Wild Ducks – the OSCON experience

Aug 6th by arunabh

As you may have picked up from our previous blog post, the audience at OSCON was very receptive to the concept of the Wild Ducks. The interest and enthusiasm shown was stupendous! At an expo, you don’t often get people sitting down with you in the evening to solder wires and debug modules. It all felt like one big community and I’d like to thank everyone for making us feel so integrated, especially Bryan Smith.

More than 200 visitors stopped at the Wild Ducks stand, including admirers from the Free Software Foundation and Mozilla, along with other prominent open source advocates, and it felt really good to rub shoulders with all those passionate individuals who at various times have been involved in similar community projects. In addition to this, there was quite a lot of interest shown by some prominent publication houses wanting to run a story on the Wild Ducks. I’d like to, but I won’t disclose their names just now, I’ll let you wait for the surprise…

Much of the curiosity shown was for the Beagle UMTS extension (and this includes guys from BeagleBoard) and why not? This is probably the first BeagleBoard extension that has an inbuilt modem and GPS module. The board itself is still under testing, but for the over-enthusiastic types, antrax have already put some information on their website and we will very soon announce possible dates for commercial availability, so stay tuned. Read more »

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Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2010

Aug 5th by andrewkl

This year’s Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition is now open, and they’re looking to find and develop the best mobile internet start-ups, including those from the Symbian community. If you’ve got an innovative mobile internet idea that utilises the Symbian platform, or any great mobile internet idea for that matter, you could be in with a chance of winning the €150,000 prize.

The competition is open to any start-up from the Netherlands, Portugal or the United Kingdom with a great idea for a mobile site, service or application. The closing date for applications is midnight, August 22nd, 2010 and the winner will be chosen at the PICNIC Festival in Holland on September 24th, 2010.

For more details on the entry requirements, judging process and criteria, or to enter your company, please visit www.vodafonemobileclicks.com.

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SEE 2010 – Call for Speakers

Aug 4th by toddbsymbian

We are excitedly preparing for SEE 2010 in Amsterdam and Symbian is looking for inspired individuals to bring the industry’s hottest topics to life at the event. The Call for Speakers is officially now open and anyone can submit to present.

This year SEE 2010 will feature four dynamic tracks, allowing the community to share its experience and knowledge on engaging topics. These are:

  • Application Developer Track
  • Horizon Track
  • Platform Developer Track
  • Business Track

To learn more about the audiences and suggested themes in each category please visit www.see2010.org/call_for_speakers.

The deadline for entry is 3rd September 2010 and all submissions will be reviewed by experts in each area to ensure that the line-up for this year is the most comprehensive and compelling to-date.

See you in Amsterdam!

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The numbers are in for Q2 2010…

Aug 4th by andrewkl

… and although they show just how fiercely competitive the smartphone space is becoming, it’s also fair to say that it’s been a record breaking three months for Symbian. Canalys’ latest market trends report, which analyses the volume of smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2010, has revealed that Symbian shipped on more than 27 million smartphones around the globe during this timeframe.

Or to look at it another way, that’s 207 shipped every minute from 1st April until 30th June!

Lee Williams, Executive Director of Symbian, gave the foundation’s official response to these results earlier today, saying: “These figures make for very positive news for the Symbian community. The smartphone market place has become more crowded than ever. So the fact we continue to outsell our competitors by such large margins, combined with all the feature commitments and developments published on our roadmaps, make us highly confident in our outlook and we will continue to embrace the challenges ahead.”All told, these figures point to a solid performance in Q2 and highlight the opportunities available to the wider Symbian community, including a larger target audience for Symbian-related apps, products and services. To give a little more perspective, the Symbian platform has now been shipped in over 389 million smartphones around the world to-date, which means we’re closing in on that huge milestone of 400 million. Watch this space…

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OSCON – what a great event!

Aug 3rd by arunabh

The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON 2010) is over for another year, and if you were lucky enough to attend you’ll know how good this year’s event was. OSCON brings together people from a wide variety of computing backgrounds, as well as leaders from the education, government and business worlds. This creates an open and inspirational environment where you can learn, meet others and become partners in collaboration.

Highlights

In his keynote, Tim O’Reilly inspired us to work on stuff that matters – the financial crisis, health care, global warming – and a number of different topics were strong this year: cloud computing has built a lot of momentum and so has government 2.0, which was first floated as an idea in the previous year and culminated with the launch of Code for America. There was also lots of activity around open source hardware, which had its own track this year, and Rob Pike introduced us to the new Go programming language, creating a lot of hype and interest. Many of the talks are available on YouTube, and in particular, make sure you check out Rob’s talk on Go called Public Static Void. If you missed the conference you can find most presentations online, but be warned, the quality of the sessions and talks was excellent! And of course there were also lots of activities in the evening. My personal favourites were the Ignite talks – on topics such as “Hacking Frequent Flyer Programs” (we still need to test the tips in practice) and “How to Look Good Laminated” – the O’Reilly Open Source Awards, and the many parties and gatherings.

Symbian Workshop

On Tuesday afternoon, Symbian hosted the Open Source Mobile Platform and App Development Workshop, which Lars Kurth kicked off by introducing the Symbian Foundation, how it can benefit you and how you can contribute to it. Read more »

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docomo SMART series™ SH-09B, based on the Symbian platform, is now available in Japan

Aug 2nd by Michiko Nagai

The docomo SMART series™ SH-09B, manufactured by the Sharp Corporation, has a sophisticated stainless steel panel with a HairLine finish and a slim design, and is just 11.4mm thick. It comes with convenient dictionary applications such as the New Words Dictionary and Spelling Dictionary, in addition to Japanese, English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries.

The handset also has a rich line-up of handy functions for both private and business use: such as Business Card Reader, an application that allows you to register company names and addresses simply by taking photos of business cards; Mail Referring Reply, which allows you to create a reply email whilst referring to a received email by horizontally splitting the screen into two; Shot Memo, which helps improve the quality of shots of meeting minutes written on a whiteboard, and; Triple Clear Talk, which emphasises human voices and makes it easier to hear callers by cutting out surrounding noise and echo.

The device comes in three body colours of bordeaux, white and black, and will be sold at all NTT DOCOMO shops in Japan.

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Building Orange Wednesdays in Qt, by Orange Labs UK

Jul 30th by asangamneheri

For those who love films, the free Orange Wednesdays app brings the hugely popular Orange Wednesdays cinema experience to Symbian smartphones. With the app you are able to:

  • see the latest film releases and browse full listings
  • rate a film, read reviews from film fans and submit your own
  • watch trailers for upcoming films
  • find your nearest cinema on a map
  • view cinema details including showing times
  • every Wednesday, get 2 for 1 cinema tickets.

Orange Wednesdays was launched by Orange on the Apple iPhone last year. At the same time we at Orange Labs UK were starting to experiment with Qt on Symbian. We set about looking for an Orange application to demonstrate the possibilities of Qt, and Orange Wednesdays was the ideal candidate: it had a rich user interface with multimedia, maps, etc and was perfect for understanding Qt’s potential.

We used the iPhone app as the benchmark for user experience. One of the first issues we faced was how do we provide the same UX on Symbian touch devices. We decided not to use Symbian native UI or just copy the iPhone UI, but instead took clues from the forthcoming Symbian^4 UI and built our own application template based on it. This provides for a consistent look and feel for the app across platforms. It also demonstrates how, using Qt, it is possible to provide an iPhone like UI experience on existing Symbian touch devices: Read more »

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SEE 2010 – Amsterdam

Jul 29th by toddbsymbian

We’d like to announce that SEE 2010 is happening this November 9th and 10th, and we’ve made some great changes to this year’s program – most notably the location!

We’ve moved SEE 2010 to Amsterdam – a city that, much like the Symbian ecosystem, is comprised of a unique cultural fabric and deep creative roots. The SEE 2010 venue, Beurs van Berlage, was originally designed as a commodities exchange – a place custom built to facilitate the sharing of information and ideas. Influenced by modernist architects to reject the styles of the past, the venue for SEE 2010 will be an open arena for creators and innovators to engage, exchange, and explore the opportunities that will drive the industry forward.

Just as Symbian has broadened its mission to driving innovation throughout the mobile space, we are also redefining the landscape of our annual event to engage and inspire the brightest and most enthusiastic minds in the industry. SEE 2010 is not a tradeshow – it’s a place for the wider community to come together, make cross-industry connections, conduct conversation, share ideas, educate each other and realize some of the vast possibilities that exist in the market.

There is truly something for everyone – we’re talking open forums, keynote sessions, seminars, hands-on labs, interactive demos and, as always, the much anticipated Symbian Party.

…and remember, this year, it’s all about feeling free – free to attend, free to connect and free to help shape the future of the mobile industry! Register now, mark your calendars and see you in Amsterdam!

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Interview with ThinkChange

Jul 28th by roelofkotze

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how did you get into developing apps?

Hi! My name is Ren Tong and I got into developing Symbian applications in early 2005 when I was a graduate student in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I majored in Computer Science. At the time I thought there were too many people developing desktop applications, and when I saw the ads for the Nokia 6600 – which is a Symbian OS-based S60 2nd Edition smartphone – I spent all my money and bought one, and started developing on the Symbian platform.

What was your inspiration for developing FlipSilent?

FlipSilent is the app that made me famous. The idea came from an ad, in which a man and a woman were dating and the woman turned her phone over to make it silent. In 2007, the Sensor API for Nokia N95 became available and I spent about two nights making a prototype of the “turn to mute” feature. I then made a video and uploaded it to YouTube in the morning. I went out to play football and by the time I’d come back in the afternoon, something crazy had happened – the YouTube video had been viewed thousands of times within several hours, and my inbox was full of emails requesting the app!

I spent about one month implementing new features and fixing bugs submitted by users from all over the world to make FlipSilent perfect. During this period I made lots of new friends and the YouTube video had more than one million views. Read more »

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New Symbian^2 device – Raku-Raku Phone 7 released by NTT DOCOMO

Jul 27th by Michiko Nagai

The Raku-Raku Phone 7, manufactured by Fujitsu and based on Symbian^2, is now available in Japan in all NTT DOCOMO stores.

The main feature of the Raku-Raku (meaning “easy-to-use” in Japanese) Phone 7 is the ease with which you can connect to the Raku-Raku iMenu by simply pressing the newly added “Raku-Raku Site Button”. Fun and useful information about the weather, news, train routes, share prices and fortune-telling is available via the Raku-Raku iMenu and they can all be accessed quickly. It’s now possible to create Deco-mail (decorated mail messages) too.

The new phone inherits the popular waterproof and dust-proof features from the Raku-Raku Phone 6. Other services include iConcier, an application that delivers and displays information tailored to the individual user and makes life easier, and i Bodymo, which helps you stay healthy whilst you simply enjoy the applications of “Walking” and “Eating”. In addition, Walking Clinic by Naoko Takahashi is an application in which Ms Naoko Takahashi (Japan’s Olympic gold medalist and former marathon runner) advises you on how to walk correctly by diagnosing the way you walk. As you can see, the device is full of attractive functions and is even easier to use.

The model comes in four body colours of gold, dark silver, pink and red. You can find more information in Fujitsu’s press release.

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