I’m Naoki Kanetani from Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho. I have been involved in Symbian for nearly 15 years including EPOC32 period.
I believe the great ambition, or motivation, of people associated with Symbian to develop a world-class OS for portable information terminals, especially mobile phones, was achieved along with software manufacturers, handset manufacturers, hardware manufactures and carriers, and now Symbian OS is moving step by step toward a new ambition.
I look forward very much to seeing the progress of new Symbian Platform releases and Symbian Community under Symbian Foundation management.
Japanese mobile operators have been releasing their mobile phones in line with their own direction.
NTT DOCOMO has mounted an IC card function in their mobile phones and started supporting people’s daily life by allowing subscribers to use social infrastructure services with the IC card function.
Softbank Mobile is apparently heading to support family life by adding WiFi function to all the lineups, and releasing WiFi enabled digital photo frames. I’m not sure which direction au is looking at.
In Japan, “Android” and “cloud computing” are talked every day on the Internet though, in contrast, I’ve heard nothing about Symbian in the last six months.
“Japan Android Group” was established a year ago. Since then, the group has been aggressively doing activities such as speeches, study sessions and exhibitions all over Japan.
A variety of people are its members; University professors, university students, people from handset manufacturers who purely pursue the possibilities of Android, and software developers who think about next-generation applications and services through the group interaction.
One interesting thing is that not handset manufacturers or computer manufactures but peripherals manufacturers and engineers who engage in non computer-related electric products are also its members.
They were enough to display only specific data to the functions on the screen since their devices do not require such functions, for example, browser and/or email of smartphone.
Also, non-general purpose OS made them gave up adding new functions even when they wanted. However, with Android, it’s relatively, or dramatically, easy to incorporate such functions into peripherals and home appliances. They expect that small products which are usually placed on a wall or floor might be put next to the dining table if Android is mounted to those products with LCD panel. In fact, members from various fields in the peripherals, software, etc. gather together to discover new possibilities.
No one sees how this movement will change our future, but I can at least say that Android’s possibilities are maximized with people who are not involved in mobile phones industry. In other words, Android generates the motivation for other industries, and encourages them to bring out many kinds of outputs.
I think one of the challenges for people associated with Symbian is how to encourage other people to use Symbian at that time that Symbian Platform is moved to EPL completely, and is released to the public.
I have asked one of my colleagues what the difference is between Symbian and Android from a community standpoint. He said, “Hmm…It looks like that the Symbian Foundation world doesn’t accept any kinds of people, and only people who really want to use Symbian can join”. (I paraphrased what he said a little) “Why do you think so?”, he replied, “Robustness is developed with everyone’s cooperation but is collapsed easily by only one person who don’t cooperate. ”.
The Symbian world has established its position by putting the greatest importance on quality including robustness and power-saving mechanism for a stand-alone handset device. Android phones, on the other hand, aim to operate and refer to information on the other side of the internet in the data centric or web centric view. As a result, he thought it looks ok to create Android mobile phones and software all together at a stretch.
This means that Symbian Community is formed by the people who have a mind to secure quality such as robustness for all the software levels from low level to high level, and Android Community is created by people who explore Android’s possibilities anyway.
“It’s understandable…” but I see that the Symbian world is also going to the direction to fulfill users’ demand to use Symbian via a browser while maximizing the value of Symbian Platform with the quality of each mobile device unit.
The Symbian world, therefore, might require other community formation that is apart from a quality-oriented approach from low software level such as kernel and system library to middleware and higher application levels.
The word “Cloud Computing” is now booming in Japan but “Cloud Sourcing” has not been experienced and is difficult to be accepted by Japanese people due to the different culture. I, however, hope to develop Symbian community in Japan which creates data-centric value (or other value) together with Symbian Foundation and its community members by referring to other countries’ approaches and cases and involving people on the other side of the cloud to understand attractive points and value of Symbian Platform.
Let’s cooperate with each other and move forward.
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.
