Smartphone Show
Yesterday, I was at the Symbian Smartphone show in London. Here are the things that caught my attention and my thoughts…
First of all, I went to the Sony Ericsson pre-show pub meet. This was a bit disappointing. It was mainly ‘marketing-speak’ with very little value for developers (apart from food and drink!). Talking to people at the show the next day, I gained the impression that people are disappointed with the P990. It’s seen as too expensive (nearly twice the price of say a Nokia E61), late to market, currently buggy and people are finding it hard to get used to the new UI. Add the fact that the Carbide.c++ UI designer doesn’t work with UIQ and things like Python aren’t being supported, the situation isn’t panning out for Sony Ericsson UIQ 3.0 Phones as well as I might have expected. I wouldn’t write off UIQ 3.0 yet though. Both the P800 and P910 had teething problems and went on to be very successful.
It was great to have the carbide.c++ team at the show. The new profiler looked very useful. In particular, it can be used for both public SDK apps as well as DevKit ROM builds. Speaking to the actual carbide developers, I was able to clear up some problems I was having exporting and re-importing mmp files.
I had a chat with Appforge about Crossfile applications and Symbian Signing. It turns out their runtime has been Symbian Signed. User-created applications also have to be Symbian Signed.
While it’s great to see LG and Samsung producing S60 based phones, I can’t help but wonder why they chose S60 and how they expect to compete with Nokia. As far as I can tell, their main USP is HSDPA. By the time these devices ship, Nokia will also have HSDPA (in the N95) so I don’t quite get it (yet). It’s also interesting that they chose S60 over UIQ which would have made them less reliant on Nokia.
I spoke to several people at Symbian regarding the future of Symbian Signed. I was told it’s ‘here to stay’ - despite current criticism from some developers and consumers.
Google had a strong presence at the show with a stand, keynote and Q&A session in the afternoon. I believe Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo have the opportunity to change the mobile ecosystem which is currently (over) dominated by the mobile operators and OEMs. Encouragingly, Google was sending a message of collaboration rather than domination.
It was ironic that Palm OS based barcode readers were being used to track visitors into the event and keynotes/seminars. As I have mentioned previously, there’s a large market for rugged mobile devices which is currently being ignored by Symbian licensees.
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