominatinated for either an individual Duckling Award, a Yellow Duck Award or a Yellow Duck Team Award. Read more »

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What I Gained by Working for Symbian…

May 14th by Joe Neale

It might seem like an odd request for a company to ask one of their employees to write a blog post about what they had learned while working there, especially during their resignation discussion, but for me it sums up what working at Symbian is like. If you have a moment to spare, let me elaborate…

I joined Symbian just over a year ago from a social media, design and marketing background which included helping MySpace launch in Europe, a period at Comic Relief and running my own digital consultancy. Considering my previous work experience, Symbian seemed like an odd fit, yet they choose to give me a chance as their Head of Online Presence based on my optimism, drive and yearning for knowledge of the mobile space.

On my first day in the office I remember being instinctively surprised by the passion, kindness and intellect demonstrated by those around me. As I am not particularly technically skilled but have all the hallmarks of a geek, I was keen to embrace a deeper, more technical understanding of the platform. It concerned me at first that the Technology Managers and Engineers might view me as little more than ‘the prat from marketing’, so I was pleased when I found absolutely no hesitation in people willing to share their insights, thoughts and hopes for their particular areas of expertise. Read more »

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Introducing the New Nokia N8, Powered by Symbian^3

Apr 27th by andrewkl

We are delighted to publish the following guest post by Jo Harlow, Head of Smartphones, Nokia.

Today, Nokia is introducing the world to our latest smartphone device, the Nokia N8. This advanced device has some pretty amazing features that enable users to connect, create and be entertained – but one of its more remarkable characteristics is that it is the debut device on the new Symbian^3 platform.

We found that the Symbian^3 platform is the perfect fit to power the many demands on the device – and when paired with Nokia’s fresh, new UI, Nokia N8 users will discover that the device fits their mobile lifestyle like none other, supporting on-the-go activities ranging from social networking to visual multitasking.

And there’s much more going on above the platform – the Nokia N8 brings leading imaging capabilities with a 12MP Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash, HD viewing and sharing with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound and a Web TV application delivering TV programs, news and entertainment. It also comes loaded with our Ovi Maps walk and drive navigation. You can find all of the features and specs here.

The Nokia N8 marks a renewed device and UI experience on Symbian and we simply can’t wait for you to check it out.

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Symbian Values

Mar 10th by stevewarner

Collaborative —— Open —— Passionate —— Inspired

Hi, I’d like to tell you a little bit about what’s been happening here at Symbian with the creation and launch of our values, and how we’re living them. We’ve got to the point of creating and launching the imagery around our values, and we’ve made a video for you to see how we got to where we are now. And just so you know, there’ll be more to come on this.

But the main thing I want to say is, let’s live it!!! Cheesy, I know.

Really though, if they make sense and they came from us, what’s stopping us live them? Or is the only thing actually stopping us ourselves?

Read more »

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